In the course of another exercise (Johnson, Scrimgeour & Manning 2006) I compiled, with the help of CCMAU, a financial record of the crown research institutes from 1992 to 2005. In this paper I thought I would share with this audience some of the facts that emerged from the exercise and make some observations about present and future trends in the organisation of R&D funding in NZ. There has been a systematic clamour from the agricultural institutes that the initial plans for the CRI discriminated against their activities. This led to job uncertainty as well as a huge increase in transaction costs in the process of obtaining funds. More recently, the activities of the agricultural interests has seen a re-activation of forward planning for this part of the science sector in the form of Dairy 21 an amalgamation of Dexcel, Dairy Insight and Fonterra interests along with AgResearch. In the meantime, the Government has yielded to CRI pressure to modify the contestable model for science funding with more emphasis on longer term planning and continuity for the funding of the institutes. Most recently, scientists at Otago University have pointed out that moves in this direction are likely to be at the expense of university funding of R&D.
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