The Government is set to blow through its own deadline for shutting down Callaghan Innovation, leaving 176 science and technology workers with no clear idea of whether they will have a job in three weeks’ time. Eighteen months after ministers announced the Crown agency would be wound up, not a single piece of legislation needed to make that happen has been introduced to Parliament.
The closure was first announced on 23 January 2025, when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the then science minister Judith Collins unveiled what officials described as the largest reset of the science system in three decades. Callaghan Innovation, the agency set up in 2013 to back high-tech firms and commercialise New Zealand research, was to be carved up and its functions spread across new and existing bodies. A later science minister, Shane Reti, then put a firm date on it, stating in writing that the agency would be wound up by 30 June 2026.
That date is now almost upon us, and the House does not even sit again until Tuesday 23 June. With no enabling legislation on the order paper, the legal mechanism to dissolve the entity and shift its people and assets across simply does not exist. The Public Service Association, the union representing many of the affected staff, says the result is a mess that has been entirely avoidable.
According to the union, around 80 of the remaining staff had been told their transfers to other agencies would go ahead on 1 July. Those moves have now been delayed indefinitely because the law that would authorise them has not been passed. A further 96 staff have had no confirmation of a transfer at all and could be facing redundancy, with no certainty about what comes next. The receiving organisations were to include the Bioeconomy Science Institute, Earth Sciences New Zealand, the new Advanced Technology Institute and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
The numbers tell their own story. More than 100 roles have already been disestablished during the long wind-down, including dozens of scientists working in applied technologies such as medical technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and mechatronics. The PSA argues this represents a serious loss of specialist expertise that will be hard to rebuild once it walks out the door.
PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons did not hold back, calling the situation “a fiasco of the Government’s own making”. The union’s point is straightforward enough. If a government decides to abolish an agency, it has a duty to line up the legislation, the funding and the transfer arrangements so the people who keep that agency running are not left dangling. Eighteen months of planning, the union says, has produced very little that staff can actually rely on.
The one concrete outcome so far is money rather than certainty. The Budget set aside $28 million to keep Callaghan Innovation operating for another year, an acknowledgement in all but name that the original timetable was never going to be met. That funding buys time, but it does not answer the basic question facing the workforce, which is whether their jobs will survive the reshuffle and, if so, which agency they will belong to.
Responsibility for the science portfolio has itself shifted during the saga. Penny Simmonds took over as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology on 7 April 2026, inheriting a reform that had already slipped well behind schedule. The original ambition was to sharpen New Zealand’s research effort, cut duplication and put more weight behind commercialising good ideas. Few people disagree with those goals in principle. The argument is about the execution, and on that score the agency’s own staff have borne the cost of the delays.
For the workers involved, the practical effect is months of uncertainty layered on top of more than a year of it already. Some have watched colleagues take redundancy, others have hung on in the hope of a transfer that keeps being pushed back. The risk the union keeps returning to is a brain drain, with skilled researchers in fields such as medtech and artificial intelligence choosing to leave for the private sector or overseas rather than wait for a restructure that never quite arrives.
The wider reset of the science system was meant to be one of the Government’s signature reforms, the kind of structural change it could point to as evidence of a serious agenda. Instead, the closure of a single agency has become a case study in how hard it is to dismantle a public body cleanly when the legislation, the funding and the human side of the change are not moving in step. With Parliament not sitting until late June and the deadline days away, the most likely outcome is that the 30 June date passes quietly, the agency keeps running on its $28 million lifeline, and the people inside it wait a little longer for answers.
Science and research policy will be one of the dividing lines at this year’s general election, and how the major parties would treat agencies like Callaghan Innovation is a fair question to put to your local candidates. If you want to see where the parties line up on this and other issues before you vote, you can work through Newswire’s voting tool.
What do you make of the way the Callaghan Innovation closure has been handled, and should the Government have had its legislation ready before setting a deadline? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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