Professor Fred Watson

And so that is what the sites that the European Southern Observatory operates offer.

It's got the very best sites in the southern hemisphere for doing optical astronomy.

One thing that the Australian government has done is made a sizable investment over probably 15 years or so.

I calculated it at more than $400 million in the Square Kilometre Array Observatory, which has two telescopes, one in South Africa, one in Western Australia.

It's a radio telescope.

It will be the biggest radio telescope in the world.

It's sure to produce Nobel Prizes because it's such a giant leap forward in radio astronomy.

But radio astronomy needs optical astronomy to give you the full picture.

And the perfect complement to the SKAO, the radio telescopes, is the European Extremely Large Telescope.

Together, they are a combination that will yield much more in discovery space than either of them separately.

So, Australian astronomers would have been in pole position because they have, as of right, access to both of those facilities.

As one of the host countries, we have access to the SKA and we would have had, had we had full membership of ESO, access to the ELT.

Those two together would produce discoveries that we can't even imagine at the moment.

ranging from what's going on in the early universe before the first stars were formed and when the first stars were formed, ranging from that right up to the modern science of astrobiology, where we are looking for signs of living organisms elsewhere in space.

Both those telescopes have a part to play in that.

It's roughly $40 million a year.

In times when people are queuing up for diesel, it's a lot of money.

But in terms of investing in the future of our scientists, in the future of our young people, in the future of our technologies, it is really a relatively small amount.

This might be an unfortunate comparison at the moment, but that $40 million annually for ESO membership is what the Australian Defence Forces burn up in six hours.

And with the budget changes, it will be what they burn up in three hours.