‘I think that’s dangerous’: The moment the new CSIRO boss decided to hit back at Peter Dutton

It is dangerous to dine with Doug Hilton. I learn of this early in my lunch with the new boss of the CSIRO. We’re sitting in a square of sunlight spilling from Sydney’s Botanic Gardens into Botanic House restaurant as saucy concoctions of crispy mint, finger lime, and cashew nut crumble sail to the table aboard pho spoons and gleaming scallop shells.

“The moths are tiny,” he says. “They’re like little sunbeams, they dance around, they’re metallic ... It’s like a treasure hunt.” “Maybe this is why community is so important to me. There were people looking out for me. They knew my dad had died. They knew my mum was doing it tough as a single mum and didn’t have a lot of money.

“I run a light so I can see what moths are there. It’s amazingly diverse – 600 moth species that have been documented by this passionate guy who lives next door to me, Frank the moth man,” Hilton says. “These are my people.” He ended up pursuing honours at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute , working as a trainee protein chemist in molecular hematology.

“It ended up being manufactured and one of the biggest selling laboratory reagents in the world,” he says of LIF. The people he’s met so far across the CSIRO’s more than 50 sites are “as absolutely passionate and driven about their quarter of science as the people I worked with in Melbourne, trying to kill brain cancer”.The institute had 1500 staff compared to the CSIRO’s 6000. “It’s a step-up, but it’s not like going from 100 to 100,000. Fifteen hundred to 6000? That’s a rounding error.” An immediate problem for Hilton, however, is that headcount has to fall.

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