CSIRO head Douglas Hilton was quoted in the Australian today,

    "For science to be useful and for challenges to be overcome it requires
    the trust of the community. Maintaining trust requires scientists to act
    with integrity. Maintaining trust also requires our political leaders to
    resist the temptation to disparage science,"

Science is a process, not a person or institution.

The scientific method is grounded in process and facts. It requires distrust,
and that certainly includes distrust of people who are called scientists.

It is unreasonable and unscientific for Douglas Hilton to ask for his
organisation to be trusted as a priesthood of experts and it suggests the
organisation is politicised.

The CSIRO does not have a monopoly on science or scientists. When Peter Dutton
highlighted flaws in a CSIRO report, he was not "disparaging science". Rather,
he was participating in science.

Dutton's specific criticism was, "[the report] doesn't take into account some
of the transmission costs, the costs around subsidies for the renewables."

If the CSIRO considered Dutton's comments to be invalid, the scientific
response would be to make substantive arguments in defense of its thesis.

Instead, the head of the CSIRO spoke in defense of the report without engaging
with the specific criticisms made about it. This is remarkable.

Hilton styles himself as a scientist, but he is not behaving like a scientist.

There is a separate matter of administrative competence.

Put yourself in the position of someone who is an authority at the CSIRO, a
government-funded entity. It is widely-expected that the federal opposition
will take a position of support for nuclear policy to the next federal
election. Your organisation, CSIRO, is about to release a report about energy
policy that paints nuclear energy in a poor light. If only for selfish
motives, surely you would want to be absolutely sure that (1) the thesis was
robust, and (2) that your organisation was well-placed to defend the report
against inevitable criticism.

That is not what happened here.