James Bidgood (Dawson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2008 will provide funding to the Australian Research Council to support research schemes. It builds on the government’s commitment to an education revolution in Australia to support our nation’s best and brightest in research and in the development of their skills and their expertise in Australia, securing our nation’s future. Future Fellowships funding is open to all universities, medical research institutes and other publicly funded research agencies, including those in regional areas such as Dawson.

As the Committee is aware, my seat of Dawson has an excellent university in the Central Queensland University, with opportunities in applied science, engineering, education, business, health, informatics, communication and human movement sciences. This scheme is surely good news not only for the university but for prospective researchers there as well.

The fellowships will provide opportunities for mid-career researchers—that is, researchers at a pivotal point in their career—to further their careers in Australia. Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, as you know, over 11 years the Howard government failed to support Australia’s top researchers and as a result created a roadblock to innovation and productivity. The Australian people, for 11 long years, were used to a government that had core and non-core promises and core and non-core election commitments. But keeping our election commitments is something that we on this side of the Committee are very proud of.

Education, training and getting the most out of our best and brightest are things we are very proud of. Specifically, this bill will, firstly, provide funding for the future fellowships; secondly, apply indexation to existing appropriation amounts in the act; and, thirdly, create an additional out-year financial forward estimate. Fourthly, the Future Fellowships program will offer four-year fellowships, valued at $140,000 a year, to 1,000 of Australia’s top researchers in the middle of their career. Surely this has got to be really good news for our research community. Fifthly, at least 10 per cent of federal Labor’s Future Fellowships places will be targeted to encourage outstanding Australian researchers currently based overseas to come home to Australia, which is a measure to alleviate the brain drain of our best and brightest which occurred as a direct result of the attitude towards this issue by those opposite for 11 very long years.

The higher education sector is anticipating the commencement of Future Fellowships from early in calendar year 2009. This bill provides funding for the Future Fellowships scheme. The government’s Future Fellowships plans build on Labor’s plan to double—that is right, double—the number of Australian postgraduate awards available in our universities by 2012. Labor understands that overseas experience is important for our researchers, but it is unacceptable that our best researchers are being forced to stay overseas to do high-level research which is adequately supported and with no incentive to lure them home. So Future Fellowships will be targeted at researchers working in areas of national priority such as renewable energy, manufacturing technologies, the sciences, medical research and education.

The Rudd Labor government is committed to supporting high-quality research in Australia. This program is keenly anticipated by the Australian research community and is being delivered, as promised, within the first 10 months of the Rudd Labor government. I commend this bill to the House.

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