Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Ryan, and I note her very longstanding interest in the University of Queensland, which is in her electorate. It is really one of the top four universities in Australia, and it has come along in leaps and bounds in the last 10 to 20 years, primarily because of a focus on research. The University of Queensland has always been a Go8 university, but in the last 10 or so years it has moved to a whole different level of quality, making it one of the very best universities in the world. In fact, UQ has been in the top 100 universities in the world for some time, as are all our Go8 universities. To put that in perspective, there are about 11½ thousand universities in the world. So for Australia to have eight in the top 100 is an enormous achievement.

We in this government do have a particular interest in research, and we are lucky to be led by a Prime Minister who is also particularly keen on research and knows the benefits of research. Therefore, as the Minister for Education and Training, it is a great pleasure of mine that, when I go to the Prime Minister to ask for more support for research, it is readily provided. He knows, as a former health minister, the enormous economic and social benefits of high-quality Australian research, whether it is, as you pointed out, NHMRC or ARC or CRC research for that matter. This year in the budget the government is committing $10.7 billion over the forward estimates to research in my portfolio alone, which is quite remarkable. Across the government, we spend on science research and innovation yearly about $9 billion.

So I was very disappointed, when I became the minister for education, to discover that the Labor Party, in government, had cut the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme. It had left a funding cliff for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme, known as NCRIS.

It had also left a funding cliff for the Future Fellowships program. Future Fellowships and NCRIS are both vitally important for Australia's research effort. Future Fellowships supports mid-career researchers who have perhaps not yet proven themselves nationally or internationally to attract a research grant from the private sector, universities or individuals but who we know are going to be really high-level, high-quality researchers and who we want to keep in Australia doing research in our universities or institutes. Therefore, we have refunded the Future Fellowships program. This year I announced 50 Future Fellowships under the program, which the ARC are now working on to implement, and we will be able to announce those successful future fellows soon. Also, happily, the Treasurer and the Prime Minister supported the continuation of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme at $150 million a year for the next two years—so that is $300 million—while we also undertake a review of infrastructure in our universities.

The NCRIS pays for really vital infrastructure that universities would not otherwise be able to fund. It might be the renovation, the refurbishment or the repurposing of an old building in the university which is no longer meeting its purpose, to turn it into something that will be a fabulous laboratory or a test site for research—things like the Synchrotron, for example. There are many other good examples of NCRIS funding, whether in agriculture, science or medicine. Take quantum computing, for example; much of the quantum computing, which is world-class—in fact, world-beating; it is a good year ahead of all of our competitors—is funded through the NCRIS program.

We have saved that NCRIS program, thanks to lobbying from people like the member for Ryan and others to make sure that that continued. Labor wanted to cut it; we refunded it. I fixed that problem, as the Minister for Education and Training, that Labor left for us. I am very pleased to say that we are continuing our strong focus on research. I am lucky to come from the great state of South Australia, as does the member for Kingston. Out of the 15 Nobel Prize winners in Australia's history, five have come from South Australia. Therefore, I have taken a very keen interest in research, because our Nobel Prize winners often begin doing medical or scientific research from these kinds of research grants.

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