Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I want to be clear that Labor does support the passage of the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2021, but I especially want to acknowledge my support for the amendment moved by the member for Moreton:

… the House notes that the Government's mismanagement and politicisation of Australian Research Council grants and failure to adequately support Australia's universities during the pandemic are causing serious harm to our world-class researchers …

The Australian Research Council is Australia's independent research agency. Its purpose is to grow knowledge and innovation for the benefit of the community by funding the highest-quality research. The ARC runs a competitive grants process over a number of grant schemes. The process is arduous. The previous speaker, the member for Indi, spoke of this earlier and of her personal experience of that process. It goes through the highest standard of peer review. Applications take many months to put together and they take many more months to review.

I worked in the university sector for nearly 10 years. My first job in that sector was at the University of Western Australia, where I was a research contracts lawyer. One of the first tasks I had in that role was to develop contracts for successful applicants for Linkage Projects. Linkage Projects, through the ARC, involve academics working with industry and the university, with in-kind contributions, to develop a particular line of research. I also worked on developing agreements around centres of excellence. And though I did not do the agreements for Discovery Projects grants, I had a lot to do with the many academics that pursue Discovery grants, which is, in this country, the principal mechanism to fund basic research in the humanities and the sciences.

Discovery grants are extremely competitive. There is only a 19 per cent success rate. In fact, Discovery grants are harder to get than any kind of grant a Liberal government might give to someone in a safe Labor seat. Linkage grants involve, as I said, close collaboration and partnership with industry. In round 2 in 2020, the success rate was nearly 26 per cent. These grants are hard to come by. It takes a lot of effort to even get your application in, to get it through the rejoinder process, and there are many, many minds that work on these—the applicants themselves, but also the teams of research grants officers who help academics and their entire teams work through this process.

The peer review process is also arduous. Each proposal is about 50 to 100 pages, and each one is assessed by two members of the ARC College of Experts. They take their job seriously and read every single word. There's no colour-coded spreadsheet for the ARC College of Experts. Members of this college literally receive suitcases of applications under the ARC Discovery grants process. That's how competitive it is. It takes months to get through, reading every single night, these very extensive and expansive applications. Those applications then get reviewed again by four subject experts. This is a trusted, thorough, arduous and thoughtful process that has developed over many years. But this government shuns a well established trusted process in favour of its own personal political assessments.

The acting education minister rejected six humanities grants on unsupported grounds of not contributing to the national interest and not demonstrating value for money—this from Minister Robert, the member for Fadden, who charged the Australian taxpayer $1,000 a month for mobile broadband services. Where is the value for money in a $38,000 internet bill? And when did the minister make this announcement? It was on Christmas Eve last year. This is the longest delay in announcing ARC grant recipients in 30 years. You've got to ask: What are these people doing? What is the government doing? They have a college of experts and a thorough independent review process. They get their recommendations and do nothing with them, or they fiddle about with them. Who really knows? Ultimately, they make a political decision to grab a little soundbite in the middle of the night so that they can make an attack on academics, who are already under severe pressure, given that this government failed to support them through the pandemic, and, as we know, thousands of research jobs have been lost around this country, and 40,000 jobs have been lost within the higher education sector.

This is the longest delay in the notification of grants in 30 years. But perhaps the ARC Discovery grant applicants are even a little bit lucky that the member for Aston has been stood aside as education minister. That particular cultural warrior may have gone even further than Minister Robert. The truth is that there's a long history of interference in the ARC independent processes by the Liberal Party of Australia. Brendan Nelson, as the minister, vetoed three in seven applications. Senator Simon Birmingham, as the relevant minister, vetoed 11 ARC humanities grants. They play stupid, harmful games by picking titles that will get them a headline and maybe a bit of a clap and a cheerio from some of the shock jocks around this country. In doing so, they disrespect the literally thousands of hours of work conducted by researchers in universities right across this nation and that of their peers, the senior academics, the leaders of our research institutions that review these applications night after night. They think it's a little bit of a joke to pull out some seven-word title and dismiss the hundreds of pages of tens of thousands of words and the years and years of research that sit behind it. It's disgusting and it has to stop. It's wasteful, it's stupid, it's unfair, and it holds back Australian science.

I want to say a few words to conclude on the matter of science and commercialisation. I studied at university and worked there for 10 years amongst academics and academic scientists. From being around that system and from general reading, I’ve learned that you can’t boss around science. Discovery happens as it happens, but it always happens on the back of years and years of hard work.

The commercialisation of scientific discovery is important, but it is not everything, and it never will be. Not all science or scientific discovery can be commercialised. Take the discovery that the Helicobacter pylori bacterium plays a major role in causing most peptic ulcers. The work of the South Australian great, Robin Warren AC, and the Western Australian great, Barry Marshall AC, worked against commercial interest that produced medications and expensive surgeries to treat ulcers. Ulcers were thought to be a product of stress, and many people around the world spent thousands of dollars on psychiatric assessments and psychological appointments to try and beat ulcers. There was a groundswell of commercial interest that tried to defy the findings of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. What Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proved was that ulcers could be cured by antibiotics. This simple—it's not a simple discovery; it was years of testing and, famously, even self-testing. They changed the lives of millions of people around the world.

These two Australian scientists were working in Fremantle Hospital, Royal Perth Hospital and the University of Western Australia many years ago, beavering away, trying to get funding just like everyone else tries to do in a very competitive research system. A complex discovery, complex to discover, changed the lives of millions once they had proved it—of course, Barry proved it on himself. They quite rightly were rewarded with the 2005 Nobel Prize for medicine. This is a scientific discovery that won't make money. It saves people money. It saves individuals money. People that get peptic ulcers and other stomach complaints now know that they can have a simple test for Helicobacter pylori bacterium, they can take a round of antibiotics and they will more than likely feel much better; they don't have to go through gastric surgery or other kinds of treatments that often make people's lives much worse.

To conclude, I would ask that education ministers in this government have a real think about how they treat scientists in this country—how they disregard their thoughtful and long-term work and their extraordinary effort when they put in these applications—and not dismiss the extraordinary work that goes into each and every Australian Research Council grant application. I thank the House.

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