House debates
Tuesday, 6 February 2024
Bills
Australian Research Council Amendment (Review Response) Bill 2023; Second Reading
5:08 pm
Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source
I also rise to speak to the Australian Research Council Amendment (Review Response) Bill 2023. Spending by our federal government should comply with the Commonwealth Grants Rules and Guidelines. It should be effective, efficient, economical and ethical. The government should plan all spending programs based on its identified aims. It should determine the size and purpose of the grants to be expended, issue guidelines to potential applicants, arrange independent evaluation of submissions, disburse those funds, critically assess the effectiveness of the expenditure and report back to the taxpayer. All government programs must be critically reviewed at regular intervals, given the increasing evidence of decayed Public Service processes and systemic political interference in their actions in this country in recent decades.
Last year the ANAO released a scathing indictment of both the Morrison government and the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care's implementation of the Community Health and Hospitals Program. In administering that scheme, more than a billion dollars was allocated from what was essentially a slush fund, from which the health minister handed out grants without any competitive processes or Public Service advice. These were precious health dollars which largely went to marginal electorates rather than those which need it the most: the rural and remote communities. These were dollars which might well have saved Australian lives had they been better spent. In recent years, other health department programs have been similarly subverted. Concerns have long been expressed around allocations from the Medical Research Future Fund. By 2020, 65 per cent of the funds allocated from that fund by the health minister—65 per cent of MRFF spending—were noncompetitive.
Sadly, we've also had concerns about the administration of the Australian Research Council in recent years. The federal government is a major funder of basic research in Australia. It issues about $830 million in grants every year via the ARC. There are a variety of grants for researchers at different stages of their careers as well as grants for specific research projects. Researchers put a huge amount of effort into applying for these grants. Independent experts at the ARC assess all applications, and they make funding recommendations to the federal education minister for approval. It's a tough process. It's very competitive. Only about one in six applications is successful. And it's always worth us remembering that ARC funding can make the difference between researchers and their employees—their team members and lab members—keeping or losing their jobs. In some institutions, receipt of funds from groups such as the ARC are a hard barrier to promotion. The need to be successful in grant applications has compounded gender disparity at a professorial level in many research disciplines in this country.
Unfortunately, as the education minister himself has said, the ARC has been bedevilled by political interference in the last decade. From 2018 to 2019, Senator Simon Birmingham, then the Minister For Education And Training, vetoed 11 research grants recommended by the ARC. In 2020, the member for Wannon vetoed five. On Christmas Eve 2021, the then acting education minister, Stuart Robert, vetoed six projects on the grounds that they did not demonstrate value for taxpayers' money nor contributed to the national interest—a description one might easily apply to that minister himself! Each of those six rejected projects was in the humanities. Four were in literary studies.
This shameful interference in the academic process was not only disrespectful to academics who submitted applications based on their career-long professional interests; it was also utterly disrespectful of the generosity and the expertise of the scholars who gave their time to assess those applications. I know that the minister's decision was condemned by numerous prestigious national and international bodies. That is embarrassing for us as a country. This political intervention flies in the face of the research principle of academic autonomy. In some cases, the Morrison government deliberately acted to silence competing voices, such as those of students looking to study the extent and impact of climate change. We also saw the Morrison government use grant announcements for political PR. They trickled out announcements via media releases over weeks or months to increase the ability of the local minister and MPs to render political capital from them. Research training centres at the University of Melbourne and Monash University—neither being supporters of or employing my own research—were announced not by their local MPs, who were not members of the government; instead, those big funding allocations were announced by Morrison government MPs from nearby electorates. This was all about political capital for the former government and not about science or academic progress.
This behaviour costs all Australians. Researchers have suffered from the stress of waiting for the results of grant applications, which, in many instances, have been delayed. They've missed opportunities to apply for other grants. In some cases, they have picked up and left the institution, the field or even the country because of their frustration and disgust with the process. Members of review panels have quit and also removed themselves from the process. Subversion of the ARC grant process has made it harder for universities to recruit and retain staff. It has damaged our international reputation. This is obviously bad for our universities but it's also bad for those businesses which attempt to engage in research with our universities.
And so in 2022 the incoming Minister for Education commissioned an independent review of the ARC. This was the first comprehensive assessment of the ARC and its enabling legislation since its inception in 2001. The review ultimately made 10 recommendations, including those to amend the act to provide greater clarity of the ARC's purpose and functions, to strengthen governance and accountability arrangements by establishing a board for the ARC, and to reduce the legislative burden and increase accounting flexibility for the funding of research programs. In response, the Albanese government has produced this bill, the Australian Research Council Amendment (Review Response) Bill 2023, which implements six of the review's 10 recommendations. Legislative reform is not needed to implement the outstanding recommendations. I commend the government for amending the objects of the act and the role and mission of the ARC, with a stronger focus on its impact and purpose. It makes sense to establish a board to ensure the independence and integrity of the ARC and its decision-making processes.
The bills also ensures that parliamentary scrutiny will be reserved for funding guidelines, which the minister will be responsible for. This has been designed specifically as a safeguard against the politicisation of research grant decisions.
The bill also amends the current funding arrangements to ensure greater flexibility for the future. Specifically, capped special appropriation for research funding has been replaced with a provision for annual appropriation, which will reduce the administrative burden of annually updating capped funding amounts via legislative amendments.
Board decisions must be made in accordance with the funding rules made by the minister and after considering advice following expert and peer review processes. I do note, though, that the minister retains the power to approve nationally significant investments for projects which he or she feels will drive research infrastructure, training and collaboration. Mr Deputy Speaker, this legislation is not perfect. Members of the board will be appointed by the Minister for Education. While the legislation suggests that they should comprise an appropriate mix of skills based appointees with sector experience and appropriate industry and governance experience, I note that there are no stipulations as to their qualifications. So essentially this is still a situation where the minister has carte blanche regarding the membership of the ARC board, which will be advising him on some pretty important issues. I would suggest that at least some of those representatives should have ex-officio positions. Obvious examples would include the Chief Scientist and a senior representative from the NHMRC. It's not clear from this legislation whether or not board members will be excluded from office should they hold current ARC or other federal grants. I'm not convinced that conflicts of interest have been adequately addressed in this legislation other than via ministerial discretion.
Finally, and possibly most importantly, we still await a definitive position from the government regarding the review's recommendation 10, which concerned the evaluation of excellence and impact. The independent review addressed the risks associated with replacing Excellence in Research for Australia, ERA, which is Australia's national research quality assessment, and its companion assessment, the engagement and impact measure, or EI, with a metrics based method. Metrics based approaches to assessing excellence and impact in research, I can tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, can be inherently flawed or biased, can be gamed, and don't work well.
A division having been called in the House of Representatives—
Sitting suspended from 17:19 to 17:31
As I was saying, metrics based approaches to research to evaluate excellence and impact can be inherently flawed or biased. The government has signalled that the ERA and EI initiatives will not continue in their current form, and it's now asked the Australian Universities Accord Panel to advise on how best to measure impact and engagement in university research. That advice was given by the Universities Accord Panel to the government at the end of last year, but it has not informed this legislation. It's absolutely crucial that the ARC gets this right, but we don't, at this point, have an answer to what the government is considering.
Our research grants system is under great strain. It needs systemic reform. Our basic science and medical researchers are world-class, but they have, for too long, been subjected to funding allocated on a political and a personal basis in many instances, rather than on need and on merit. We need systemic change to our Commonwealth Grant Scheme. The vast majority of grants should be developed and administered by departments, with ministerial involvement really being limited to approval of the purpose and the size of the scheme. The minister should retain some discretionary ability to fund grants only in very special cases. The grounds for that appropriation should be clear and all spending should be subjected to regular and independent review.
We need to run our Australian research in a way that's consistent with the UK and it's Haldane principle—that is, once funding parameters, rules and assessment procedures are set, the decision as to which research represents the best mixture of originality, significance, feasibility and benefit should be left where it belongs, in the hands of the experts. We must remember and respect that not all research will have commercial implications, at least not at first.
I would suggest that all government research programs worth more than $100 million should be subjected to parliamentary oversight. This should be from their inception and while they are underway, not in retrospect. Our public service departments need the resources required to do their jobs themselves, not by outsourcing to external consultants. And they need appropriate governance frameworks to protect them from political manipulation. Our research system is unhealthy. We deserve better. I commend the government for presenting this bill and I look forward to engaging with it on the ongoing reform of governance in all sectors of basic science and medical research.
No comments