Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to rise today to speak on the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2018. For those who aren't aware, this bill is an annual appropriations process that updates the funding caps on the Australian Research Council programs. These programs are phenomenally important to the Australian innovation, science and research industry and should be monitored, improved and strengthened, particularly at such a critical time in the sector in this country. To that end, Labor will be supporting the bill, just as we have always supported updating the funding profile for major Australian Research Council grant programs.

This type of routine administrative change should have been debated and passed a long time ago, quite frankly. However, as many in this House are aware, nothing this government has done over the past 1½ terms has been inspired by precedent or due process. The government has been willing to pick the wrong side of history in most arguments in this place and remain obstinate in their defence of the indefensible. It held up this basic bill in its fumbling attempts to pass the massively unpopular and retrograde legislation for $100,000 degrees that we saw some time ago.

One of the key drivers of Australia's ongoing success in the research sector is the provision of competitive grant funding by the Australian Research Council and the NHMRC for programs as well as a long-term, stable block grant that allows universities to invest strategically in research. Research funded by the Australian Research Council allows the best minds in this country to produce outcomes that will help Australia further integrate itself into the creative, innovative and productive powerhouse we all know it can be. With every extra dollar of funding, we leave Australia that much better off to face the vast challenges of the world that this century and the next present to us. It seems like a no-brainer, but, after some of the discussions and decisions surrounding this issue of research funding over the years, it needs to be reiterated clearly that societies and economies that invest more in research show an increased rate of growth and greater human development.

The Abbott and Turnbull government sought to cut almost $900 million from science and research in its first budget, including around $75 million from the ARC and its associated programs. This year's budget saw the increase in the ARC Discovery scheme—this is a scheme which funds basic and fundamental research—go up by only 0.3 per cent. The associated Linkage Program, which is to do with applied research, increased by only 2.7 per cent. For those who aren't aware, the ARC Linkage Program brings together universities and encourages collaboration across the university sector with private industry and small business. It's an excellent scheme and one I've worked on myself in bringing the partnerships together. It appears that, since the first horrible 2014 budget, the Liberal government has learned its lesson on research funding in Australia, even if only barely and ever so reluctantly, as is reflected in the poor public research investment figures.

We on this side of the chamber, the Labor Party, have an entirely different approach to research funding. When in government, Labor supported the ARC. Support for the ARC reached a high-water mark of $873.2 million in 2012-13 under Labor. Contrast this with the appropriation bill in the current budget, where support will be $759.9 million in 2018-19, rising only slightly to $779.1 million in 2019-20. This $94.1 million fall in real terms for research funding is largely due to the fact that the Liberal government has not continued funding programs for mid-career researchers, like the Future Fellowships scheme, at previous levels. For example, 200 fellowships were awarded under Labor in 2012; however, in 2018, only 100 future fellowships are set to be awarded. The maths is pretty simple: this halves the opportunity for mid-career researchers in this nation, across all fields—the humanities as well as the sciences—who are ready to take the next step to get solid support, a bit of long-termism in their outlook, so that they can go on and conduct their very important research.

This halving in the fellowships represents a chilling example of the government's quite strange priorities and is a reflection on its definition of the value of research in this country. And this from a Prime Minister who used to spruik his innovation agenda! I don't know if anyone else in the chamber remembers those days. To quote from a Liberal website, 'There's never been a more exciting time to be an Australian.' But we've dropped that now, haven't we. I'm not sure why the Prime Minister dropped his innovation agenda, but it's probably because he knew there were going to be cuts to the Australian Research Council and the Future Fellowships program.

When these figures are broken down on a state-by-state basis, the funding disparity gets even worse, especially from a Western Australian perspective. The Discovery Projects scheme provides funding for excellent fundamental research projects that can be undertaken by individual researchers or research teams. When adding the figures from the WA universities who applied for funding under this scheme, the total figure sits at just over $17 million from 45 recommended proposals. This is $17 million from a total of over $225.6 million for the entire Discovery Projects scheme for 2018, representing just 7.5 per cent of the total funding for the scheme. The disparity is similar across other funding schemes for this year. Of the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award scheme, WA universities received just over eight per cent of total funding for this year. In the Future Fellowships program for 2017, WA received about 6.7 per cent of total funding for that program.

This disparity is a little uninspiring, given WA's large contribution to the innovation space over the years. Indeed, the development of Western Australia, in agriculture particularly, depended on science. The development of WA's onshore and offshore resources has also relied on science, and I point to the magnificent work of the Centre for Offshore Foundation Systems as well as the mineral exploration and mineral science resources and various microscopy institutes in Western Australia that help the greater exploration of mineral resources, which of course leads to greater benefits for the whole of the nation as those royalties and the associated GST through WA get distributed throughout the country.

WA universities and their academics and support staff put a lot of effort into ARC grant applications. I might add that all universities around the country put a lot of effort into ARC grant applications. I would think that WA needs to apply a little bit more to make sure we get a greater share of this grant funding, but the ARC needs to do a little bit to ensure this disparity does not remain too high, at a minimum, whilst still awarding the grants on merit, which is a very important factor of the scheme.

I will reflect again on the difficulty of winning an ARC grant. The success rates are quite low, and that reflects the difficulty of the arduous process that the Australian Research Council quite rightly sets out. The standards are high and competition for the limited pool of resources is quite remarkable. Don Aitkin once said, it is 'the world's best process for the world's smallest fund.' Only about 25 per cent of Discovery grant applications are successful. For Future Fellowships it's a little bit under 30 per cent, and for Linkage grants it's just above 30 per cent on average. A lot of effort goes into grant applications, and I take my hat off to those researchers who spend their summers not on holiday, like many others might, but doing grant applications. Often they fail on their first attempt, and some fail on their second attempt and have to do a third attempt to hopefully get it. That's a good month's worth of work, plus the rejoinder process. It's extraordinary and extensive, and I pay tribute to researchers around the country that put in enormous efforts to try to get good funding from the Australian Research Council.

The importance of the grant programs cannot be underestimated. They are a critical part of the research and innovation system in Australia. The NHMRC and the ARC are the major funding bodies of the Australian national competitive grants system. As I've stated before, the ARC supports both basic research through the Discovery scheme and applied research through the Linkage scheme, with the important contribution of industries around this country that pitch in to the ARC Linkage scheme. Underpinning that is the premise of the positive impact basic research has on society as a whole. Integrating ourselves in the pursuit of knowledge expands the base from which it's drawn—that is to say, building on our collective understanding of the nature of our continent and the wilder world around us. Strengthening these core research ideals will produce larger benefits for the broader economy and, indeed, for our collective wellbeing.

Labor knows this, as has been mentioned often by several members of the ALP frontbench. Most notably, the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, in various speeches to the research community has emphasised the importance of basic research in this country. We have set a national goal to lift our investment in research and development across government, universities and the private sector such that the proportion of expenditure on research should increase to three per cent of GDP by 2030. I strongly support Labor's position and the Leader of the Opposition's position on this goal, and I sincerely hope that we will get there. If we're going to talk about aspirations, that is a terrific aspiration for this country to try and hit.

When Labor came to power in 2007 it had a strong plan for the future of research and innovation in Australia. In 2008 Labor implemented its 10-year innovation strategy, Powering Ideas. This strategy had a number of objectives that sought to increase the number of Australian research groups performing at world-class levels, to boost international research collaboration by Australian unis and to significantly increase the number of tertiary students completing higher degrees by research over the decade. It also sought to double the level of collaboration amongst Australian universities, public funded agencies specialising in research and, of course, private industry. The scheme saw Labor increase the proportion of businesses using their resources to engage in the innovation sector as well as undertake further investment in private sector research and development programs.

The success of these measures is easily quantifiable, notwithstanding the significant impacts of the global financial crisis. Between 2007 and 2013 Australian expenditure in science and research increased by nearly 50 per cent, by $3.3 billion per year. Labor built on national science assets such as CSIRO, ANSTO and AIMS, the Australian Institute of Marine Science. We doubled the number of Australian postgraduate awards and raised the stipend for over 10,000 researchers that we supported previously and whilst in government.

Labor fought for some of the biggest science and innovation investments in Australia, including securing hosting rights for the low-frequency array of the Square Kilometre Array, one of the biggest global astronomy projects of our generation and representing a multibillion dollar international investment in Australian infrastructure. All of that is happening in the great state of Western Australia. I was very fortunate to witness the start of the project, helping to set up the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, headed by Professor Peter Quinn. He leads a world-class, first-rate team, spearheading international efforts to better understand the universe and humanity's place within it. The construction of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope is one of the world's largest public science data projects, and it's happening in WA, where our clear skies are the envy of the developed world. The radio quiet of the Murchison is literally a radioastronomer's dream.

I want to talk about a couple of the people I have met in science—people who have benefitted from ARC projects, and specifically the Discovery projects. There are people like Professor Gia Parish. Professor Parish conducts research around the world in advanced sensing technology, such as chemical sensors for environmental and industrial monitoring. She manages to do this whilst at the same time teaching the next generation of engineers, taking on administrative and strategic duties as the associate dean of research at the faculty as well as raising two wonderful young girls. It's people like Gia Parish who need continued funding through the Australian Research Council to undertake their important basic research.

Debate interrupted.