Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question now is that the amendment be agreed to.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Centre Alliance supports the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2019. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to express our increasing concern at what appears to be the politicisation of the awarding of academic grants.

In 2018, the then Minister for Education and Training, Minister Birmingham, intervened to block 11 humanities grants recommended by the Australian Research Council, often known as the ARC. Whilst I shared the minister's view at the time that some of the recommendations appeared to be somewhat interesting, we all know how important it is to take the politics out of the academic process and to safeguard the integrity of an independent academic process. It should not be up to politicians to judge the merits of the ARC's individual recommendations, especially when the government already sets the priority areas for nationally funded research.

This year, there has been a clear break from previous practice on how the grants are announced. It used to be that announcements were made all at once, whereas this year, for the first time, there has been a drip-feed to the media over a number of months. One can only assume that the purpose is to enhance the political benefit to the government by maximising the media coverage the grants receive. Quoting a piece in The Conversation by Professor Jodie Bradby on these embargoed announcements:

… a leaked internal email from the University of Queensland stated that it understands "the embargo is lifted by local MPs in conjunction with the minister of education", and that it is "waiting for its local MP" to make the awards public.

This is highly concerning, not only because it is politicising what should fundamentally be an academic process but because the embargoes are creating real-world consequences for our universities in attracting and retaining talent. For example, I'm aware of several universities that have successfully received grants but are unable to advertise for positions—positions they'll need to fill next year—because they are under embargo for political reasons. Those who understand academic recruitment understand that it works to a tight timetable with tight deadlines, and if you miss the deadlines you lose the talent you have or you miss the cycle on attracting the talent you need to deliver on a federally funded grant.

Academic recruitment is an international affair and does not turn on a dime to suit the newfound political proclivities of the current government. Again, I quote the professor at length:

Politics aside, the delay and uncertainty is bad news for researchers.

Applications for next year's funding round have already opened, and researchers who were unsuccessful this year still don't have any feedback on their applications. This feedback is often a crucial tool for improving an application to make it more likely to succeed.

Successful applicants will already know they are successful—but they can't sign funding agreements with the ARC and actually get on with the research until all the grants have been announced. No one knows when that announcement will happen, and it could mean some researchers are left without income early next year.

It could also mean Australia loses out as the top talent takes positions overseas rather than waiting.

So, even if it does not wish to abandon the limited political benefit of several local media releases, the government must urgently return to a timely schedule for announcing the awarding of ARC grants, because it is undermining the efficacy of our national research program—a program that we so desperately need to operate efficiently and effectively in order to maintain our country's competitive edge and create the technological innovation that will underpin the prosperity of current and future Australians.

For these reasons, I'm supportive of clause 51A(1) of the member for Melbourne's proposed consideration in detail amendment, although I would seek tabling of the determinations in parliament rather than require public announcements and website publication. However, whilst I recognise its importance, Centre Alliance does not want to frustrate a minister's ability to make announcements that they see fit to make regarding what is ultimately public expenditure for which the minister is responsible. For this reason, Centre Alliance will not be supporting the amendment proposed by the member for Melbourne in this place, although we reserve our final position in the Senate. However, we would be minded to support amendments that address the issue of timeliness in making ARC determinations publicly known. I won't take any more of the House's time, and I commend this bill to the House.

Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Research Council plays a crucial role in allocating research funding in Australia. As a professor at the Australian National University, I was the successful recipient of two Linkage Program grants and two Discovery Project grants, and I put many hours into reviewing proposals put forward for Australian Research Council funding. I can attest to the House that this is a common practice for academics. Contestable research funding is an important part of our system, and Australian researchers rely on the independent scrutiny of the Australian Research Council. Researchers recognise that the peer review process is extraordinarily rigorous and give it greater respect than other methods of handing out research funding, such as the more ad hoc approach employed by the Medical Research Future Fund as well as other funding systems which have more ministerial meddling in them.

Australian Research Council funding is seen as being above politics—at least that has been its history until the last few years. We have seen, under this government, an extraordinary politicisation of the allocation of Australian Research Council grants. Barbara Keys, a historian at the University of Melbourne who trained at Harvard, tweeted recently:

Yup. Disgust with months-long purely political delays that exact high psychological cost and actively hurt ongoing research is one reason I'm heading overseas.

She is but one of many academics who are extraordinarily frustrated at the partisan meddling that the former minister for education Senator Birmingham has engaged in over recent years.

Professor Jodie Bradby, a professor of physics at the Australian National University, wrote on 15 November for The Conversation that there is always going to be uncertainty in a research career. Professor Bradby wrote:

Recently, however, the situation has been made even worse by delays in announcements of government funding—delays that appear to be caused by government using announcements for political advantage.

She points out that nearly $800 million in grants allocated annually by the Australian Research Council have been delayed in order to give the coalition a purely partisan advantage. Professor Bradby draws on work that has been compiled by the anonymous Twitter account ARC Tracker, which noted on 12 November that an ARC training centre at Monash University had been announced by the minister with the member for Menzies. As the account noted, Monash is not in fact in Menzies. The main campus is in Hotham, but, because the member for Hotham is a Labor member, the decision was made to make the announcement with a coalition member instead. A leaked internal email from the University of Queensland stated that it understands that the embargo for the grants for early career researchers 'is lifted by local MPs in conjunction with the Minister for Education'. These DECRA grants are a vital way for young-career researchers to get their early start, yet their knowledge of how their career is going to be affected by the announcement of grants is being held up for purely partisan gains.

The ARC tracker account went back to 1999 to look at the announcement of Discovery Projects grants and found that, in order to find a date when the government announced the successful Discovery Projects grants so late in the year, you have to go back 20 years. Not since 1999 have the Discovery Projects grants been announced so late. Typically they've been announced some time mid to late October, but this year they were announced at the very end of November, which has created further uncertainty for academics, further instability, further risks that academics will give up on promising careers and move overseas.

Last year Minister Birmingham decided to block 11 humanities grants recommended by the Australian Research Council. Minister Birmingham decided that he is a better judge of how humanities grants will be allocated than the experts who, between them, have spent hundreds of hours assessing these grants. The minister very proudly flaunts his philistinism on Twitter, saying that he is quite happy to knock off an application dealing with post-orientalist arts. Apparently that's something he can dismiss, probably just by reading the headline. As then Minister Carr has noted, this is unprecedented. There is no public disclosure and no explanation given to the Australian public as to why the minister has traduced the system of peer review in this way.

The heavy politicisation of Australian Research Council grants is only of political benefit. There is no national benefit to Australia of this kind of partisan meddling. The minister must cease it immediately. The minister must give an undertaking that, in future, announcements will be made on the website to all candidates simultaneously. To allocate grants in conjunction with local MPs gives the false impression to the Australian public that this is pork being handed out by the Morrison government rather than grants carefully assessed by expert scrutiny in the field and allocated purely on merit. The politicisation of the Australian Research Council is hurting our productive capacity, it is sending researchers offshore and it must stop at once.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In summing up, I thank all members and senators who have spoken in relation to the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2019, which amends funding gaps within the Australian Research Council Act 2001. This bill will ensure the ARC can continue to support Australia's best researchers to undertake the highest quality fundamental and applied research and research training.

In recent weeks, the Morrison government has announced over $24 million in research funding for new ARC training centres and approximately $242 million for ARC centres of excellence around the country. We've also announced the 2019 Australian Laureate Fellows, who will share $54 million to lead their world-class research teams for five years. This funding underpins the research careers of hundreds of researchers which, in turn, underpins Australia's position as a leading power among the world's scientific and knowledge economies. The state of Australian university research 2018–19: ERA national report, released by the ARC in March, found that Australia is increasingly performing above world standards in terms of research quality. The report also found Australia exceeds international standards in 11 broad disciplines, including technology, mathematics, medicine, engineering and in sciences relating to our earth and environment. More than half the units assessed in broad discipline areas were rated above or well above world standard.

In maintaining this lead, we are determined to leave no researcher behind. Two of the Australian Laureate Fellowships just awarded include additional funding for the recipients to undertake an ambassadorial role to promote women in research. They are named after two pioneering women in Australian research. The Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship is awarded to a highly ranked female candidate from the humanities, arts and social sciences disciplines, and the Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship is awarded to a highly ranked female candidate from the science and technology disciplines. This year the recipients are Professor Belinda Medlyn from Western Sydney University, who is the 2019 ARC Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellow, and Professor Lynette Russell from Monash University, who is the 2019 ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellow. I extend to them my congratulations and the congratulations of the minister himself.

On 10 October 2019, Senator the Hon. Marise Payne released the ARC's Gender and the research workforce report, which uses data from the Excellence in Research for Australia assessment to give new insight into Australia's research workforce. The key statistic out of this report is that the ratio of men to women in the research workforce in 2018 was 56 to 44. This is a small improvement on the 57-to-43 ratio in 2015. The report also shows that the proportion of male and female researchers varies greatly between research disciplines. Female researchers outnumber men in just five of the 22 disciplines measured by the report. It is through the work of the ARC that we know about this gender disparity, and it is through the ARC that we can address it, through initiatives such as the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship and the Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellowship.

Initiatives such as these show the significant role of the ARC in Australia's research landscape, which gives us both the insight and the power to create real change in our research sector. Thanks to the ARC the impact of this research is also known, since the release of Australia's first national assessment of how universities engage outside academia and translate research into benefits for society. The Engagement and impact assessment 2018-19 national report, released by the ARC in March this year, makes transparent the value to ordinary Australian taxpayers of the government's $12 billion in research funding. It is now possible to explore the data presented in this report, as well as the 240 highly ranked impact studies, through the ARC website. These studies paint a rich picture of how Australian research is saving lives, strengthening the economy and improving our quality of living.

Funding the ARC is part of this government's investment in the future of Australia over the next four years. With the passage of this bill, the ARC will deliver over $3 billion in funding for thousands of research projects. This will underpin Australia's research strengths as well as ensure that many benefits are reached by Australian industry, Australian jobs and the Australian community. I commend this bill to the House.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Moreton has moved as an amendment that all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The immediate question before the House is that the amendment moved by the member for Moreton be agreed to. There being more than one voice calling for a division, in accordance with standing order 133 the division is deferred until after the discussion of the matter of public importance.

Debate adjourned.