Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I note that this is not my first speech. Document No. 47 relates to grant approvals through the Australian Research Council. Document No. 47 is a small document, just a few pages, but it deals with a big issue. Our country is facing huge challenges: climate action, inequality and dealing with a pandemic. To deal with these issues, we need the very best research and the very best university graduates. Document No. 47 lists an important set of new university research funding through the Australian Research Council's Linkage and centres grant allocations.

I want to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of our country's researchers that lie beneath every line of these grants. Our nation's researchers spend their summers crafting and redrafting and honing, based on peer review, their proposals that face our biggest challenges. They're trying to get them as good as they can. I know, because I've spent many a summer and I bear some of those scars. Writing those applications takes persistence and a ridiculous level of optimism because they have only a 33 per cent chance of success. Grants on things like these are listed in document No. 47: creating a climate-ready social housing, improving the wellbeing of our healthcare workforce, creating greener roads and waterways, and preventing abuse of people with disability.

I would like to make three points in relation to this document and what it symbolises. Firstly, we need to keep politics out of the Australian Research Council. The selection processes are robust. Indeed, they are often onerous. They're lengthy and they're very thorough. While we might certainly improve on those processes and make them less resource intensive, we need to make sure that the process retains its integrity and that politics is kept out of the decision-making. Secondly, we need to increase our funding for research. I know from personal experience as a peer reviewer over many years how many excellent proposals don't make the cut. This is because we put too little money into research in this country. The 33 per cent success rate reflects too little money for all these critical research tasks that we face. Thirdly, projects like these need our very best people on the job, working under the conditions that let them get the job done. We need to make sure our researchers and academics are treated fairly. I'm sure that many Australians would be shocked to learn that 69 per cent of our university workforce now work on casual or limited-term contracts. These are our uni teachers and our researchers, and half of our university teaching force is now made up of casuals. Our kids and our students deserve.

To keep our best researchers, we need to reform the casual conversion provisions in the National Employment Standards to allow university workers employed from semester to semester for year after year to convert from casual to permanent—people like Dr Lara McKenzie, whom I met today, a researcher of 10 years at one of our most prestigious universities, the University of Western Australia, who is currently researching COVID vaccination behaviours, and don't we need that research, but is kept on a casual contract year after year. She's been doing that for over a decade.

We also need to stop endemic wage theft in our universities. The National Tertiary Education Union has recovered over $30 million from our universities who have underpaid their staff in recent years. Our country needs our best research from our best researchers, and we need our university students to be taught by the best.

In sum, we need to keep politics out of our university research funding, we need to put enough money there to get the research done on the big challenges we face, and, finally, we have to attract and retain the best university teachers and researchers.

Question agreed to.