The National Tertiary Education Union welcomes any additional public investment in research, however today’s funding does not come close to the amount of money pulled out of research over the past decade.
NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes said the federal government has cut funding from research through reduced allocations to the Australian Research Council’s essential Discovery and Linkage programs.
“Over the past nine years, the Coalition has slashed $1.47 billion from the Australian Research Council alone,” Dr Barnes said.
“It has systematically reduced levels of funding for research and even with this additional money, it still falls short.
“Over the same period, the Morrison Government has pulled $10 billion from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme and funding per student place in our universities will fall around 14 per cent under the recent Jobs Ready Graduate cuts.
“This money is now being re-directed towards the commercialisation of research in particular industries hand-picked by the Coalition.
“The Morrison Government has also interfered directly with the ARC’s competitive peer-review grants process to block funding for approved projects it doesn’t like and the acting Minister for Education and Youth has directed the ARC to appoint industry based non-experts to the College of Experts who assess grant applications.
“Not all publicly funded research should require immediate commercial application. In fact, research teams are rightly advancing human knowledge in pure sciences, social sciences, and other fields without bias towards potential for-profit applications of such knowledge, which are largely unknowable in advance.
“In the NTEU’s pre-budget submission, we have called for a substantial increase in research funding to the ARC and the National Health and Medical Research Council of $1 billion per year for each agency.
“While applied research funding through the Linkage Grant Scheme is vital, our investment in curiosity driven, pure research – which has led to innovations such as laser technology and Bluetooth – and is the primary form of support for early and mid-career researchers needs to be secured.
“On top of this, research decisions must be made by independent peer reviewers at arm’s length from government and free from interference or influence.
“Today’s announcement is another step in the wrong direction.”
