Full review of Australian Research Council reveals widespread calls for change
With a public funding pot of A$800 million to dish out to researchers each year, the Australian Research Council is vital for the country’s research.
ARC funding keeps many university research programmes afloat, makes or breaks careers with its project grants and fellowships, and drives industry-focused research through its Linkages grant programme.
But widespread disquiet with the authority prompted incoming education minister Jason Clare to order a full review of ARC’s founding act last year—and submissions from the sector to a consultation for the review reveal a myriad of urgent concerns that review chair Margaret Sheil must grapple with.
Funding levels
Although overall funding levels are not explicitly on the table in the current review, they were mentioned by plenty of submissions made public so far.
Universities Australia has repeated last year’s call for more money. In March 2022, it said ARC funding and processes were in need of improvement and called for “adequate, long-term, indexed funding”. It doubled down in its submission to the review, saying it wanted the government to work with the sector and “develop an appropriate model for funding the full cost of research”.
UA said the hundreds of millions flowing from the Medical Research Future Fund (now around A$600m per year) has diverted “overheads” to medical projects, adversely affecting other research. Winning funding now “results in an increasing burden on universities”, UA said, as they have to fund the cost of their own success.
The Group of Eight quoted 2021 research budget figures from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources to back its claim that, “over the last decade, real funding by the ARC has declined with an estimated cumulative shortfall of $1.25 billion against 2012-13 funding levels”, which it said put “further pressure on the ability of universities to undertake basic research”.
Basic vs commercial research
Depending on their perspective, different parts of the sector want more or less focus on “basic” research. After years of focus on commercial applications, many feel the pendulum has swung too far.
Most trenchant was the submission from the Australian Academy of Science, which said that a “shocking” incoherence in Australia’s research support system is “an indictment of the approaches that fundamentally imply knowledge is only important if it can be commercialised—or relate to some ill-defined national interest test”.
The Australian Institute of Physics said it was “important to recognise that many technological and scientific breakthroughs were enabled by fundamental research that, at the time it was carried out, had no foreseeable commercial application”.
The Group of Eight research universities—whose members get the lion’s share of Australian top-level research funding—want the ARC’s founding legislation to “explicitly legislate the balance of funding between basic research and applied research to provide an explicit commitment to basic research”.
Vetoes and the Haldane Principle
Since 2017, 22 ARC grants chosen by peer review have been vetoed at ministerial level.
UA’s and the Group of Eight’s submissions stress the importance of the so-called “Haldane Principle”, which holds that the best people to make decisions on which research should be funded are researchers themselves rather than politicians.
Both bodies, and most other submissions, want the veto scrapped—which is politically unlikely—and if that doesn’t happen, UA and the Group of Eight want the reasons for any veto to be given to federal parliament.
The Australian Institute of Physics, which has been one of the most vocal critics of the ARC’s processes, told the review that the veto “damages Australia’s international reputation”.
“We recommend that the minister has no veto power over research grants,” it wrote.
Quality control
In September 2022, the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) assessment process was paused, followed by the Engagement and Impact process in December. Universities Australia wants the ERA to be scrapped altogether and a consultation to be carried out on other “options to provide assurance of the high-quality research performed by Australian universities”.
“The current exercise…is highly expensive and far exceeds what would be required for assurance,” it wrote.
The Group of Eight also wants the two processes scrapped for good, saying that the ERA fails to measure volume of excellent research and has not even been used to guide government funding decisions for the past seven years.
The Academy of Science has flatly recommended: “Abolish the ERA.”
Administration and governance
Low success rates and onerous application processes are common at many funders, but several peak bodies mentioned the burden imposed by the ARC on researchers.
In its submission, the Australian Academy of Science’s Early- and Mid-Career Researcher Forum said the application process—with some applications running to 80 pages—was discouraging some from applying, particularly researchers with “caring responsibilities who work part-time and/or who are on short contracts”.
Universities Australia wants an initial screening process developed to reduce the workload, an approach also floated by the EMCR Forum.
Given that ARC’s woes have been longstanding, culminating in an unexpected change of chief executive at the end of 2021, several submissions focus on better governance.
Universities Australia backed the idea of a legislated board with an independent chair, saying: “The ARC is the only key funder of research without support of a board or council.”
The Academy of Science even called for a greater role for the humanities in the ARC’s governance, saying that “vested interests” had been given a voice in advisory groups while learned academies had not.
The bigger picture
Untangling the ARC’s place in the wider research picture will not be easy.
The Group of Eight universities were at pains to point out that their submission on the ARC did not supersede “the generational reform of the entire university research system that will be considered during the Australian Universities Accord process”.
The Accord process, now underway, is reviewing everything from funding to research, and its terms of reference explicitly mandate coordination with the ARC review.
The Australian Academy of Science says even the ARC review and the Accord process are not enough, and has called for a sweeping national review of all Australia’s federal research programmes.
“Australia’s approach is now simply the sum of multiple, rarely coordinated interventions with the obvious result: fragmentation, duplication and gaps,” the academy said.
The ARC itself has not made a submission to the review, despite Zielke suggesting earlier that it might work with other organisations to do so.
Sheil is due to report back to Clare by the end of March.
While the consensus from the sector is clear, the outcome may depend on the government’s political will for change.