Opinion
Australia's research debate concentrates on funding levels, security, translation, and impact. The institutional capability that converts those ambitions into outcomes has largely been treated as overhead. One of the highest returns on investment available to Australian research could be recognising it as essential infrastructure and resourcing it deliberately, in partnership between government and the sector.
Discussions of Australian research tend to focus on researchers and their outputs, and funders increasingly frame the system in terms of outcomes, integrity, and national benefit. These are reasonable lenses; however, they share a blind spot. None of these outcomes are produced by researchers alone, and the capability that produces them has grown substantially without a corresponding conversation about how to invest in it. That gap is also an opportunity: it is one of the few places where modest, well-directed investment could materially improve the return on everything else Australia already spends on research.
That capability, research enablement, is a workforce and a set of systems: research managers, contracts and grants specialists, ethics and integrity advisers, research finance professionals, data stewards, research software engineers, cybersecurity staff, commercialisation experts, and governance teams. It can be argued that this has become a form of research infrastructure, and that treating it as such, deliberately and jointly, would do more to lift translation, security, and impact than almost any equivalent investment in the research effort itself.
Why enablement is now the high leverage point
Over the past decade, universities have been asked to assess foreign-interference risk, meet sanctions and export-control obligations, embed research security, strengthen data governance, raise standards of integrity, deepen Indigenous research engagement, accelerate translation and commercialisation, support open science, and evidence societal impact.
Each of these expectations is laudable. Public investment should be accountable, partnerships should be scrutinised, and knowledge, people, and national interests should be protected. However, each has been considered as a capability requirement before it was a policy principle, and the capability has been treated as a given.
This is what makes enablement a point of high potential leverage. Research security is realised not by policy but by people able to evaluate a specific collaboration. Translation depends on the ability to structure contracts and manage intellectual property. Open science depends on data stewardship and digital infrastructure. Impact depends on sustained tracking and evaluation. In each case, the constraint is increasingly institutional capacity rather than the quality of the underlying research. As a result, strengthening capacity is the most direct way to unlock the outcomes which the system has already funded. Research dollars already committed deliver more when the capability around them is adequate, and less when it is not.
From absorbed cost to deliberate investment
For a decade, research institutions (and funding bodies) have absorbed expanding assurance and reporting obligations by compressing workloads, deferring systems investment, and relying on individual professionalism. This creates technical debt: deferred investment in capability accumulates without visible failure, until it appears as longer establishment times, difficulty retaining specialist staff, increased risk aversion, and partnerships that lapse because the institution could not act quickly enough.
The forward-looking opportunity is to convert this absorbed, invisible cost into deliberate, visible investment and to do so before the debt compounds further. The attraction of such a shift is because it is efficient. Much of the capability already exists; it is under-resourced and under-recognised rather than absent. Investing in it does not require building something new so much as properly funding what the system already depends on. The gains—faster establishment, more opportunities assessed and pursued, more reliable assurance, better partnership outcomes—accrue across the whole research base rather than to a single project or discipline.
What investment could make possible
Recognising research enablement as infrastructure has concrete, constructive implications. It would mean measuring it: establishing sector-level indicators of enablement capacity and load, so that the constraint can be observed rather than inferred. It would mean costing new assurance and reporting requirements for their capability implications before they are introduced, rather than assuming absorption. It would mean building and retaining professional expertise through genuine career structures. And it would mean funding it explicitly, including through the indirect-cost and infrastructure mechanisms that already exist for physical research infrastructure, rather than leaving it to cross-subsidy.
Each of these is achievable with existing instruments. None requires a wholesale redesign of the system. Together they would improve the yield on the research investment Australia has already made.
A closer partnership between government and the sector
The most significant opportunity is relational. The present pattern of government setting ambitions centrally while the enabling capability is found internally by institutions produces a predictable misalignment between intent and outcome. The forward-looking alternative is a closer working relationship in which both sides treat enablement as shared infrastructure for national objectives.
In practice, that means a few things working together. New assurance and reporting requirements could be assessed for their capability implications before they are introduced, through genuine consultation with the professionals who will deliver them, so that intent and feasibility are aligned at the design stage rather than reconciled afterward. Government and institutions could jointly develop the indicators that reveal where capacity constrains national priorities, giving both sides a shared evidence base. And enablement capability could be recognised explicitly in the next generation of research-infrastructure and sovereign-capability policy, so that security, translation, and open science are resourced as the capability-dependent objectives they are.
This would be a constructive agenda. Government and the sector want the same outcomes: a research system that is secure, accountable, translatable, and internationally competitive. That those outcomes depend on a layer of capability which is generally under-recognised, means that aligning on it (and measuring it, investing in it, and designing policy with it in mind) is among the most practical steps available to improve what Australian research already delivers.
The opportunity
Australian research infrastructure policy has historically meant physical assets: instruments, facilities, computing, and the national platforms supported through mechanisms such as NCRIS. These remain essential. The opportunity now is to complete the definition and to recognise professional capability as another form of infrastructure, to measure and fund it accordingly, and to do so in genuine partnership between government and institutions.
Australia is already debating how to strengthen its research system. Research enablement is the part of that system where intent most often meets, or fails to meet, delivery. Investing in it, and aligning government and sector around it, is one of the clearest opportunities available to ensure that what Australia funds is what Australia achieves.
Dr Ross McLennan is Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research Services at Macquarie University.