Opinion
You can sometimes discern how much a Minister wants to keep their distance from an institution by their speech.
Education Minister Jason Clare took to the podium at the Shine Dome in Canberra yesterday for an historic speech to mark the 25th birthday of Australia’s research funding agency that started with his reflections on the ABC ‘Insiders’ show, and then some reflections on technological change over the last quarter century, before getting to the legacy of the Australian Research Council (ARC).
It’s not easy being the organisation that doles out the cash to a relatively small proportion of those clamouring for it, but it is even harder stumping up cash for a fancy shindig at the Shine Dome when you haven’t actually had the measuring tape out for around one third of your history.
Yes, dear reader, it was 2018 when Australia last measured the strength of its research against the rest of the world in that flawed, disliked, but ultimately not-replaced measurement scheme run by the ARC known as Excellence in Research for Australia.
The poor old Department of Education still relies on this 2018 measure to assure citizens about the strengths of Australian research. Perhaps, at a time when foreign espionage and cyberhacking is so prevalent, this is some sort of defensive bluff – we don’t measure any of our research with a national framework, anymore so that the spies can’t find the good stuff?
The good news is that, despite having lost the measuring tape down the back of the couch for the best part of a decade, the good people of the ARC have polished up a new strategy, which was unveiled yesterday.
the ARC strategy for 2026-35 prioritises leadership, value and people in research, and “promotes international standard, responsible research assessment practices across the sector.” It just isn’t ready to unveil a national measurement too fit to replace the ERA yet.
So if we aren’t bothering to ask what is actually good on an international level, do we at least have a plan on how to keep paying for the discoveries that we assume we need?
Well no. Wedged by their political opponents, the Government has clamped down on international student numbers, shutting off a key revenue source that had been propping up Australia’s research capability. In 2020 HE policy guru Professor Andrew Norton calculated that 38% of university research funding came from student revenue – and international student revenue accounted for about 27% overall.
Research has taken a distant back pew to teaching and learning in the national discussion on tertiary education, but with a limited government funding pool, a rapidly shrinking revenue stream from international student fees to cross-subsidise research, and no national framework in place to measure research and understand where the gaps and strengths really are, it is a devilishly difficult time to steward the future of the nation’s knowledge discoverers.
As Minister Clare says in the backend of yesterday’s speech, “…we can’t rely on importing discoveries made somewhere else. We can’t just be passive consumers of others’ ideas. We have to create knowledge too and make discoveries.”
“The AI race of the last few years has shown the importance of sovereign capability.”
To be fair to Minister Clare, he has limited capacity to change the funding mess constraining research in Australia right now, given the political environment. But the future of Australian research is not helped by the lack of a national yardstick.
Which might just possibly drive a Minister’s speech writer to open a milestone speech with a reverie on his Sunday morning viewing habits.