ARC grants schemes in need of review

CAPA salutes the twentieth recommendation of the Senate Committee report, Universities in Crisis, that Australian Research Council grants schemes be reviewed to more effectively meet our national research objectives across the board.

"The measures recommended by the Committee will, when implemented by a government with vision, ensure that Australians are getting the most from our investment in research," said CAPA President John Byron today.

"Under the Howard Government, research funding is overly focussed upon development projects run by senior academics in certain selected sub-disciplines in older, usually urban, universities," he said.

"A truly innovative approach, by contrast, would invest in a broad range of research opportunities, would invest in the career development of the researchers who must sustain the system for the next few decades, and would sponsor the development of new research centres in our new and regional universities.

The Committee emphasises the need to support basic enabling research, in addition to the more applied developmental work currently favoured. The report also specifically mentions the need for bolstering funding for research in the humanities and social sciences.

"These are areas that have suffered tremendous neglect in recent times, and the present policies of the Coalition explicitly state that this appalling neglect will continue," observed Mr Byron.

"John Howard made it quite clear in Backing Australia's Ability that anyone who thinks we are living in a society - and not just a market-research laboratory - will need to look elsewhere for any hope of further developing our capacity to understand each other and our world in deeper, more enabling ways."

The Committee also recommends providing explicit support for early career researchers, for emerging disciplines, and for newer universities.

"Established researchers are a tremendously valuable resource for commencing research academics," said Mr Byron, "but there is no doubt that the failure of the current research funding structures to find other ways to measure merit in addition to the possession of a long track record is effectively endangering the future of Australian research beyond the next five to ten years.

"Additionally, the failure to imagine even the possibility of new ways of organising academic thought demonstrates the lack of any understanding by the Coalition of what innovation actually means," he noted.

"Finally, the reinforcement of the notion that all universities have the right to position themselves as players in the research game - and that it is in the national interest that they do so - also contrasts starkly with current Government policy," argued Mr Byron.

"The Committee recognises the destructive elitism of Dr Kemp's famous preference for supporting a privileged few and suppressing the attempts of the newer universities to engage in research," he concluded.