Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

First of all, I would like to talk about the appalling behaviour of the government in the chamber today. We have before us a critical piece of legislation which has the potential to undermine the integrity, the independence and the international reputation of the Australian Research Council and of Australian research more generally if it becomes law. But the government today has made a total mockery of this bill by deciding to ram it through the House tonight with no proper debate, no chance to move and debate amendments and no opportunity to question the Minister for Education, Science and Training over the impact of this very heavy-handed bill. This is yet another example of how this government is out of control and out of touch. The government does not seem to be able to handle any debate or dissent, whether it is in this chamber today or on the Australian Research Council.

The Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2006 gives effect to the former education minister’s unilateral decision to abolish the board of the ARC. With a simple press release, the former education minister decided to intervene and direct the actions of the ARC in a way that no other minister has done before. The Howard government had a chance to redeem itself earlier this year when a new minister came to the education portfolio. The current Minister for Education, Science and Training could have quietly backed away from some of her predecessor’s more outrageous excesses, but she chose not to.

With this bill, the minister is damaging the integrity and independence of the ARC in four main ways. First of all, the bill abolishes the ARC’s board and transfers the board’s functions to the chief executive officer and the minister. Secondly, it makes the CEO directly answerable to the minister. Thirdly, it gives the minister the power to intervene directly in the everyday workings of the ARC, to appoint the chief executive and all of the ARC’s committees, including the ARC’s main peer review committee, the College of Experts. Fourthly, it removes the ability of the ARC to offer strategic advice and conduct inquiries into research matters of national interest.

Lastly, the bill extends appropriation funding to the ARC for 2008-09. There is no policy reason for tacking on the ARC’s core funding grant to the end of this extreme and very heavy-handed bill. The current act gives the ARC security until 2008. The only reason that the ARC’s appropriations have been tacked onto the end of this bill is that the government knows that Labor will not stand in the way of core funding to the ARC. It is this last feature of the bill which means that Labor will not oppose this legislation.

Of course, we in the Labor Party understand that we must exercise responsibility and care when it comes to funding high-quality research in this country. However, we do have very serious concerns with this legislation. I would have moved amendments in the consideration in detail stage, and I would have had the opportunity to question the minister about our concerns, but that is not possible because of the heavy-handed way in which the government has behaved today. The amendments that I will seek to have incorporated would have improved transparency and limited the capacity of the minister to impose her political whim on the ARC.

The government justified its decision to sack the board and diminish the ARC’s importance under the guise of its review of the corporate governance of statutory authorities and officeholders, otherwise known as the Uhrig review. This review does recommend that boards of statutory authorities be abolished unless the government is prepared to devolve all responsibility to those agencies.

But we have a problem when the Uhrig recommendations collide with this government’s political reality. This Howard government is a heavy-handed, meddling, ideologically driven outfit, not afraid—ever—to destroy anything that opposes its views. This is the sad political reality of why we are presented with these changes today and why the government is getting rid of the ARC board. That will not deliver better governance, more transparency or proper accountability of taxpayers’ funds. It is just like everything else in this government. This government is all about playing politics and pushing extreme agendas, and that is what we are looking at today.

Under the existing ARC Act, the ARC was charged with, first of all, making recommendations to the minister about which research proposals should be funded; secondly, administering the various regimes of financial assistance provided by the ARC; and, thirdly, providing strategic advice to the minister on research matters. This bill transfers all of these functions to one person, the chief executive. The board of the ARC was charged with hiring the chief executive with the approval of the minister, directing the CEO to perform certain functions, establishing committees to assist the effective and efficient functioning of the ARC, making sure that the ARC’s functions were performed properly and, finally and very importantly, initiating inquiries on research related matters.

The ARC bill transfers the first four responsibilities to the minister and, most disappointingly, removes the power to conduct inquiries from the ARC. So the ARC will become one person in the hands of a grand puppet master, the Howard government’s education minister. The ARC’s funding recommendations have always been subject to the minister’s final approval, but the presence of a board has created a buffer between this government’s politically driven agendas and an independent research funding body.

At the moment, the ARC board assesses recommendations from ARC committees and sends its recommendations to the minister for approval. It is up to the minister to reject or change the board’s recommendations. This bill would change that. If this bill becomes law, unamended, the minister would be able to reject or change recommendations from the chief executive, a single person who is appointed by the minister and of course can be sacked by the minister. The ARC could run into grave problems if this bill becomes law. There will be no group of eminent experts from the academic or business communities to mediate the minister’s interference. It is much harder to sack 14 distinguished people who disagree with you than the one you have appointed yourself.

Under the ARC’s current act, the education minister can only appoint the chief executive if he or she has taken the board’s advice on the appointment. The minister will no longer have to consult anyone with academic or management expertise before naming a favourite. And let us not delude ourselves for one single minute that the chief executive has much protection or job security if they disagree with a minister in this government. I doubt that the chief executive of the ARC in the future will have much job security at all.

If the government is genuinely concerned that there is confusion over reporting and accountability with the ARC, the solution is for the minister to issue clear directions to the ARC and to establish a set of expectations that she expects them to meet. Good governance and accountability could slip away from the ARC’s grasp with this major transfer of powers to two individuals, the minister and her chief executive. If this bill becomes law, the minister’s selection of the chief executive and all of the ARC’s committee members would not be regarded as a legislative instrument. No democratically elected member of parliament would be able to question or challenge this government’s record when it comes to these issues. Let us not fool ourselves: this government is not interested in transparency or accountability. Even before this bill was introduced, the Howard government had plenty of form on meddling with research and research funding. Brendan Nelson, the former Minister for Education, Science and Training, vetoed at least 10 separate grant recommendations from the ARC in just two years. This government certainly has plenty of form on silencing dissent.

But this bill goes much further than allowing an education minister to veto proposals. The minister will now be able to establish any ARC committee that looks at grants and select every individual assessing grant proposals before those committees. This includes all the ARC’s peer review panels, including its College of Experts. The minister will also be able to appoint directly the one person whose job it is to sign off on those grant recommendations and deliver them to the minister. Under the current act, the board of the ARC does all these things with the approval of the minister. The difference is crucial. It is one thing to accept or reject membership recommendations from the board of an expert body; it is quite another to make them yourself. Before appointing someone, the minister only has to ‘try to ensure that the composition of the committee reflects the diversity of the interests in the matter or matters that the committee will be dealing with’. Telling a Howard government minister to ‘try to ensure’ that they do not rort something is like putting a big bag of lollies in front of five-year-olds and telling them to sit still. This government just will not be able to help itself.

The College of Experts plays a critical role in the ARC, as do the expert panels that assess proposals for the ARC’s Linkage grants and Federation Fellowships. Many of its members are internationally acclaimed researchers, and they provide strategic advice to the board on funding proposals across a wide range of disciplines. Peer review is currently international best practice, the most reliable mechanism we have today to assess high-quality research around the world. The research community is very right to be worried about the College of Experts being turned into a ministerial plaything. Where would we have renewable energy research or embryonic stem cell research if it were up to a Howard government minister to pick whoever they liked to assess those proposals?

If this bill becomes law the minister will also have the power to get rid of the College of Experts completely, so at the drop of a hat the minister could destroy the integrity of the ARC. No country in the world would take the quality of research in Australia seriously if a minister meddled with peer review in this way. The Federation of Australasian Science and Technology Societies said:

Australia produces about 1% of the world’s knowledge and accessing the other 99% is significantly dependent on:

the quality of Australian research;

the calibre of Australian researchers; and

the integrity of Australian research agencies and institutions.

Australia has built a reputation of excellence in many fields of research, thanks in part to the integrity of the competitive research funding process. Freedom from political interference in research and research funding decisions is critical to that reputation. To top it off, the minister retains her ability to say yes or no to any grant that comes through this process.

It is true that the current minister has said that she does not intend to veto grant recommendations or interfere with the College of Experts. If that is the case, why give the minister this kind of power in the first place? Labor recognises that ministers in any government must have ultimate responsibility for activities in their portfolio. But what we are responding to today is what we know has happened time and time again with the government. They just will not be able to help themselves from taking advantage of the massive power that this bill allows. This bill is a slap in the face for good governance, transparency and accountability. We know that the government have form when it comes to all the different pork-barrelling examples we are so familiar with, whether it is transport, regional grants or schools funding. We know what the government like to get up to. It is simply not in the interests of good governance or world-class research for the minister to be able to manipulate or pork-barrel our research funding in the way in which it has been done in other areas.

I am also concerned that the government has undermined the ARC’s ability to provide strategic advice on research issues and conduct inquiries into research matters of national interest. This is a very important aspect of the ARC’s capacity. The ARC may no longer be able to examine whether it is serving the national interest through targeted research, whether it is funding research appropriately or whether the research that it funds is having any impact. The ARC itself was unclear at Senate estimates whether it retains the power to initiate inquiries under the bill. There is no reason to take this very heavy-handed approach to the ARC under the guise of the Uhrig review of governance. In fact, the Minister for Health and Ageing tabled a bill this year to change the governance arrangements of the National Health and Medical Research Council in line with the Uhrig review but without abolishing its board.

Labor’s amendments would have protected the integrity of the ARC and its grants approval processes, if we had had the chance to have them moved, debated and voted on. For the information of those who are very concerned about these issues, I will go through the amendments that Labor would like to have seen made to this legislation. Firstly, we would like to see and certainly would have amended the legislation to have the board of the ARC retained as an important safeguard against politicisation by this government. Secondly, Labor seeks to enshrine peer and expert review as the main mechanisms to be used to determine research funding recommendations to the minister. I have already given my reasons for believing that the minister’s unfettered power to change or abolish peer review could damage Australia’s research recommendations. Labor also seeks to amend the legislation because we reject the government’s attempts to make the chief executive completely vulnerable to ministerial interference. We would do this first by making sure that the chief executive is appointed responsibly and is answerable to the minister through the board. We also reject the government’s attempts to appoint the ARC’s committees directly.

Department of education representatives tried to tell the Senate committee inquiring into this bill that there was no change to the minister’s powers. They said:

I think the first thing to point out is that the amendments actually maintain the minister’s decision-making role in appointments to designated committees and in the grant approval processes. The legislation does not enhance or diminish that; it maintains it.

Unfortunately, this is simply not the case and you would have to wonder why the department said this to the inquiry. The bill before us and the act as it stands today are substantially different. Even the ARC concurred at the recent Senate estimates hearings that this bill is a radical departure from existing arrangements. A sensible role for the minister to play under the current act is to outline priorities and expectations for statutory bodies and to lay out clear guidelines to meet those priorities. Meddling with the internal management of the ARC, its staff and its committees is not good governance.

We would also like to see the minister being required to table approved grants in every calendar year. Tenured employment is a figment of the imagination of most staff at universities these days and very many of our researchers rely on grants for job security. We certainly need to make sure that, when the government decides to approve grants, it is done in a timely way. Universities rely on grant funding to manage research and to make sure that staff will be there to conduct the research in the following year.

Given the chief executive’s enhanced responsibilities under this legislation, we certainly think that their operational responsibilities should include developing and presenting the organisation’s strategic plan to the minister. It is very important for us to remember that the ARC exists to fund the best and highest quality research in Australia and to build the international reputation and integrity of Australian research. The ARC’s governance arrangements should assist in that purpose but, unfortunately, much of this bill threatens to destroy the integrity and independence of the ARC.

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