Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

The primary purpose of the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2006 is to abolish the Australian Research Council board and to transfer its powers to the chief executive officer and the minister. The government justifies this legislation by citing the conclusion of the Uhrig review that agencies should ultimately be directed by government—that is, by ministers. There is reason to support greater transparency in the operations of the Australian Research Council to ensure public accountability. This could be achieved by clarifying and delineating the ARC’s functions rather than by abolishing a critical mediating body that stands between a government and the independent function of our primary academic-funding body. I believe that this bill undermines the autonomy and therefore the academic credibility of the Australian Research Council and its importance as an advisory body on research matters. The bill removes the ability of the Australian Research Council to initiate and to conduct inquiries into relevant research issues.

Despite the opportunity this bill provides to the government to effectively politically annex the Research Council, Labor will not oppose it because it extends the standing appropriation to the Australian Research Council. The appropriation for 2008-09 is some $572 million. To oppose this bill would effectively mean opposing funding to the Australian Research Council. The bill continues the current practice of prohibiting the minister from recommending which particular projects are to be funded. However, the bill allows the minister to appoint directly the chief executive officer and all committees of the Australian Research Council. This bill is unprecedented in the amount of control that any minister has had or has been given over the grants process in the history of the funding body. The bill also reduces the importance of the ARC as a body capable of offering strategic advice and conducting inquiries into research matters of national interest.

Labor believes that the bill ought to be substantially amended and that those amendments ought to reflect the following: retention of the board with oversight and advisory capacity; enhanced responsibilities of the chief executive officer, including direct reporting of ARC decisions to the minister and power to establish advisory committees as needed; retention of the College of Experts as an independent committee of the ARC over which the minister has no power of appointment—this is not the case with the existing ARC Act; and, finally, retention of the ability of the Australian Research Council to initiate and conduct inquiries over research matters of interest. I think that these changes to the bill are absolutely necessary to protect academic independence and research integrity.

What the government is putting forward dilutes the peer review process. By introducing political elements into the process of funding Australian academic research, the government detracts from the fidelity of the peer review process. Peer review is the foundation of the world’s academic achievements. It is the basic process by which knowledge is tested and built upon. Arguably, the ARC could be more transparent, peer review need not mean secrecy and the reforms that improve transparency are arguably in order. But to assume political influence over the council and its decisions, as this bill will enact, is to debase the academic integrity of Australia’s tertiary sector. This matters. It matters because our academic integrity provides quality. It matters because our academic integrity provides up-to-date training for Australians. It matters because it is academic integrity that attracts foreign students. It matters because it is our academic integrity that appeals to internationally respected professors, researchers and tertiary industries. I ask the government: why threaten the integrity of an institution as important to our future as this one? You have to ask yourself: can there be any reason for this other than this government’s instinctive quest for greater power and its dislike of independent sources of research and advice?

I draw the attention of the House to the performance audit carried out by the Australian National Audit Office into the Australian Research Council’s management of research grants. This audit report is No. 38 of 2005-06. It makes a couple of significant findings. It indicates that the Audit Office has detected areas where the Australian Research Council could improve its performance management framework and be more consistent with the outcomes and outputs framework of the Department of Finance and Administration. In particular, the Audit Office found that there was no obvious link between the Australian Research Council’s effectiveness indicators and its 10 key performance indicators and that reporting against the effectiveness indicators was minimal. The separation of indicators against administered and departmental items or output and outcomes in the portfolio budget statements was also not well defined.

The Audit Office suggested that the Australian Research Council use more targets and a wider range of quality and quantity measures to describe its performance and its performance reporting to Finance’s requirements. The Audit Office also indicated that there were shortcomings in the Australian Research Council’s administrative processes, which meant that the Australian Research Council was not in a position to determine and inform the government of whether all grants met their objectives, whether funds were used as intended and whether ARC goals were being fully met.

While it is observed that the ARC has a strong focus on selecting the best applications, the Audit Office found that it had few systemic processes to enable effective or timely post-award management of grants. One of the recommendations of the Audit Office for the Research Council comprises a number of suggestions to strengthen the Research Council’s management of grants with particular emphasis on improving the effectiveness, transparency and accountability of the Research Council’s grants administration. I certainly hope that those recommendations are followed up and put into effect and that we see some improvements as a result.

In this country there is considerable concern about the effort being put into renewable energy research. A number of renewal energy researchers have suggested that there is a climate of fear causing a loss of expertise and tipping Australia, which used to boast a world-leading industry, into decline. The Canberra Times has reported on comments made by the Murdoch University Professor of Energy Studies, Dr Philip Jennings. According to the report:

... scientists were fearful of losing research grants if they were perceived as criticising Federal Government policies on renewable energy or climate change.

Dr Jennings said:

They’re afraid of being victimised because they have seen it happen to colleagues who have spoken up about government funding cuts to renewables research.

Similarly:

Former federal energy policy adviser and whistleblower Guy Pearce has ... called for “independent and credible economic research” to inform the Government’s policy on energy options on climate change.

In addressing a coastal environment forum in Queensland recently, Professor Pearce said:

It’s important to understand that some of the same interests who have persuaded our government to avoid emission cuts domestically also have an interest in domestic nuclear power. Our two biggest uranium producers are also in the coal and aluminium business …

The fact is that Australia was a pioneer and world leader in solar technology as far back as the 1940s but has lost its leadership as research programs have closed. Scientists have moved overseas and taken up lucrative research opportunities in Europe, China and Japan. For example, we have lost solar thermal technology to China because there were no funds for its commercialisation. It has been estimated that that kind of industry would have been worth at least $1 billion to Australia, but that opportunity has been lost. Because of work done at the CSIRO in days gone by, we led the world in solar water heater technology. Regrettably, we have now lost that lead to Israel and Greece because of this government’s short-sighted views on renewable energy.

The federal government has progressively stripped solar energy of research funding. It closed the Energy Research and Development Corporation and the Cooperative Research Centre for Renewable Energy, so in this country we now have only two solar energy research centres—one at the Australian National University and the other at the University of New South Wales—despite Australia’s strong international track record of innovative solar technology.

A recent report to the World Bank by six leading scientists recommended active and continued support for solar thermal technology, claiming that it could play ‘a more significant role’ than, for example, wind power in achieving deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. That report supports claims made in a report by the Cooperative Research Centre for Coal in Sustainable Development that solar thermal technology is capable of producing Australia’s entire electricity demand.

It has also been suggested at the CSIRO that the kind of research work that we need to build our sustainable energy industries for the future and meet our climate change targets and responsibilities is simply not being done. Scientists at the CSIRO have been operating under a climate of job insecurity and keeping their heads down while the CSIRO is progressively failing to deliver on the kinds of things which we as Australians expect and are entitled to expect of it. Figures from the Department of Education, Science and Training show that administration now consumes 46½ per cent of national gross expenditure on research and development, which is up from 28½ per cent in 1989. Between June 1998 and June 2004, the CSIRO more than doubled its corporate management positions at the same time as it lost 316 people from its research projects.

The public need for expert scientific information on these issues of climate change, fossil fuel energy reliance and building of sustainable industries has never been greater, but instead of speaking out about these issues in public the CSIRO has turned inwards to exert more control on what its staff do and say. We now have a situation where the vast majority of new science positions are on short terms and the funding sometimes binds the science to confidentiality or supports a narrow view. In my view, it is regrettable that the careers of internationally respected scientists such as Dr Graeme Pearman and Dr Roger Pech were scrapped. That sets a poor example for younger scientists and discourages them from emerging as champions in the area of contemporary public debate on energy issues. We now have a situation where for the last financial year 93 per cent of appointments to the CSIRO were on fixed-term or casual arrangements, and job insecurity and the burgeoning demands of bureaucracy have forged a culture amongst CSIRO staff of keeping your head down, meeting the indicators and effectively doing the real science at night. That is regrettable and really needs to change.

We have seen a series of troubling headlines concerning CSIRO, including that CSIRO is failing to meet forecasts, that prices are rising, that standards are falling, that CSIRO is in the red and that CSIRO is set to scrap research jobs. Instead of stories of scientific triumph, CSIRO has been making the news as a result of internal strife, staff cuts, corporate excess, financial woes and those sorts of things. If we are going to see the kind of research effort that this country needs, the kind of effort that will position us properly for the future, we need our research bodies to be capable of focusing on original research, without anything in the way of political direction. The changes that the government has put forward in this legislation are unhelpful in this regard. This bill undermines the autonomy, and therefore the academic credibility, of the Australian Research Council. By transferring the powers of the ARC board to the chief executive officer and the minister, the bill opens the way for inappropriate interference. Furthermore, it removes the ability of the Research Council to initiate and conduct inquiries into relevant research issues. The amount of power over the grants process that that gives to the minister is without precedent and capable of being abused. I do not support it and the opposition does not support it.

The only reason we support this bill is that we do not want to put ourselves in the position of opposing funding for the Australian Research Council, because clearly that funding needs to go on. In my view, it is improper for the government to link serious changes of this nature to funding for the council and to put the parliament in this kind of jeopardy, whereby we are not in a position to vote in the direction we would wish to vote concerning the kinds of provisions that form the heart of this bill. Nevertheless, that is the situation. Before the government gags debate with a closure motion, we will certainly be taking the opportunity to register our concerns about the impact of this bill on public accountability and on the independence of the research process at the Australian Research Council.

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