Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

As previous members have mentioned, the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2006 has been opposed, in part, by the opposition because of what it contains. We should really be calling it the ‘Andrew Bolt’ amendment. I am glad to see that the former minister for education, the member for Bradfield, is present in the chamber. It is interesting to look at the debate about the Australian Research Council board and the way in which the approval of research projects was undertaken by the ARC. An article in the Australian on Wednesday, 29 March 2006 entitled ‘Dust-up down at the ARC’ referred to the contribution by one of the lay members of the research grant committee and to the objections of Paddy McGuinness, who is well known to members of the House, and others to the grant applications that were put forward for the minister’s consideration. The article said:

It was an extraordinary period for ARC staff, many of whom were caught in the crossfire. Humanities and creative arts executive director Mandy Thomas, who had carriage of much of the correspondence between the protagonists, was one of them.

At the height of the kerfuffle Hoj sent an email to Thomas urging her to “stay strong”. “I am sorry you have to endure all this,” he said.

This was as a result of a public campaign waged by an opinion writer for the Herald Sun, Mr Bolt, who it seems disagreed with some of the decisions taken by the Australian Research Council board. We find ourselves in an extraordinary situation. Despite the government’s comments and despite the references in the explanatory memorandum to the Uhrig report and so on, this bill is in effect a response to Mr Bolt’s continued proclamations from the privileged position he inhabits—his views, or otherwise—and the views of other conservative commentators as to what research we should or should not be funding in this country through the Australian Research Council.

I spoke in the parliament last month about the decision to abolish the staff elected position on the ABC board. The decision on the ARC board is somewhat similar in that a loud range of credible voices are concerned about the direction in which this amendment would take us. But the government is clearly intent on carrying this legislation through the parliament, and there are political reasons, as opposed to policy reasons, for this amendment coming before the House. Under this bill, it is proposed to abolish the board of the Australian Research Council—which is made up of academics, community representatives and department of education officials, and whose membership has in the past been determined by the minister—and replace it with an advisory body which would provide advice to the CEO, who is currently Professor Peter Hoj. The CEO would take on the responsibilities of recommending to the minister which research proposals should be funded, administering the various regimes of financial assistance provided by the ARC and providing advice to the minister on research matters.

What is contemplated by this bill is that the minister will now assume the power from the board to appoint the CEO, to direct the CEO to perform certain functions, to establish committees, to assist with the effective and efficient functioning of the ARC and to ensure that the ARC’s functions are performed. This amendment greatly increases the role and responsibility of the CEO, who will be directly responsible to the minister. This bill effectively concentrates a great deal more power in a process which, up to this point in time, had been the province of a range of experts. From now on it will be the minister and, at his behest, the CEO who will determine what the ARC will and will not fund. I think it is very difficult to say that this will improve the governance of the ARC.

It is also true that, under this amendment, the minister will have more power to intervene in the functions of the ARC. The former Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Nelson, now the Minister for Defence, who is in the House, vetoed 10 or 11 recommendations for ARC grants. There was much publicity at the time about these recommendations and their fate. The changes that the government is contemplating in the amendment have attached to them the prospects of ongoing funding for the ARC. Clearly, the opposition would not oppose those measures, but it is very clear that there is a significant amount of concern in the scientific community, the wider community and the media about the nature of the proposed changes.

Effectively, these changes mean that there will be a further erosion of arms-length funding. I note the Australian Academy of the Humanities has argued that it is imperative that research-funding bodies are independent from government. I think that that is a self-evident enough assertion, but it is important and it is not reflected in this amendment. Frankly, for there to be confidence in the decisions that are made by funding bodies, that component of arms-length funding—the removal, as it were, from the perception or the taint of influence—is absolutely essential. It is one of the critical components of there being public confidence in a body like the ARC and in an ARC board.

The Australian Academy of the Humanities voices additional concerns. They include concerns that the performance of the ARC itself will be dependent upon one person—in this case, the chief executive officer—and that the chief executive officer, as a result of that enhanced discretionary and effective power, will feel a little more pressure than otherwise would have been the case, given that they have been appointed by the minister as well.

The National Tertiary Education Industry Union has also criticised these amendments and said that the amendments will undermine the independence and accountability of the ARC. The argument is that the findings of the Uhrig review are being implemented differently across agencies. The Uhrig review recommended that statutory agencies should use boards where they could be given genuine independence and full power to act and that where boards are not afforded this autonomy they should be replaced by an executive management system of governance. In this case, the executive management system proposed under the bill leaves only the chief executive officer to oversee the peer review process and also to respond to and relate the minister’s decisions.

I think it is well understood and well known here that the peer review process has played a very important part in equivalent and corresponding overseas bodies and that peer review is considered one of the means by which good decisions are taken that identify and harness the best of emerging and existing scientific and research thinking. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada states quite simply that peer review is universally recognised as the most objective and effective way to allocate public research funds, but this amendment appears to make no provision for keeping the College of Experts and the establishment, appointment and function of committees are now totally in the hands of the minister.

I think most significant were the comments and the criticisms from the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee. The AVC Committee is probably the most significant grouping of leading academics, representing their institutions as they do, and I would have hoped that the government would have been mindful of the comments that were made by the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee. Its concerns relate again to the minister’s ability to designate committees and control appointments and the functions of these committees. I quote:

... the AVCC is concerned that there may not be sufficient diversity in that selection process to ensure fair and reasonable advice is provided to the CEO.

Labor believes that the board of the ARC should remain as a barrier against possible political interference, that the CEO should remain free from ministerial interference, that the minister—any minister—should not meddle in the running of the ARC and its committees, that peer and expert review should remain cornerstones of the funding recommendation process, that the minister should have a deadline by which approved grants are tabled in each calendar year and that the CEO should have the enhanced responsibility of developing the ARC’s strategic plan.

There is an opportunity that the government has let go here to introduce change within the ARC which would greatly increase their capacity to run vital research projects of national significance in areas like climate change, energy alternatives and digital innovation. There is much that can be said about the sorts of directions that the ARC could and should go in, but clearly with this amendment the government shows that, by abolishing the board of the Australian Research Council, it does not have confidence in the scientific community or in the peer selection process and that it is responding to the political pressures that have emanated from right-wing journalists and commentators. To that extent, I will leave my comments about the bill there.

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