Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks to the member for Kooyong for that question. I want to acknowledge her esteemed career as a clinician researcher in paediatric neurology before coming to this place over many years—part of, frankly, the amazing Melbourne community of health and medical research that has helped over decades make Victoria one of the leading jurisdictions in medical research in the country. Consistently winning more than 40 per cent of NHMRC grants, Victoria really is the centre of our health and medical research ecosystem. It pains me to say it as a South Australian, but it absolutely is. The MRFF has really added to that capacity in a significant way. I pay credit to the former government for setting up the MRFF in their term.

I tried to give the Leader of the Opposition a compliment, but she couldn't quite stand it. It flowed from a review I commissioned 14 years ago that Simon McKeon, who was Australian of the Year at the time, conducted. Frankly, our budget for medical research was topping out then at about $650 million a year. The recommendations were to lift that significantly. It's now $1½ billion a year because of the MRFF as well as increases in the NHMRC budget. That's almost 2½ times at the budget that we had at the time the McKeon review was set up. It also established, as the member knows, a priority-driven part of research so that priorities around brain cancer, dementia, mental health and suchlike could be subject to research funding and not just investigator initiated research from the NHMRC.

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