Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Minister, Australian medical researchers and universities are struggling to survive while your government is releasing less than half of what it could spend from the Medical Research Future Fund. The Parliamentary Budget Office says that you could spend up to $1.4 billion a year while still keeping $24 billion in a fund which was never intended to hold more than $20 billion. Why won't you release taxpayers' money for the purpose for which it's been set aside?

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

I thank the member for her question. As a paediatric neurologist and a very esteemed researcher, she understands this area very well and has been a strong contributor to the debate about the future of health and medical research, which I'll come to. That includes the question of disbursements from the MRFF, but it goes more broadly than that.

As the member knows, and as most in this House know, the MRFF was set up about a decade ago not just to add more money to our health and medical research sector from government but also to take a slightly different approach: not only to have funding flow essentially bottom up for investigator initiated applications to the NHMRC but to allow us as a country to set out particular priorities that would then be funded through a priority driven fund, through the MRFF. It means that we're now finding more than $1.5 billion of health and medical research projects every year. When I set up the review that set the MRFF in motion that was about $650 million—so more than double the amount of funding going in. The member looks confused—$850 million from the MREA, the endowment account from the NHMRC, and about $650 million per year from the MRFF.

As the member knows, $650 million has been the annual disbursement from the MRFF for some years now. The member knows the departments of treasury and finance conducted their statutory review, after 10 years of the MRFF. That review, I think, has been published in the last couple of weeks and has raised a number of issues around the funding from the MRFF, including annual disbursement amount.

More broadly than that, again, as the member knows, we are in the process of receiving a national strategy for health and medical research that's been prepared by Rosemary Huxtable, a very esteemed former public servant. This has been a big ask from the health and medical research sector to have an overarching national strategy. Ms Huxtable has released a draft strategy that's out for consultation now. I encourage the member and other interested members to engage with that. We've asked Ms Huxtable to deliver the final strategy to government by the end of the year. That strategy, obviously along with pieces of work like the 10-year review commissioned or delivered by the departments of treasury and finance, will guide the government's future thinking.