Inquiry into Funding Australia’s Research: Response to the Inquiry by the Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training

This submission to the Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training responds to its Inquiry into Funding Australia’s Research, addressing each of the four terms of reference. Research Australia maintains that the multitude of Australian Government research funding programs creates unnecessary variation in guidelines and acquittal processes, leaves interdisciplinary and psychological research falling between Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) schemes, and is poorly coordinated with state and territory funding. It makes seven recommendations: a cross-departmental review of funding programs, led by an Interdepartmental Committee with support from the Chief Scientist and the Australian Council of Learned Academies, to standardise processes; a whole of governments research and innovation strategy through COAG; a new model for ongoing funding of specialist capabilities such as health economics, data science and registries, citing the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre as a model; risk-based, proportional grant acquittal; a common approach to funding indirect research costs, noting that Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) grants forecast to exceed $600 million a year carry no indirect cost funding and that Independent Research Institute Infrastructure Support Scheme grants totalled only $29.5 million in 2017; public recognition of the value of basic, investigator-led research; and a Research Workforce Review building on the 2011 research workforce strategy.