Industry Research Grants

The Prime Minister recently announced more funding for industry linked research, including hundreds of new industry PhDs and fellowships. This is a welcome commitment. Australia is blessed with world-class universities. Their research is the great enabler of economic growth. It yields new ideas and technologies that improve our lives and offer the prospect of safer, higher-paying and more-satisfying jobs. It has been frustrating, through the term of this government, to see research underrated and very much underfunded and to see the government's constant interference in research grants.

I accept that our funding processes are not perfect. For instance, we waste too much public money. But, while the government sees waste in projects it thinks are pointless, I see waste in how much time our researchers, our best and brightest, spend on grant applications. Some studies have found that up to 40 per cent of a researcher's time goes into doing applications instead of doing the research we have trained them to do. That's two days a week wasted. The government could significantly increase our research capacity by reforming the application process and progress or by even introducing a lottery.

Another problem is that, while public money is increasingly channelled into commercial and industry research, too little is spent on basic research and knowledge diffusion. Without basic research, there is nothing for industry research to draw on; and without making research outputs freely available, allowing new ideas to spread, the benefits are captured by one or two big corporates and don't flow through to workers and the broader economy. I welcome the government's announcement but it is a piecemeal, stopgap solution instead of the broader reforms that are urgently needed.