Trust in the Australian Research Council has been “dramatically eroded” by controversial grant decisions made by former Coalition ministers, including Simon Birmingham, Dan Tehan and Stuart Robert, a review has found.
The review, released by the education minister Jason Clare on Thursday, called for more “checks and balances” on the power of ministerial intervention, limiting it to “the extraordinary circumstance of a potential threat to national security”.
Stakeholders have welcomed the report, including Universities Australia chief executive, Catriona Jackson, who said it creates an opportunity to “right the wrongs” of past interventions and Science and Technology Australia chief executive, Misha Schubert, who welcomed “stronger guardrails to prevent future political interference”.
The first comprehensive review of the ARC in 22 years was led by professor Margaret Sheil, vice-chancellor and president of Queensland University of Technology and former chief executive of the ARC.
The review found that since 2001 there had been at least six interventions by four education ministers withholding approval for grants recommended by the ARC chief executive after an “extensive competitive and rigorous peer review process”.
Other than Tehan’s intervention in 2020 “for national security concerns”, it said the projects blocked by Brendan Nelson (2005, 2006), Birmingham (2017, 2018) and acting minister Robert (2021) “were rejected reportedly on the grounds of poor value for money”.
“At face value, the rationale of these interventions amounts to a lack of trust in the peer review process on the part of the minister of the day,” it said, creating a “a spiral that reflects on trust in the ARC itself by other stakeholders”.
Blocked grants were a “widespread source of despair, particularly acute in the humanities in which the majority of the cancelled projects were focused”, it said.
“The negative consequences of the perception of arbitrary intervention have been significant both within Australia and with our international partners.”
The review recommended that individual national competitive grants program (NCGP) projects should not require approvals by the minister, with decisions left to the ARC, which is “best placed to judge the intrinsic merit of the proposals”.
“Where the minister does exercise directions in relation to [grants], these would require transparency and parliamentary oversight.”
The review proposed that the minister “should have wider discretion to direct funding outside the NCGP, to advance the government’s strategic research objectives”, but that these projects should be administered separately.
Jackson said the review had “backed a rigorous process with the establishment of an ARC board with decision-making power on grant funding in response to merit-based recommendations”.
“The panel has struck the right balance in limiting the ‘ministerial veto power’ for use only when national security is concerned – with an appropriate level of transparency.”
Schubert praised the review’s recommendation to adopt “more streamlined processes including two-stage application processes where possible”.
“Shifting to a two-stage application would be a gamechanger for productivity, wellbeing and morale in Australia’s brilliant research workforce, which is why STA has championed this shift for several years,” she said.
“It can free up researchers who currently spend hundreds of hours writing full funding applications – when around only one in five of those applications gets funded.”
In 2022 a Senate inquiry rejected a Greens bill proposing to strip the education minister of the power to block grants.
Labor committee members instead recommended that the ARC Act be amended to require that ministers table within 15 parliamentary sitting days the “reasons, evidence and advice received” for any grant veto decision made.
On Thursday Clare acknowledged the review’s “recommendations to modernise legislation and strengthen governance arrangements” promising only to “consider the findings … and respond in due course”.
