Grant vetoes add to delays and confusion for Australian research

Australia’s research grant processes have veered off the rails again, with delay and confusion prevailing after a couple of years of smooth operations.

Hundreds of academics will learn on 19 May whether they have secured funds from a key Australian Research Council (ARC) scheme, six months after a selection committee decided which projects to fund.

The scheme, Linkage Projects, supports researchers’ partnerships with businesses, community organisations and other research agencies in Australia and overseas. The results from last year’s first funding round were announced in October, three months after the committee had picked the successful bids.

However, applicants to the second round have been forced to wait twice as long, after the ARC extended its grant processing time frames to accommodate new security obligations.

The agency will announce the outcomes five days after revelations emerged that the education minister, Jason Clare, had blocked funding for 13 projects – including three approved under the Linkage Projects’ second round – on national security grounds.

The ARC appears to have adopted an approach of delaying entire funding rounds if a handful of applications raise concerns. Its previous practice was to announce all the other grants while delaying the problematic ones for additional scrutiny.

Outcomes from the other three funding rounds affected by the ministerial veto – Discovery Projects; the Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities scheme; and the first round of Linkages Projects – were announced last October and November.

Researchers fear the new approach could resurrect the nightmares of the past decade, when delays became so entrenched that academics learned the results of funding bids only after they had spent weeks developing fresh applications for subsequent rounds. “[We are] going back to the days when things would just sit on the minister’s desk for months,” said a transparency campaigner who communicates under the social media handle “ARC Tracker”.

“People…can’t plan. This is simply bad process. [It] debilitates the entire community and the very purpose of this scheme, which is to engage with industry partners. No industry partner is going to get involved if there’s a one-year wait for outcomes.”

The uncertainty appears set to escalate, with almost all future ARC funding rounds under wraps because the grant schemes are being overhauled following a review last year.

In his March “statement of expectations”, Clare instructed the ARC to implement the changes “as a priority” in line with the review’s recommendations. However, the government is yet to release the recommendations, and the ARC board’s “letter of intent” in response to Clare’s demands – which it promised to publish “shortly” in late March – is yet to emerge.

A similar lack of clarity surrounds the quashing of the 13 grants. The ARC has vowed not to release any “public” details of the vetoed projects, or the individuals or universities involved, “for national interest reasons”.

But the agency’s newly released Research Security Framework suggests that its officers engaged with the universities after receiving the applications to “remove, mitigate or manage” the perceived national security risks. The framework also obliges universities to assess their researchers’ proposals and avoid submitting applications that pose “threats to Australia’s security, defence and international relations”.

Southern Cross University research security specialist Brendan Walker-Munro said the ARC understandably wanted to “protect the privacy” of the researchers whose funding had been pulled, and to avoid forewarning researchers how to “game the system” by steering clear of certain “keywords” in their funding applications.

But by keeping such details secret, the ARC was withholding any “educational benefit” for researchers keen to avoid incurring similar treatment. “If it wasn’t your grant that got knocked on the head, you don’t actually know…what the ARC is looking for,” Walker-Munro said.

He said the new framework was “a good start” but “could have gone a bit further” in giving researchers more information about the “types of affiliations” that “might be problematic” from the ARC’s perspective.

Asked at a Perth press conference why he had vetoed the 13 grants, Clare refused to “go into the detail” beyond saying that he had based the decision on advice from the ARC and other federal government agencies.

He said the government was also “implementing further reforms to protect research security” by changing the “threshold standards” of regulatory requirements for higher education institutions.

The ARC Act requires Clare to give the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security a written statement on the vetoes “as soon as practicable”.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com