Australia undermined its research ambition before the Serd ink was dry

In March, the final report of the federal government’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development (Serd) was released under a focus group-approved title: Ambitious Australia. At the time, science minister Tim Ayres’ key message, that Australia must “invest in our people, and our prospects” passed for vague optimism about the government’s commitment to a sector delivering 3 per cent of global research output. And yet this week’s budget simply redistributed research funding, rather than increasing it.

According to the Serd report, competitive Commonwealth grant allocations have declined 19 per cent over the past 12 years. University research and development is increasingly reliant on reinvested international education revenue. And research productivity has flatlined since 2020, after growing 112 per cent between 2006 and 2016.

Our modelling at the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (Capa) suggests that a key driver of that slowdown is the decline in real-terms support for the people doing most of the research: PhD candidates. We contribute 54 per cent of Australian university research hours yet account for only 8.5 per cent of its research and development expenditure. That’s because we live on A$34,315 (£18,440) a year, which is below the Australian poverty line and is the lowest research-training stipend among comparable economies.

Unsurprisingly, then, by 2024, about half of those completing PhDs in that year were international students. This is a direct consequence of the fact that doing a doctorate has become untenable for Australians without independent financial support. And it is why the Serd calls for A$50,000 stipends for PhD candidates in national priority fields – health, energy, agriculture, defence, resources, and technology – with a long-term objective of lifting all stipends.

Students in those priority fields represent only about 7 per cent of postgraduate research students, yet even they missed out in the 12 May federal budget, which was billed as the “first stage” of the government’s response to the Serd report.

Nor was the budget the first disappointment. On 1 March, the government doubled the cost of the Temporary Graduate Visa fee from A$2,300 to A$4,600 overnight, without consultation. This was framed publicly as a measure to deter low-quality international student recruitment and to protect the integrity of the student visa system, but the fee, now the highest graduate visa fee in the world, is also levied on the PhD graduates Australia is increasingly dependent on – and 70 per cent of international postgraduate students cannot cover it from current savings. More than 20 student organisations wrote to home affairs minister Tony Burke requesting a postgraduate exemption but it has not been granted.

Then there are all the redundancies at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Csiro): 350 in the environment division and 800 positions cut over the past 18 months. This is another blow to postgraduates: Csiro researchers supervise roughly 600 higher-degree research candidates and provide top-up scholarships that make public-interest research viable for students who could not otherwise afford it.

The Senate inquiry on Csiro funding recommended at the end of April that the government’s response to the Serd – which names environmental research as a national priority pillar – “include CSIRO’s situation”. Sure enough, A$387 million in extra funding was announced a couple of weeks later. Unfortunately, on the same day, the agency announced further redundancies.

The budget does make unspecified provisions to fund Australia’s anticipated accession to Horizon Europe, which is currently being negotiated. We initially welcomed the idea of gaining access to the largest pool of research funding in the world – but only until it was paired with the withdrawal of A$800 million from the Australian Economic Accelerator, the Commonwealth’s principal research commercialisation programme. That trade-off was confirmed in the budget – but the Serd said that Australian research needs secure public investment as the foundation; converting a supplement into a substitute increases our reliance on international agencies and is a risk to Australia’s sovereign research capability.

Asked on ABC’s Science Show on 1 May what concrete steps the government would take in the next 12 months to address workforce flight from research, science minister Ayres responded: “I don’t think it’s the kind of set of challenges that invite a short-term answer.” But the financial challenges faced by about 80,000 Australian PhD candidates have immediate solutions that would convert the Serd’s principle into practice: a funded stipend with a date for a universal lift; a postgraduate carve-out from the Temporary Graduate Visa fee; secured transition funding for Csiro’s affected research candidates; and the restoration of the Australian Economic Accelerator.

As things stand, the Serd is increasingly looking like a diagnosis without a course of treatment. But the remedies Australia offers – or doesn’t offer – its suffering young research workhorses will make or break the health of its whole research body for a generation to come.

Jesse Gardner-Russell is the national president of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (Capa), and a PhD candidate in ophthalmology at the University of Melbourne. Maxim Jon-Buckley is Capa’s policy and research adviser and a PhD candidate in medicine at Adelaide University.