By Angus Dalton
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It was an odd time and place to learn a federal minister had stripped her of $436,000 in funding.
Professor Philippa Collin had just nipped into the National Portrait Gallery to buy last-minute gifts from the gallery shop. It was Christmas Eve, 2021.
The Australian Research Council’s funding model was rehauled last week.Credit: Stephen Kiprillis
She returned to her car outside Old Parliament House and checked her phone.
“That’s when we realised that the news of the veto had been dropped on Twitter,” Collin says. “That gave me pause to reflect on the quality of our democracy.”
Collin, a social researcher from Western Sydney University, had applied for funding from the Australian Research Council for a research project on the unprecedented School Strike for Climate protests.
Her application passed through the painstaking peer-review process undertaken by ARC’s selection committee and was approved for $436,069. More than 3000 applications were made that year and about 600 green-lit.
Professor Philippa Collin is researching the unprecedented wave of student activism over climate change.Credit: Paul Jeffers
But there was a final hurdle: sign-off from then-education minister Stuart Robert. He vetoed Collin’s funding along with five other peer-approved projects. “We were shocked and disappointed to say the least,” she says now.
The outrage unleashed by Robert’s actions would reverberate globally, and the furore eventually sparked new legislation, passed last week, substantially stripping the power of ministers to veto grants.
A caricature of Richard Haldane published in Vanity Fair, 1896.Credit: Wikimedia
So why did the incident spark such a volcanic response from scientists, and how were ministers’ fingers finally prised from the handle of the funding axe?
The violation of Haldane’s principle
To understand that, we must touch on Richard Haldane, a cigar-chomping politician booted from the British war cabinet amid the throes of World War I after the press became suspicious of his German sympathies. (Haldane was fluent in German and admired the enemy nation’s science and education policies.)
After the war, Haldane – a philosopher as much as a politician – sent an 80-page treatise to the prime minister that would become as “important to the soul of modern science as the secular state is to modern democracy”, as put by Nature editor Ehsan Masood.
The report advocated for science-backed policymaking and planted the seed for roles now fundamental to our governments, such as chief scientists and medical officers.
Most significantly, the document established the Haldane principle, the idea researchers should decide how public money is spent on science – not politicians. The idea became sacred to academic freedom and how modern science should operate as an independent, objective force for social good.
The axing of six peer-approved research projects, under the cover of Christmas, was a direct violation of Haldane’s law. Robert said at the time he didn’t believe the projects represented value for money, but offered no further feedback to gutted researchers.
And this had happened before.
A track record of political interference
Brendan Nelson axed several ARC applications in 2005 and ’06. Simon Birmingham nixed 11 projects worth $4.2 million in 2018 and made his scepticism of the projects’ value clear on Twitter.
Admittedly, some research projects may seem frivolous or esoteric at first glance. The non-bookish among us might look at one of the projects axed by Robert – $165,000 for Finding friendship in early English literature – and roll their eyes. Aren’t there cancers to cure?
But let’s look deeper.
The academic behind that project, Professor Daniel Anlezark, is an expert in medieval literature. Part of the research would examine why obsession with the Middle and Dark Ages was becoming a hallmark of far-right extremism.
As pointed out in the Australian Financial Review, the man who killed 51 people five years ago in Christchurch mosques had covered his gun and clothing in symbols only medieval historians could decode.
The point is the tangible impact of academic pursuits isn’t always obvious. But ARC-funded projects are rarely frivolous. Months of rigorous, competitive scrutiny by an independent panel sees to that.
Researchers get angry
After Robert’s Christmas manoeuvre, universities issued furious statements condemning the intervention. Thousands of protesting academics signed open letters. Two members of ARC’s College of Experts quit, “angry and heartsore”. Leading international science journal Nature ran an editorial blasting the law that allowed Australian ministers to veto research grants.
The fury led to a review into ARC which found the vetoes had “dramatically eroded” trust and damaged Australia’s international standing as a research partner.
As a result of the review, legislation passed last week to establish an ARC board that will approve grants, rather than the minister of the day – a major win for adherents of Haldane’s principle. (The minister retains the ability to intervene for national security reasons.)
Collin, whose climate advocacy research is now funded and underway, says: “It’s very, very pleasing to see this. It feels like Australia is now in line with other democracies.”
Professor Sven Rogge, science dean at the University of NSW who appeared at the Senate inquiry into the ministerial vetoes, also welcomed the move and said he feared politicians continuing to kill certain projects would encourage academic self-censorship.
“It’s very important that the government sets the policy and the expectations and after that, the ARC, with peer review, handles the best practice of funding, according to the Haldane principle,” Rogge says.
What next?
Now scientists are focusing on improving other aspects of the research ecosystem – chief among them the 17-year low in research funding as a percentage of GDP. Australia is at 1.7 per cent while the average for other OECD nations is 2.7 per cent.
That’s part of the reason Rogge is launching a program at UNSW called Pact for Impact, a new method of quantifying science’s contribution to society in the hopes of encouraging more businesses to invest in R&D.
An example of a new matrix used by UNSW as part of a new program to quantify science’s impact and attract business investment in research.Credit: UNSW
The new metric visualises a science project’s pay-off by bringing together commercialisation potential, how much a research project has improved people’s lives, and the impact it has had on the environment, policy, and academia.
It’s the kind of tool that might help make science’s impact clear to business leaders or politicians. But Rogge acknowledges that advocating for the blue-sky, fundamental, big-picture research that doesn’t have a clear commercial application remains a fundamental challenge.
“RNA vaccines brought our life back into normal, or semi-normal, and have saved millions of lives. But they started as blue-sky research,” he says. “Out of the 30 years they’ve come to flourish, more than 20 years were spent purely in academia.
“That commercialisation or penetration into society would have never happened if that blue-sky research, supported by government funding, hadn’t happened.”
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