Burke must put the nation first

From Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and spinal regeneration after accidents to mental illness, autism, flu treatments and healing burns, Australian medical researchers have mountains to climb. In a competitive field where funding is tight and uncertain, they excel consistently, to the benefit of patients in Australia and across the world. The prospect of high-quality, lifesaving research being jeopardised because of a lack of flexibility under Labor’s ideologically driven industrial relations changes is anathema. If Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke will not act, Anthony Albanese must step in.

The problem, exposed on Friday by national affairs editor Joe Kelly, is that Australia’s 58 medical research institutes are set to be saddled with up to $3m in extra costs a year under workplace changes that took effect on December 6. The changes involve new rules that apply when engaging employees on fixed-term contracts. Such rigidity will leave MRIs such as the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, the Garvan Institute, the Burnet Institute, the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the John Curtin School of Medical ­Research hamstrung as regards planning, hiring and progressing lifesaving research. The sector values its highly skilled workforce and plays a major role giving early career researchers new opportunities. But, of necessity, it operates like no other.

As Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes chief executive Saraid Billiards said, the sector operates on a combination of fixed-term and permanent contracts, and institutes are now “in a bit of limbo”. Funding from government, philanthropists and commercial investors tended to operate in cycles of one to five years, she said. Because success rates for funding applications from major government pools often were below 10 to 15 per cent, institutes needed the flexibility to offer short-term contracts rather than casual employment, which would carry ­financial risks associated with redundancies. The matter is a classic case where a rigid centralised workplace relations system will not serve employers or their highly qualified staff well. If employees needed to be put on permanent contracts and funding ran out, “then you have to go through a redundancy process and that costs money and that money can’t be extracted from grants. That has to come from the additional cost of research”, Dr Billiards said. “If the MRI sector is not carved out of these provisions, or if they are not at least significantly amended, the unintended consequences will undermine research in Australia, jeopardise financial security and sustainability of MRIs, result in substantial job loss and drive research offshore.” That outcome would directly contradict the point of the Albanese government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, which lists medical science as one of its priority areas to support Australian projects that drive high-value industry transformation.

Mr Burke is doing the nation no favours either with his mulish refusal to direct the Fair Work Commission to intervene as soon as possible in the crippling dispute between the nation’s second-largest stevedore, DP World, and the Maritime Union of Australia that the company calculates is costing the economy $84m a week. Mr Burke sounded more like a belligerent union official when he complained Australians were “sick to death of having highly profitable companies say everything is the fault of them having to pay their workforce the same as their competitors”. The MUA is allowed to take industrial action for nine months before the FWC will start official mediation, which makes a delay untenable. Retailers are suffering stock shortages, they warned on Friday. Such a handbrake on productivity is the last thing businesses, consumers and government revenue need.