Boost science and tech research for the post-Covid age
Australia lags other countries in key areas of science and technology research and is not ready for the post-COVID age.
Australia should invest more research effort in science and technology to arrest a slide in research money spent in these areas, according to a new report addressing how universities can prepare for a post-COVID world.
Since the 1980s the share of university research spending going to the physical sciences has roughly halved and life sciences’ share has dropped about 40 per cent. The main winner has been health and medical sciences, where research funding has more than doubled from less than 15 per cent to more than 30 per cent, says the report, The Future in Black and White: Research in a Post-COVID World.
The report, by R&D strategist Thomas Barlow, says Australian universities are underweight in research in the physical sciences and technology by global standards, and it calls for a new research funding body to build strength in these disciplines.
“The obvious place to start would be with the creation of a dedicated national science and technology funding council,” the paper says.
Health and medical sciences already have their own funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and Dr Barlow is calling for a similar body for other science and technology — a National Science and Technology Funding Council — to be split away from the Australian Research Council, which currently distributes non health and medical research funding.
Under his proposal the ARC would fund research in the humanities, arts and social sciences.
In the report Dr Barlow also calls for universities to examine whether their research effort is balanced in a way that meets national needs.
He quotes Australian Bureau of Statistics data showing that, in 2018, Australian universities spent as much researching education as physics (both $393m), which was more than twice what Australian industry, with its highly successful mining sector, spent on R&D in the earth sciences ($158m). The same data set shows that universities spend more on research in law and legal studies ($232m) than in mathematical sciences ($226m), and more on research in commerce ($482m) than on information and computing science ($472m).
Dr Barlow said Australia’s allocation of research resources was out of step. Australia is at or near the bottom of the list of industrialised countries in the share of research spending allocated to chemistry and material sciences, physics and mathematics.
“I do think we are underinvested in these areas,” Dr Barlow said.
He said, with COVID causing intense pressure on research budgets, it was the right time for universities to think strategically about which research areas they invested in. “What you keep and what you lose is of critical importance,” he said.
Dr Barlow’s report focuses on the 20-year outlook for universities — well beyond the COVID crisis — and he is optimistic about the longer-term future. He said there was a “strong impetus” towards doing more research and increasing the research intensity of leading universities.
But he warned that to justify increasing spending on research, universities needed to be able to demonstrate positive outcomes, and he urged closer alignment with industry and business needs.
“There has never been a university research portfolio in Australia that aligns in any truly significant way with industrial needs, and university and private systems as a whole are very badly matched,” the paper says.
It sees an opportunity for universities to direct research effort to areas that will attract commercial investment and yield commercial outcomes, such as engineering and computer sciences, “where Australian industry is most active”.
The report also warns against the trend for research funding decisions to be made directly by government, meaning they are more exposed to political factors.
“Twenty years ago, Australian universities derived 50 per cent more research income via competitive grants administered independently through the Australian Research Council than they obtained via non-national-competitive-grant funding disbursed through various other government departments,” the paper says. “Today, this arrangement has reversed, so that political funding is now nearly 70 per cent more prevalent than Australian Research Council funding. This can only be creating a politically sycophantic culture.”
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