Education Minister Dan Tehan pledges national-interest test for grants

A national-interest test for research grants will boost public confidence, says Education Minister Dan Tehan.

Education Minister Dan Tehan. Picture: Kym Smith

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan will introduce a national-interest test on research grants to “improve the public’s confidence” in the process for distributing the $3 billion the Australian Research Council is expected to hand to university researchers in the next four years.

“If you’re asking the Aust­ralian taxpayer to fund your resear­ch, you should be able to articula­te how that research will advance the national interest,” Mr Tehan said.

He also signalled a wider overhaul of ARC funding, saying he would investigate whether the “financia­l structure” of ARC grants fitted national priorities.

At the same time, Mr Tehan bowed to a demand from Labor and agreed to a new rule which will require him, or any successor, to reveal when a grant recommended by the ARC is blocked at ministerial level.

The commitment to transparency is an effort to quell the furious response from univer­sities and academic bodies to the revelation last week that former education minister Simon Birming­ham had secretly vetoed 11 grants for humanities research, which had been approved by the ARC.

Senator Birmingham specific­ally named one funding proposal he turned down, “Post-orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar”, as one taxpayers would probably not want their money spent on. It was the first time since 2005 that a federal minister had interfered in ARC funding decisions.

Mr Tehan said such decisions would no longer be secret. “As Minister for Education, I can guarantee the sector that I will be transparent in reporting ARC grant funding decisions,” he said.

“I have asked the ARC to add an additional category to the grant outcomes so applicants are notified of instances where a ­project is ‘recommended to but not funded by the minister’.”

Mr Tehan’s move follows a call by Labor’s science and research spokesman Kim Carr to “end the secrecy” over ministerial vetos of research grants. Senator Carr, whose questions in an estimates committee hearing last Thursday revealed Senator Birmingham’s veto actions, had written to Mr Tehan on Monday urging him to ensure that ARC decisions could not be overturned “without a full, timely and public explanation”.

Mr Tehan said the new nation­al interest test for research grants would apply to all future grant rounds yet to open. This means the test is unlikely to apply to 2019 grants. Even some 2020 grant rounds have already opened, so would be unaffected.

ARC chief executive Sue Thomas would be advising him on how to introduce the national interest test into the decisio­n-making processes on grants.

He said the national-interest test was important to explaining the value of research to the public. “The value of specific projects may be obvious to the academics who recommend which projects should receive funding but it is not always obvious to a non-acade­mic,” the minister said. “Australians can have confidence in the independence and integrity of the ARC and I continue to work with them to ensure the taxpayer is getting value for money.”