Our review aims to restore trust in the research funding system

Ministerial interference damaged trust in the research funding system, say the independent reviewers of the Australian Research Council.

Announcing the government’s independent review of the Australian Research Council in August last year, the Minister for Education, Jason Clare, told the university sector that he was asking the panel, “to look at the role and purpose of the ARC within the Australian research system so it can meet current and future needs and maintain the trust of the research sector”.

As the three panellists commissioned to conduct that review, we can attest that the university sector heard that message and responded in good faith. There is a high level of respect and historical goodwill towards the ARC itself and the work it does to support the sector. Those sentiments were closely tied to the theme of trust, which was widely and loudly echoed in our extensive consultations with stakeholders.

Trustworthiness is built on integrity, competence, care, and reliability. When we include responses that were couched in these themes, the central element of trust was pervasive across all our engagements.

The sector adopted a mature approach to trust, recognising not only its critical importance but its fundamentally reciprocal nature. The government-ARC-universities plexus – and the wider national research enterprise that absolutely depends on it – can only function properly when researchers trust the ARC and government, when the ARC trusts researchers and government, and when government trusts the ARC and researchers. There is no “or” about it – this trust must flow in all directions, otherwise it flows in none.

It will surprise nobody to learn that the impediment to trust most frequently and most ardently cited by the sector was ministerial interference in the grant approval process. Trust not only in government but in the entire research funding system was dramatically eroded by ministerial interventions on at least five separate occasions since the ARC Act was passed in 2001, most recently in 2021. The widespread perception of arbitrary intervention damaged the conditions for trust and the negative impact has been significant both within Australia and with our international partners.

Keeping trust at the centre of our deliberations, then, the panel struck a balance that aims to place each function in the hands that are best equipped to discharge it – whether by virtue of academic expertise, executive accountability, or administrative competence – while preserving the imperatives of good governance, ministerial responsibility, and parliamentary oversight. We named our report Trusting Australia’s Ability to emphasise the point.

Our recommendations are framed around a set of interconnecting principles:

• That the minister needs to exercise proper executive oversight of the guidelines and levels of funding available under the National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP);

• That the ARC CEO should have the capability and expertise to oversee the administration of the grants program;

• That individual grants under the NCGP should not require approvals by the minister, but that recommendations and approvals should instead be made by those best placed to judge the intrinsic merit of those recommendations, with appropriate checks and balances;

• That the minister should retain the means to intervene in the extraordinary circumstance of a potential threat to national security; and

• That where the minister does exercise directions in relation to the NCGP, these would require transparency and parliamentary oversight.

Our recommendations also provide for the minister to have wider discretion to direct additional funding outside the NCGP, in advancing the government’s strategic research objectives, handled separately to the administration of the NCGP.

The result, we hope, is a system design that will favour trust between participants: to make judicious expert assessments by means of rigorous peer review; to safeguard and promote public benefit; to conduct research ethically and responsibly; to support research involving Indigenous knowledges and methods; to add to the stock of knowledge as well as bring applications to life; to respect expertise and intervene only in extremis (and to be accountable when doing so); to administer impartially and efficiently, responsive to the needs of both research and government.

While governance reform, statutory protections and legislative amendment are important, alongside the ARC’s own processes of continuous improvement, the critical next step is to develop and nurture a genuine and lasting trust between the key participants – researchers, universities, the ARC, and the minister.

We have laboured long and hard to craft a report and a set of recommendations that will favour that outcome. The entrenchment of trust has been our holy grail; our light on the hill.

In coming to our recommendations, the panel enjoyed the benefit of the very considerable expertise and goodwill of the full spectrum of the Australian research sector, which took the exercise seriously and gave generously of their insights, experience, and creativity.

We have sought to return this generosity and creativity in kind, looking for practical approaches that will strengthen both the ARC and the research sector for years to come.

Professors Margaret Sheil, Susan Dodds and Mark Hutchinson constituted the Panel for the federal government’s independent review of the Australian Research Council Act 2001, published yesterday. Margaret Sheil is a former ARC CEO and Vice-Chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology; Susan Dodds is Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Research and Industry Engagement) at La Trobe University, and Mark Hutchinson is Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics at the University of Adelaide.