Probe of Australian Research Council’s ‘function and role’

Education Minister Jason Clare has announced Labor will commission an independent review of the ‘role and function’ of the Australian Research Council.

Education Minister Jason Clare. Picture: Bronwyn Farr

Education Minister Jason Clare has announced Labor will commission an independent review of the “role and function” of the Australian Research Council following demands for a major shake-up of the research funding agency.

In his first major portfolio address since Labor’s election win, Mr Clare said the review would focus on the “governance framework and reporting mechanisms” for the ARC after the Group of Eight pushed for a root-and-branch overhaul of the body.

Mr Clare also vowed to stamp out “political interference” in the system after the former Coalition government vetoed several grants recommended by the ARC because it believed they did not serve the national interest.

The cancelled grants were for several projects ranging from how climate shaped the Elizabethan theatre, “finding friendship” in early English literature to the “cultural production of religion by science fiction and fantasy novels”.

Mr Clare identified his key priorities in the job as keeping more international students in Australia after they graduated, closing the gap in education outcomes between rich and poor and re­ducing sexual harassment on campuses.

Speaking at the Universities Australia annual conference dinner on Wednesday night, Mr Clare said greater effort should be made “to get more of the students we teach and train to stay after their studies end and help us fill some of the chronic skills gaps in our economy”.

“Only 16 per cent of our international students do that at the moment,” he said. “This is something I’d like to see discussed at the Jobs Summit in September.”

Mr Clare said there were “things that need to change” in the higher education sector.

“The delays and the political interference in the way competitive grants operate need to end.

“It damages our inter­national reputation. It also makes it harder to recruit and retain staff. It’s my job to make sure the ARC has competent leadership and is functioning well, that its objectives are clear and that its processes are rigorous and transparent.”

Announcing the review of the ARC, recommended by a Senate committee in March, Mr Clare said it would compliment work “already under way by the ARC reviewing its internal administrative process”.

Each year, Australia’s elite universities Group of Eight universities receive about 70 per cent of the nearly $800m in research funding allocated by the ARC but the Go8 has sounded the alarm on the decade-long decline in the real value of that funding.

Alan Tudge

In a separate speech to the Universities Australia conference on Thursday morning, Coalition education spokesman Alan Tudge will strongly defend the Morrison government’s changes to university fees which Labor has promised to review before the end of the year.

Mr Tudge will say that the former government’s Job Ready Graduates package – which lifted annual tuition fees for law, business and humanities courses to $14,630 a year while cutting teaching and nursing degrees to only $3,985 a year as well as reducing fees for science and IT courses – encouraged students to enrol in national priority courses.

“We know from enrolment data that students responded to these price signals. Witness the increased enrolments in courses such as teaching, nursing, engineering, IT, sciences and agriculture,” Mr Tudge said in an advance copy of his speech.

“(Labor should) maintain and strengthen the Job Ready Graduates reforms to ensure that students are studying courses in areas where we need them to study,” he said. “There are critical skills and labour shortages in Australia and we need graduates as soon as possible who are skilled in the areas of national need.”

The comments from Mr Tudge follow a stint of leave from the Coalition frontbench after he was cleared by an internal probe of allegations of physical and emotional abuse made against him by his former staffer Rachelle Miller, with whom he had a consensual affair. Mr Tudge has denied the allegations.

Mathias Cormann

OECD secretary-general Mathias Cormann, finance minister in the Morrison government when the new university fee structure was announced in 2020, also defended the Job Ready Graduates policy in a speech to the conference on Wednesday, saying the funding reforms were “the first of their kind in the OECD … They will help attract students to fields with good employment outcomes linked to national priorities and skills needs.”

Mr Clare said he was looking at a range of other issues in the higher education sector from funding and access, affordability, transparency, regulation and working conditions to “how universities and TAFEs and other higher education and vocational education providers and training institutions work together”.

He said universities could be doing more to improve campus safety. “Wherever you live, study or work, you deserve to feel safe, and be safe. That is not always the case, in this building or in our universities … One in six university students tell us they have been sexually harassed and one in 20 sexually assaulted.”

Mr Clare also said universities needed to “buy in” to initiatives that could help close the gap between those who were well off and those who were disadvantaged.

“I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on your postcode, your parents, or the colour of your skin,” he said. “As a start I am pleased to announce tonight an expansion of the work of the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education based at Curtin University.”

“I want to see a step change ... That means trialling, evaluating, implementing and monitoring the sorts of things that will really shift the dial. And I am providing $20.5m over the next four years to help do it.”

On international students, Mr Clare said he was meeting India’s Education Minister next month to discuss increasing Indian students to Australian institutions but that discussions were needed with “other countries in our region as well.”

He acknowledged “a backlog” in the processing of student visas ahead of the start of Semester 2 and had asked the secretary his department to work with the secretary of Home Affairs to address the problem.

In the last few weeks, Home Affairs has brought on more than 100 new staff to assist with the backlog.