Secret powers of research veto are a threat to intellectual freedoms

Let’s be clear on one thing. A minister does and should have the power to question, and ultimately overturn, any research grant.

Former education minister Simon Birmingham. Picture Kym Smith.

Let’s be clear on one thing. A minister does and should have the power to question, and ultimately overturn, any research grant which is recommended by the Australian Research Council.

This is what former education minister Simon Birmingham did with 11 grants, all in the humanities, last year and this year before he was shifted sideways into the trade portfolio by new Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

But Birmingham slipped badly by not conducting any public process or (as far as we know) seeking any advice before vetoing these grants.

In other words, he did his work in secret and, as far as the grant applicants and their universities were to know, their grants were rejected by the ARC’s quality assessment processes.

Since no minister has intervened in the ARC grant awarding process since Brendan Nelson in 2005, none would have expected their failure was a result of a ministerial veto.

Birmingham’s intervention was not publicly known until ARC chief executive Sue Thomas fessed up in a Senate estimates committee last Thursday night under questioning from Labor’s Kim Carr.

It’s not hard to see why ministers wielding their grant veto power in secret is a dangerous thing. Intellectual freedom is one of the foundation stones of Western scholarship and knowledge, and Birmingham decided that he would, on the quiet, make changes to who would get money to investigate what.

If this becomes an accepted way for ministers to act, then Australia is on the way to being a country where governments have the power to secretly channel money to academic favourites and restrict the intellectual freedom of their opponents.

Now, as revealed exclusively in The Australian today, the Morrison government has effectively repudiated Birmingham’s actions by committing to a transparent process if research grants recommended by the ARC are knocked back in future.

New Education Minister Dan Tehan says the ARC will add an additional category to the grant outcome information to indicate that a project was “recommended to but not funded by the minister”.

This is a very welcome outcome and will help quell the furious response to Birmingham’s actions right across Australia’s higher education and research community.

Less clear is the impact of Tehan’s other move, also revealed in The Australian today, to introduce a “national interest” test for all future ARC grant rounds which are yet to open.

Is this a hurdle that all grant applications need to meet? Or is it in the nature of an additional criterion that could lift an application that is weaker in other areas? It’s not yet clear.

Universities and research bodies are sure to be pressing the minister very hard until it is clear what the new national interest criterion means.

But now back to Birmingham. Why did he not just announce that he was knocking back those ARC grants when he made the decisions? It was going to come out eventually, as it did.

We know that for much of the latter part of the Turnbull government, Birmingham and his moderate allies were trying to quiet the influence of the Right and preserve Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. Undoubtedly at times they were under pressure to appease the Right. So was his veto of the grants influenced by internal Coalition political factors?

I put this question to Birmingham’s office in writing and got a very carefully crafted answer from the minister that ultimately is noncommittal.

“I never sought to grandstand or politicise these decisions,” Birmingham said.

That answer is not a “no”.

Although it does need to be noted that not all the grant vetos occurred in the last frantic period of the Turnbull government when the pressure was at its greatest. Some occurred last year.

Finally, a word about the ARC. When such a key principle of intellectual freedom is at stake, why was the council willing to go along with the fiction that the 11 grants were denied in the normal process of consideration? It’s not exactly what you would call a profile in courage. In fact it’s shameful.