Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert faces mounting anger from academics, university leaders and the opposition after he quietly vetoed six Australian Research Council grants on Christmas Eve.
An open letter addressed to Robert and Council CEO Sue Thomas, signed by 138 members of the ARC’s college of experts, senior researchers across a range of disciplines who play a key role in assessing prospective grants, slammed the minister’s decision to block the projects on “national interest” grounds.
“Such interventions compromise the integrity of the research funding system, weaken public trust in the ARC, and threaten to damage Australia’s international reputation,” they wrote.
“At least two members of the college have already resigned in protest, and the incident has already attracted international concern.”
It follows an additional letter signed by more than 60 professors sent to the minister last week, and outcry from Nobel laureates JM Coetzee and Australian National University Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt.
No reasons needed
Robert, who took on the education portfolio after Alan Tudge was stood down pending an investigation into allegations of an abusive relationship made against him by a former staffer, has broad power to veto any research project on national interest grounds, without providing further reasons.
But before projects reach the minister’s desk, they are subject to thorough, multi-level scrutiny by appointed subject matter experts. They’re then voted on by the college of experts, and assessed according to criteria including feasibility, innovation and value.
“It’s a very thorough process of peer review-based on explicit criteria that the applicant knows,” Deakin University’s associate dean of research Andrea Witcomb, who is a member of the ARC’s college of experts, told Crikey.
The minister then assesses “the extent to which the research contributes to Australia’s national interest through its potential to have economic, commercial, environmental, social or cultural benefits to the Australian community.”
Of the six grants Robert vetoed, two focused on study of modern China, two on early English literature, one on science-fiction novels, and a final grant on the motivations of school students involved in climate action.
“If it were truly national interest, you’d have to argue that understanding politics in modern China had absolutely no benefit to Australia,” Witcomb said.
“I find that rather hard to believe. You’d think in the present political environment, the more we know about China, the better.”
A pattern of interference
Robert’s blocking of the grants isn’t the first time a Liberal education minister has used such discretion. In 2005, at the height of the Howard-era history wars, Brendan Nelson blocked a series of grants.
In 2018, then education minister Simon Birmingham vetoed 11 grants in the humanities, covering topics like “post-Orientalist art in the strait of Gibraltar” and changing Chinese gender norms.
That year, Birmingham’s successor, Dan Tehan, introduced the national interest test into the minister’s approval for ARC grants.
Facing anger from Labor’s Kim Carr after Birmingham’s vetoes, the government also introduced a requirement that a minister must reveal when they blocked a grant. A further tightening to the ARC grants processes was announced in December, when Robert unveiled a plan to tie funding to the government’s research commercialisation agenda.
“We’ve not only got no accountability about what national interest might be, we’ve also got a narrowing of what that national interest might be in the future by making it more utilitarian,” Witcomb said.
The ARC college of experts wants funding to abide by the Haldan Principles, where research decisions are made by independent peer reviewers at arm’s length from government interference.
Meanwhile, Labor’s education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek promised to approve all grants recommended by the ARC’s peer review process if she becomes minister later this year. In a letter sent to concerned academics and seen by Crikey, Plibersek hit out at the “hypocrisy” of the government’s approach to academic research.
“This government has a record of decrying ‘cancel culture’ while at the same time censoring academic research it doesn’t like,” she said.
“A few years ago, the Liberal Party commissioned a review into universities because it said it was worried about freedom of speech on campus. Yet now it’s vetoing research it doesn’t agree with. This hypocrisy is breathtaking.”
A couple of days ago it was the discretion of a minister to deport individuals that was the issue. There is also the discretion used to operate slush funds, spraying hundreds of millions of dollars into marginal constituencies for party advantage. Ministerial discretion should be very tightly limited by Parliament so they can only be used where there is no realistic alternative. Letting ministers veto research grants after they have gone through due process is just absurd. As I posted earlier in the week:
These are powers Parliament has given the minister. Parliament has given such powers to many ministers. If ministers can really be trusted to exercise limitless executive powers that cannot be checked by the courts there is no need for a Parliament because ministers do not need oversight and no need for courts either. Ministers can do it all. That’s the way it used to be in the small primitive kingdoms where the king and his ministers had absolute power and there was no seperation of the branches of government. We are betrayed by parliamentarians who put party loyalty before basic principles of governance and who grovel to the ministers who demand these powers.
The Morrison government is demonstrating yet again an arrogant anti-intellectualism that in the name of some opaquely defined ‘national interest’ is actually working against any sensible notion of either national or global interest. When will the electorate wake up and reject these wreckers? Hopefully before too much more damage is done to the humanities and social sciences, our university system and Australia’s international reputation.
I don’t think the definition of national interest is opaquely defined. It is more like not defined, quite deliberately, so it can be anything a minister says it is for any particular time or circumstance. How else can the minister have really free discretion?
Perhaps it would be more honest and give greater clarity if all references to ‘the national interest’ were replaced with ‘the minister’s wishes, whims or desires’.
As Humpty Dumpty would say – national interest means what I say it means, at any given moment.
Brother Stewie has only read one book and only the bits he liked.
That’s all you need in a cult.
He much prefers the internet.
As you say, he prefers the internet. Particularly when, quite miraculously, he can pass his staggeringly expensive internet bills onto tax-payers.
Don’t porn sites make the big money by sucking (pun not intended) in viewers for ever more expensive, exclusive views?
Perhaps he didn’t realise?
Yes, indeed his cult feels compelled to snub their noses as health regulations attempting to curb the spread of the virulent Omicron COVID strain and conduct live concerts and dance at will despite that rest of the law-abiding citizenry complying.
Such is the mind set of these “born-to-rule” grubs!
” ‘National interest’ can mean anything I want it to mean”, says Brother Stuey. A line out of “Alice in Wonderland”? I wish, but nothing from the implementer of Robodebt could ever be that benign.
Of course Conservatives obstruct voices advising change – that’s their job, to flatter an electorate that doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know. Conversely reformists such as Labor owe it to an intelligent public to encourage authoritative advice from university research on changes ahead. If analysts in the media and industry are able to access authoritative, peer-reviewed assessments, that knowledge goes to the public directly, without political filtering. Reformists can then go to the polls confident of a mandate to change, without having to frighten a previously-ignorant public.
In particular, we need to know what needs to be done to achieve total decarbonisation. And what will happen when we fail. Both of those broad areas should provide dozens of university projects. Funding should be coming not just from the Australian Research Council, but from industry and from specific government grants.
This assumes that media and industry have the higher educated people who can understand, analyse, evaluate, synthesise and present research well; backgrounded by anything Labor (not LNP) having limited neutral or fair legacy media access.
One has observed a whole conga line of journalists and reporters be gamed or become bamboozled by (basic social science) data e.g. economic, demographic, property etc. over decades that allows unsupported claims and policies to survive, or even flourish.
Drew sees “journalists and reporters be gamed or become bamboozled”. Analysts will be more able to strike to the truth of each issue if they have web access to enough peer-reviewed studies. To that end, we need the universities to be actively engaging with issues that politicians dare not mention.
An example hypothetical proposal would be to convert to pumped hydro all the wild river valleys on the east coast. No pollie would dare speak of it, but the rest of us need to know the environmental cost of comprehensive pumped hydro. For that we need an academic to lay out the facts for the analysts to quote. Only then need the politicians create policies to make it happen or not.