Federal science spending hits new heights

The federal government is showing no signs of backing away from its Backing Australia's Ability program -- and there could be more good news to come.

The federal budget's bottom line for science is that the bottom line is up. The headline figure of an extra $AUD437 million for science and innovation, announced last week, brings the government's estimate of its total spending in this sector to $5.4 billion in 2003-04. While it is difficult to find exactly where all the extra money is, the mix of responses to the budget raised no voices doubting that the figure represents a lot more available funding than there was a year ago.

Nor was the Labor opposition or anyone else saying that there was too much being spent on science. With two more budgets scheduled to deliver even greater increases under the Backing Australia's Ability package, the upshot is that federal support for science is genuinely higher in real terms than it was a few years ago, that this is now structurally embedded in the system, and it is a bipartisan intention to maintain these levels if not increase them.

The difficulty in comparing the new budget with previous years begins with the fact that the official figures are not adjusted for inflation. More dramatic, however, is the effect of the removal of the capital use charge, a sneaky claw-back mechanism which first appeared under former Treasurer Paul Keating as the 'efficiency dividend'.

CSIRO, for example, received about $630 million in the 2002-03 budget, but in this year's budget papers the figure for that year is reported as $532 million. (All in all, the capital use charge removed $211 million from the science budget's top line in 2002-03.) CSIRO has been allocated $568 million in the year ahead, an outcome welcomed by chief executive Dr Geoff Garrett, but CSIRO's treatment was attacked by Labor's Shadow Minister for Science and Research, Kim Carr, who said the organisation's future was now in doubt.

"With only one year of funding, instead of the three-year allocation that is traditional, CSIRO has no funding certainty," Carr said. He cited two reviews announced in the budget -- one looking at the scope for greater collaboration between universities and research agencies and another to develop a national research infrastructure strategy -- as further jeopardising CSIRO's future.

A degree of overlap

However, Science Minister Peter McGauran said the government maintained its support for three-year funding for public research agencies. He gave a categorical assurance that the next budget would restore triennial funding and dismissed fears that the new reviews signified a radical reform agenda.

"They are not inquiries which go to the make-up and structure of the research agencies and universities," McGauran said.

McGauran admitted that there was degree of overlap between these exercises and the effort to 'map' Australia's research activity which is already underway. "They will have to be managed and there will be a lot of talking between the three," he said.

The most sweeping of Carr's criticisms was his claim that the government intended to make all Commonwealth research funds subject to competitive tendering.

"Especially sinister for university research is the proposal to abolish the block grants to institutions for research infrastructure and general research activities with a 'pure' contestable scheme," Carr said in a statement.

Asked where this proposal could be found, Carr said it was in a submission by the Australian Research Council to the research mapping exercise and pointed to a government statement that the review into research collaboration would consider "possible alternative funding models".

That hardly justified his Chicken Little rhetoric, but Carr said he had unrevealed evidence to support his claims and that the reviews announced in the budget were a ploy to legitimise a hidden agenda.

"The government's intention here is to rationalise a decision that has already been taken to make all research funding competitive and performance based," he said. "It will have serious implications for all universities which rely upon block funding.

"When we get to Senate Estimates hearings we will be able to question departmental officials on the pace at which this will be done."

Competitive grants

McGauran's response was that Carr was indulging in "typical scare-mongering". That, of course, is part of what oppositions do. But if Carr's statements are relieved of their combative content, his position is not that far removed from the government's.

"I strongly support genuine cooperation," he said of the need for more efficiencies in the allocation of research funds and resources in the research sector. He said a Labor government would retain the integrity of existing institutions but look for "independent capacities" as a basis for cooperation. He also endorsed a dual system of funding which included competitive grants.

"The existing dual system has some merit but the research training schemes are not working at optimum levels," he said.

How Carr would tweak the system may become clearer when he delivers a policy document to Labor's national conference in January next year. The government is working to the same timetable, with all reviews due to be completed by the end of this year, feeding into a sequel to Backing Australia's Ability planned which will outline funding increases to the end of the decade.

"We'd pretty well know where we are going with Backing Australia's Ability by the first quarter of next year," Peter McGauran said.

While both sides seek to exaggerate their differences and mask their agreements, one thing is for sure: as they look to spend money on science in the future they will be starting from a higher base than ever before.

THE BIG-FIVE MODEL

One pointer to the kind of initiatives that may emerge from the collaboration and infrastructure reviews announced in the budget emerged when the Chief Scientist, Dr Robin Batterham, spoke at the National Press Club three weeks ago.

Rather than every university, Cooperative Research Centre and CSIRO division trying independently to commercialise their research, he proposed five specialist organisations operating on top of them.

"They would have hand-in-glove, non-competitive working relationships with people in each university and the like," Batterham said.

These new organisations would be well-resourced and configured to spread commercialisation expertise both geographically and across research sectors. But they would not necessarily trigger a push to reduce the resources universities now devote to commercialisation.

"I don't think we have enough resource in this area, so I'd be very loath to be talking about downsizing," Batterham said.

At first glance this would seem to undermine CSIRO's recent major investment of an extra $4.5 million annually on a new commercialisation unit which employs about 60 staff. But Batterham saw this as a possible basis for his big-five model.

"CSIRO might indeed run one or two or be major partners in all of these five that I'm suggesting," he said.

Science Minister Peter McGauran said the collaborative idea was an "interesting" proposal.

"I wouldn't exclude it from consideration, but it's not immediately obvious to me whether or not it could take off in the short term," McGauran said after the budget. "I think it's a future possibility."

Simon Grose is a Canberra-based writer