The Australian government has placed a freeze on funding for research, for budgetary reasons. Initially it was for both of the major funding bodies, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC), but this morning a further announcement has freed up some or all of the NHMRC funding.
I should fully disclose: I have an application in for an ARC grant, and in the normal run of things should have been hearing about the outcome of that application about now, so this effects me quite directly. But at least I’ll still have my job – I just won’t be able to go ahead with a research project. There are lots of researchers whose salaries are paid by these research funding bodies, and who are in limbo while the freeze is on, including some who came from overseas to take up research fellowships.
Here are a couple of articles talking about the issues, then more ranting from me will follow:
Sydney Morning Herald: Funding freeze halts research
The Australian: Researchers’ warnings over funding freeze
The Conversation: Research funding falls victim to short-term politics
From the latter article:
The government had created a rod for itself by promising it would return to surplus, said Graeme Wines, accounting professor at Deakin University.
Professor Wines said it was a continually reoccurring thing for the government to manipulate spending patterns in order to meet political commitments.
I mean, it’s not as though Australia’s budgetary woes are even especially grave: healthiest economy in the OECD. Sure, it’s slowing a bit, as the world and particularly China slows. But it’s not time to sell the furniture. Or, as I said elsewhere, to be like a restaurant selling its saucepans to pay short-term debts, making it impossible to make future income for long-term survival.
This is purely a result of the fetishization of budget surpluses, regardless of the economic cycle, and of a stupid election promise to bring the budget into surplus in a particular year, no matter what else was going on at the time.
It’s not as if the surplus is even real, or means anything, if the only way to get there is by this kind of desperately damaging book-fiddling.
I hope that next week’s announcement frees up the funding bodies and let’s Australia get on with research.
‘The Clever Country’ was a slogan at some point in the past, but this situation is the epitome of anticlever policy-making.