Government stifling Australian research

[Mattus]

Firstly, please excuse any typos as I pen this pre-bedtime rant from my ipad. While I cannot imagine how I ever lived without it, the keyboard errors it produces do tend to make one sound like one J W Frogen from time to time.

Let me begin by asserting that a healthy research and development sector is the pillar on which the healthy australian economy stands, and it will be doubly vital for our prosperity in the inevitable aftermath of the current resources boom.

It is therefore vital that we maintain a healthy r&d sector through adequate funding, educating scientists and through processes which are both effective and efficient. I will save for another day my tirades against adequate funding (except to note our most recent nobel prize winner in medicine spent his entire career being soundly rejected for funding by the government's peak medical research council) and the current state of science education in both schools and universities. Today I will focus my rage on our terribly flawed and utterly stifling processes which are surrounded in red tape.

The Australian public r&d system is the laughing stock on the world. While Australian researchers strive to publish their work in high impact journals such as Nature, a recent feature in this leading forum for scientific endeavour openly ridiculed the waste and expense of this failing system. According to the authors, Australia's best and brightest scientific minds have collectively wasted more than four centuries of research productivity in preparing unsuccessful research grant proposals for consideration by the largest funding scheme of 2012. Australian universities spend more than $280 million dollars a year just meeting this government's reporting and regulatory requirements.

I have just compiled a 78 page proposal for research funding. Much of the detail in this obese document is spurious, repetitive and redundant, containing information about my career and track record which is readily available on the Internet, or indeed in the files of the granting body I am applying to. I prepare this meaty-yet-flavourless tome knowing that the success rate for research funding proposals is 20%. Of that 20%, about half will go to the elite group of worthy Nobel laureates and Australians of the year who enjoy a 100% success rate, while the rest of us battle it out for the remaining 10%. Much of my time is wasted preparing these things for routine failure.

What's worse is that another scientist has to read it. In fact, at least 3 of them do. The collective amount of time spent preparing and reviewing such gluttonous documents represents a huge loss in productivity to the system, all so we can reject 80% of applications, the vast majority of which will be ranked as fundable, but not funded.

Now I know the animals on my right will fall about laughing as I draw comparisons to Europe, which is the great grandfather of such wasteful and introverted systems, but they have at least seen the error of thier ways and instituted change. Applications to the European Research Council are capped at a maximum of 15 pages long. The US national institutes require even thinner documents, and have become so agile as a result that they even hold twice as many funding rounds per year now.

The Australian system of scientific discovery needs to undergo an extensive and exhaustive internal review, undertaken with a hatchet in hand. Benchmarked against the US and EU revised systems, we must act to release the power of our most talented and brightest scientists to advancing and developing our nation, rather than composing red tape.

[IQS.RLOW]

Has anyone petitioned the minister or body responsible for change?

[Rorschach]

It has ever been thus Mattus no matter which Political Party has been in power.
Blame it on the small minded politicians and the even smaller minded bureaucrats

[Super Nova]

Mattus,

As usual, a very interesting and thought provoking post.

The Australian system of scientific discovery needs to undergo an extensive and exhaustive internal review, undertaken with a hatchet in hand. Benchmarked against the US and EU revised systems, we must act to release the power of our most talented and brightest scientists to advancing and developing our nation, rather than composing red tape.

I was not aware Australia has more red tape around this than the EU, the masters of red tape. I agree that reducing the papers to only contain the points of interest for the grants is needed and that more could be peer reviewed if they were smaller. There is a trend today for this in everything. Even when writing a CV these days, it must be no more than 3 pages. Mine used to be 12 pages long and I had to compress it to 3 pages. If you cannot say it in 3 pages, no-one will read it. People's time is so valuable today that everything needs to be punchy and to the point. If you cannot capture the reader in the first page you have lost them.

I liked you point on what will happen when the mining boom is over. Australia is a smart country and if it does understand that it needs to compete in the science and technology space it will fall even further behind the world. Once we were the lucky country. Number one in life style in the world. Now we have well down the list.

Projects like NBN should have been built on Australian technology and from that the new Cisco could have been formed... for example. China did this and now they have from nowhere created a company to rival Cisco.

Who in the Australian leadership even understands these issues. The fundamentals for the future. Australia has even to less to offer my daughter beyond a sunny lifestyle than when I left 15 years ago. Time for Australia to have a good look at it's self and plan for the longer term future.

Australians as individuals are well respected overseas. We bring something unique to enterprises. The brain drain will continue.... sad.

What is the suggest of your paper... if I may ask?