
Successive governments have positioned Australia poorly in the areas of research and innovation. With the sector depleted by significant cuts and having no champions from within the sitting government, the outlook is bleak, and the morale of those in the area is low.
The Gillard government had proposed 'efficiency dividends' on universities that have significant consequences for research infrastructure. The Abbott government maintained these cuts and is now implementing significant others, including those which have forced CSIRO to close whole sites, let hundreds of staff go, and shut down entire areas of research. Coupled with this is Education Minister Christopher Pyne's threat that he'll slash research funding should his deregulation of university fees not get through.
Treating research as an expendable element has a greater effect than a few scientists losing their jobs. It runs down the country's research batteries. Only when these are regularly well-charged can you count on them to enact change and progress.
This 'charging' of the batteries does not only consist of funding, but also a consistent baseline requirement for a strong and confident research culture that can support good research. Good research does not happen in a vacuum or spring from nowhere. It relies on consistent, often unglamorous, gains made by smart, experienced workers who are generous and energetic with their intellect and resources.
The improvement of a society's quality of life, and its ability to compete internationally as a political and economic power, depends heavily on its capacity for research, innovation, and fresh thinking. How do you equip your community with better ways to live, work and connect without research? Where do answers to society's persistent problems come from, if not from piloting solutions derived from research?
There is a persistent myth that Australia 'punches above its weight' in research, mainly in terms of cited work. Even if this were true, it does not mean that Australia compares favourably to other developed countries when it comes to having the capacity for producing leading international research.
Research institutions, including universities, are offering diminishing resources and opportunities for researchers to be employed in larger, field-changing projects. Fixed-term appointments on shrinking 'soft money' do not lend themselves to keeping experienced, excellent staff on board in the sector. They will leave, and take their insight and creativity with them. As Paul Jensen and Elizabeth Webster have observed, '[In Australia,] we reward short-termism and incrementalism.'
While it is true that research investment in Australia has increased at a rate of 3 per cent each year in the last decade, this level of investment is consistently below the OECD average. It is a huge margin behind emerging research nations in Asia such as South Korea and China, or established Asian research hubs such as Singapore, where the amount of funding invested in research activity is extremely high.
The current government may have mothballed the Asian Century White Paper, but it cannot ignore what drove the Paper's (somewhat gauche) exhortations for engagement and collaboration with Asia. In all projections for research over the next decade or two, traditionally very strong research nations such as the US and UK, along with Australia, are falling behind – if not out – of the global research race. To stay in the race, let alone aspire to leading it, Australia needs to prioritise and fund research and research development.
Defunding research institutions at this time is a regressive, counter-productive move. A stop-start approach to funding leads to severe set-backs in staffing and a failure to develop buoyant, energetic research sectors. Research cuts bite into infrastructure and institutional funding blocks, and it affects large communities of research workers and their families. Researchers in Australia are being given less and less to work with, yet persist as far as they can in creating and producing excellent results with diminishing resources.
The research sector in Australia is increasingly one marked by casualisation and disappearing career paths. The depressed nature of working in this environment means that the very people who we'd want to solve our society's most crucial, pressing issues are the ones who will be looking elsewhere to establish their careers. Without a well-charged national research battery of properly resourced and quality researchers, there's only so far we can go, only so much we can do.
This steady draining of research resources from an already-underfunded sector can only lead to a nation that loses its ability to solve its own problems and has less to contribute to the world. Are we there yet?
Tseen Khoo is a lecturer in the Research Education and Development unit at La Trobe University and co-creator of The Research Whisperer, a blog focused on research cultures and funding. She tweets as @tseenster.