Apropos your recent article about co-funding in Canada and your open question about its consequences in Australia.

The review of the Knowledge and Innovation White Paper, released on March 24, 2004,* discusses some of the problems arising from leveraging universities for matching funds on ARC/NHMRC/CRC/MNRF programs  The estimate of the costs of that leverage (not including ARC Discovery grants) was $450 million for 2003/4 and that figure was expected to grow until 2006 when the increases to the ARC, as announced in Backing Australia's Ability, peaked.

While issues of distortion and quality were not examined in the review (as distinct from your Canadian piece), one key consequence of leveraging that amount of money is it must reduce the quantum of discretionary funds universities have available to set their own research directions.

When you consider the Coalition Government's policy and priorities on concentration of resources, critical mass, national priorities and commercialisation which are subsumed to varying degrees in the criteria for funding programs, the extensive use of leveraged funds in Federation Fellowships and CRCs, to give just two examples, is an efficient way to maximise Government control over research directions, priorities and institutional choices. My own view is this is not a bad thing in and of itself to the extent that in a democracy Governments should have the capacity to articulate priorities and expectations of the use of non-trivial amounts of public funds. The issue is how transparent and rational those priorities and expectations are and to what degree they undermine curiosity driven research.

There is an argument for leveraging funds but there is not a real understanding of the consequences. On what might that $450 million have otherwise been spent? Perhaps universities would have spent it in more productive ways other than matching/supporting ARC/NHMRC/CRC grants, perhaps not. If we accept the assumption that ARC/NHMRC processes are robust in identifying excellence then there is a sound argument that the leveraging mechanisms do concentrate research investment around quality. Thus, we could assume there is a reasonable chance universities would have used a large part of the $450 million to support researchers and research projects identified in ARC/NHMRC/CRC selection processes.

But who knows how many potentially interesting opportunities get passed up because universities have diminishing discretion? My guess is one consequence is reduced opportunities for early career researchers, not withstanding the ARC's quarantining 20% of discovery grants for early career researchers. But that is a guess.

Are there significant gaps between the research undertaken in CRCs, CSIRO and ARC/NHMRC funded university research? If so, would universities fill these gaps if they had the resources? I don¹t know the answer to these questions but would feel a bit more re-assured if a body such as the Prime Minister¹s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) or an analogue of the old National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) had a watching brief on this.
 

Bradley Smith
Executive Director,
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS)

*This review is available at http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/science_innovation/policy_issues_reviews/reviews/previous_reviews/evaluation_knowlede_innovation_reforms/default.htm)