Those bodies that were receiving public research funds were told to forward plans to Government by mid–May 2003 on how they proposed to implement the priorities.

    A seven member NPR committee was appointed "to examine the extent to which the agencies' plans support the National Research Priorities. They will assess plans from research funding bodies such as the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council and from research agencies ranging from the CSIRO to the Australian Nuclear Scientific and Technology Organisation."

 

The committee were scheduled to report "on the adequacy" of the proposals to the government "in mid-2003"

    The committee members and their affiliations at the time were:

Dr Robin Batterham (Chair) is the Chief Scientist of the Commonwealth of Australia,

Professor Barry Brady is Emeritus Professor and former Dean, Faculty of Engineering, Computing & Mathematics, University of Western Australia,

Professor Julie Campbell is Director of the Centre for Research in Vascular Biology at the University of Queensland,

Ms Melinda Cilento is Chief Economist of the Business Council of Australia,

Emeritus Professor Henrique d’Assumpcao, AO, is Emeritus Professor at the University of South Australia,

Professor Mark Findlay is the Professor of Criminal Justice, Law School, University of Sydney,

Dr Jim Peacock is Chief of CSIRO Plant Industry and is President of the Australian Academy of Science.

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    The current members of the committee are:

Dr Jim Peacock (Chair) is the Chief Scientist of the Commonwealth of Australia and a CSIRO Fellow,

Professor Henrique d’Assumpcao AO is Emeritus Professor at the University of South Australia,

Mr Hugh Morgan AC is Principal of First Charnock; a Director of the Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia,

Professor Sue Rowley Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) at Sydney’s University of Technology,

Mr Terry Enright is Chair-of-Chairs of the rural Research and Development Corporations,

Associate Professor Bob Beeton is employed by the University of Queensland,

Professor Suzanne Cory AC is the Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research,

Professor Brian Anderson AO is the Chief Scientist of National ICT Australia.

Currently there is one vacancy

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Now the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, has announced  a review of the National Research Priorities that were meant to enrich Australia, safeguard its future and protect it from terror and other threats.

 

According to Ms Bishop's office, many of the public funding agencies in allocating research grants have been interpreting the National Research Priorities too broadly.

 

Therefore, next month the NRP committee now chaired by chief scientist Jim Peacock are to work out how to measure the success of the priorities.

The Australian's Bernard Lane reported that researchers were still unsure about how tying their grant application to an NRP might affect its chances, the national audit office said this month in a highly critical report on the Australian Research Council's management of grants. "Some grants indicated an NRP but provided little information in the descriptive field to support this claim. [The] ARC provided no evidence that it systematically monitored or corrected this data... [We] observed little consideration of NRPs in either the assessor comments on grant files or at selection meetings." They also said. "It was not clear whether NRPs were a consideration [in] funding a project or not during the assessment and selection process."

University of Sydney classics scholar Emma Gee* told Lane the ARC system, and especially the NRPs, made grant-seekers in the humanities "think that their project in (as it might be) linguistics has to look like a project in border protection".

"This falsifies many projects and is a cause of anxiety, since the process is not transparent enough to tell us what proportion of funded projects can fall outside the designated research priorities," she said in a letter in this month's Quadrant with the caveat that she was voicing her personal opinion, not as a member of the University of Sydney Faculty.

"I think [this tailoring of applications is] fairly widespread, particularly among young scholars, because young scholars feel less secure about what they're doing," she told Lane. I think that what's needed is more clarity about what role [the NRPs] do play in the selection process."

And perhaps to reinforce the point Lane concludes:

ARC chief executive Peter Høj said: "Some applicants obviously feel that if they do not claim to fall within an NRP area, they have a lesser chance of success."

Speaking before Ms Bishop announced her review, Professor Høj suggested that the Government might make an issue of NRPs if too few applicants referred to them.

However, about 85 per cent of grants cite one of the four NRPs, suggesting the system was working. "We are inundated with people credibly falling within NRPs," he told the HES.

Now all this suggests that the carry on about National Research Priorities has been and continues to be a considerable waste of time and resources, not to say counterproductive.

 

Let's suppose that there were no NPRs, and those millions spent on determining and maintaining the NPRs were channelled into actual research -- a small dividend for the research communities and ultimately the commonweal.

 

Then let's suppose that professor Høj and his colleagues determined what percentage of the successful research grant applications would fit the NPRs even though they hadn't been promulgated to say nothing of other matters not of the NPRs but of significant worth from the nation's viewpoint.

 

Maybe, just maybe, the eight members of the NPR committee will tell Ms Bishop that browbeating from the top is, well, unwise.

 

Of course there may be at least a minority opinion?

 

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*According to the University of Sydney Classics Department, Dr Emma Gee studied at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge.  After graduating with a Ph.D. from Cambridge, for which she was awarded the thesis prize, she became Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter, UK (1997-2002).   Her book on astronomy and the Roman calendar, 'Ovid, Aratus and Augustus', was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000.  She has also written on the astronomy of Marcus Cicero (CQ 2001), and is working on a commentary on Cicero’s Aratea.  She is at present completing a book for Cambridge University Press on cosmology and the afterlife in Greece and Rome.