Australian Laureate Fellowships to Replace the Federation Fellowships Introduced in 2001 by Federal Coalition. (September 4, 2008)

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr has announced that "Up to 15 Australian Laureate Fellowships will be awarded every year. Each fellowship will be worth around $3 million over five years and will allow the Laureate Fellow to work with, and mentor, up to four postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers."

The Government expects to open the program from mid-October this year.

In the opinion of the president of Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), Professor Ken Baldwin, " [The fellowships] will enable Australian universities to attract and retain world-leading researchers along with the core of their research groups, as each Fellowship will support up to two post-doctoral and two PhD students. This will better allow structured 'knowledge transfer' between top-flight researchers and emerging talent."

Professor Baldwin made the point that one of the problems with the Federation Fellowships was a tendency for the Fellows to be unconnected to other funding schemes which made it difficult for universities to propose them in new areas and that the Rudd government "has recognised that it is not enough to only provide salary for fellowships but that fellowship holders need sufficient resources to hit the ground running. Both the Laureate and the previously announced 1,000 mid-career Future Fellowship programs provide funding to cover some of the basic costs of carrying out research".

According to DIISR each fellowship will be worth about $600,000 pa for 5 years. This includes a salary top-up of $100,000 pa (universities will be required to provide a base professorial salary), up to $300,000 pa for research costs in addition to the post-doc and PhD positions.

Professor Baldwin said, "Once the scheme is up and running it will provide about 75 research teams. That is a non-trivial investment that assuredly will make an impact on the fabric of Australian research."

What has not been considered but will have a profound bearing on the quality of the appointments is the comparative quality of research infrastructure that Australian university will be able to provide.

It should be remembered that although there were 25 Federation Fellowships available for 2008/09 only 14 were awarded. There was no announcement as to why 11 of the fellowship places weren't taken up, i.e. was there insufficient interest by applicants of sufficient calibre?

Note, for example, that while no more than five of each year's 25 Federation Fellows could be foreigners out of 21 foreign "considered proposals" for the latest round only 2 were considered of sufficient calibre to have fellowships awarded, i.e. three of the five available went begging.

Senator Carr said: "We want to see Australia as an important part of the international research community. We want to see these (fellowships) placed on the same level essentially as the Canadian scheme", although he conceded Canada's scheme was on a grander scale but said "we've got to start somewhere - our ambition is very broad".