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A long-running campaign to improve the nation’s glacial scientific research bureaucracy has culminated in an extraordinary blowout to grant approval times, leaving scientists waiting more than a year for essential funding and despondent about the future of research in Australia.
Turning around taxpayer-funded grants within six months of scientists applying for them is considered international best practice. But in Australia, some key research grants – which pay the salaries of many scientists and fund their experiments – will now take up to 16 months to process, the federal government announced earlier this year.
The change could force researchers to apply for a new grant without knowing if their last application has been successful, a situation Professor Euan Ritchie, an ecologist at Deakin University, labelled “quite frankly absurd”.
“They will stymie research and learning, create further job insecurity and deter our best and brightest from pursuing research careers, and hold us back as a nation,” Ritchie said.
“It makes a mockery of any political rhetoric stating that science and research are genuinely valued and supported in Australia.”
Discovery grants are a key pillar of Australia’s research ecosystem, allowing scientists to do fundamental “blue-sky” research over a three-year funding period.
The Australian Research Council took nine months to process the 2025 grants. For the 2026 grants, they are now proposing to take up to 16 months.
“That’s the worst timeframe I’ve ever seen. And this is a projected timeframe. It doesn’t work. You can’t do it on that timescale,” said a researcher who tracks the Australian Research Council’s grant timetables on social media and was granted anonymity to speak frankly.
“Colleagues just shake their heads and say it’s a complete joke. It’s unworkable. They don’t know how they can possibly plan their research.”
The ARC has long been a bugbear for Australian researchers; Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt labelled it “not fit for purpose” in 2022.
But after a pressure campaign led Education Minister Jason Clare to drop a controversial requirement that he personally sign off on all new grants in 2023, researchers thought they had made a breakthrough.
It was hoped that would cut months off the timeline for grant approvals. Instead, that progress appears to have been scuppered by new enhanced security requirements.
Law changes in 2024 required the ARC to screen grants for potential national security issues such as co-ordinating with Chinese or Russian researchers on weapons research.
“It is, in fact, a very complex and detailed issue. And it is unfortunate but, I think, inevitable that therefore the processes of making grant decisions will take longer,” ARC chair Professor Peter Shergold told Senate estimates last month.
“It is clear to us that the process is more time-consuming than was imagined.”
Meanwhile, separate changes introduced by parliament to the Defence Trade Controls Act in 2024 have left researchers with “a book 300 pages long with types of research that might have security implications,” said Kylie Walker, chief executive of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
“It’s an understandable and reasonable thing to want to put that lens over research assessments,” she said. But if the government is asking the ARC to do more, it needs more resources, she said.
Instead, the ARC has been shedding staff via voluntary redundancies, dropping from 147 employees in 2019-20, to 131.
“I have immense sympathy for the ARC. The system is underresourced,” said Professor Aidan Sims, president of the Australian Mathematical Society. “But there is no other research funding system in the world that is anything like as slow at the outcomes of grants as this.”
A spokesman for the ARC said it “recognises the importance of timely outcomes for the sector and is continuing to look for opportunities to expedite research security processes”.
“Wherever possible, outcomes will be announced early within published timeframes.”
NHMRC takes action on research integrity
While the ARC is working out how to counter foreign adversaries, its health-sciences counterpart is taking action against domestic risks.
The National Health and Medical Research Council released a joint statement with the ARC on Monday pledging to bolster the fight against dodgy scientific research.
This masthead has reported extensively on research integrity problems across the sector, including the case of Professor Mark Smyth, who won tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer research funding before he was eventually accused of fraud. Smyth has never publicly commented on the allegations.
The councils pledged to work together on developing a national database of research integrity issues; the lack of good data on the scale of the problem has long held back serious government action.
The two bodies will also work with universities to encourage them to use independent investigators, rather than keeping investigations in-house – a major pain-point for research misconduct campaigners, who allege internal investigations allow universities to sweep problems under the rug.
“There will always, in any system, be people who do the wrong thing. It would be naive to think there is nothing going on,” said ARC chief executive Professor Steve Wesselingh. “We don’t need to hide that from the public.”
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Liam Mannix is The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald’s national science reporter.Connect via X or email.