The National Tertiary Education Union has urged the federal government to end the damaging decline in research funding - a cornerstone recommendation of a new report into the sector.
While backing key funding recommendations, the NTEU is strongly opposed to proposals that would allow universities to separate teaching from research.
The Strategic Examination of Research and Development report, released on Tuesday, is under consideration by the federal government.
"Australia's research capacity is being hollowed out by a decade of real decline in competitive grant funding," NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes said.
"The government now has a clear roadmap to reverse that damage.”
The NTEU supports the report's recommendation to lift investment in the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council to globally competitive funding levels, and apply proper indexation to arrest the ongoing erosion of Australia's research base.
"In a research system so heavily reliant on grants, dwindling funding is already having devastating outcomes," said Dr Barnes.
"When that funding declines in real terms year after year, we lose researchers, we lose capability, and we lose the ideas that drive prosperity, security and intellectual enrichment."
The NTEU also welcomes the report's explicit recognition that funding protection must extend to all disciplines including the humanities and social sciences. The union backs the call to lift the PhD stipend to $50,000.
“We simply can’t expect talented young people to dedicate years to building Australia's research future while struggling to pay rent," said Dr Barnes.
"Australia cannot ask its next generation of researchers to live below the poverty line."
The NTEU also supports the report's call to reverse the chronic underfunding of indirect research costs, and the recommendation that ATEC develop a mechanism to determine the full cost of delivering high-quality research.
The chronic underfunding of indirect costs has forced universities to subsidise research by drawing resources from teaching, creating overreliance on international student revenue, endemic casualisation, unsustainable teaching loads, and the steady loss of continuing academic positions.
"Universities have been robbing Peter to pay Paul for too long," said Dr Barnes.
"A genuine full-cost-recovery mechanism is essential to breaking this structural dependency and putting both research and teaching on a sustainable footing."
However, the NTEU has serious concerns about the report’s proposal to reform university registration requirements to reduce obligations around research breadth.
"The NTEU is opposed to the separation of teaching and research. They are inseparable activities and together define what it means to be a university," said Dr Barnes.
"This proposal creates a formal pathway to a two-tiered system where some institutions become teaching-only in all but name.”
Any research workforce strategy developed in response to the report must address the chronic problem of insecure employment for researchers, who routinely spend entire careers on rolling fixed-term contracts with no job security and no clear pathway to continuing employment.
"You can’t build a world-class research system on an insecure workforce," said Dr Barnes.
"If the government is serious about fixing a broken system, it must match investment in research funding with real job security for the people who do the research."
Contact details:
Matt Coughlan 0400 561 480 / [email protected]
