Which higher education institutions get the most money and why?
Queensland’s Parliament building. The state had a strong history of supporting research and innovation under the Smart State banner.
Flickr/Neal Jennings
The Future Fellowships scheme is a great success. Scrapping it would hurt Australia’s future as a smart nation.
Research institutes are important economic contributors to their host cities. The University of Queensland is just across the river from the city of Brisbane.
Photo credit: The University of Queensland.
Scrapping the ARC Future Fellowships scheme would have a significant impact on the Australian research community, with knock-on effects for innovation, the economy, and society at large.
Chief scientist of Australia Professor Ian Chubb during his address to the National Press Club in Canberra.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Science matters and is important for Australia’s future but there is evidence mounting that we are falling behind the rest of the world.
Research infrastructure, such as the H-1NF at the Australian Plasma Fusion Research Facility, enables our world leading science.
Australian Plasma Fusion Research Facility
The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy funds 27 individual facilities that provide a wide range of services to Australian scientists.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne at today’s press conference in Canberrra.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Education Minister Christopher Pyne has backed down on his threat to defund NCRIS if the Senate failed to pass the government’s university deregulation bill.
New innovations and technologies, such as the Nanopatch developed by Australian biotech Vaxxas, are instrumental to Australia’s future prosperity, and many benefit from NCRIS facilities, which are now under threat from government cuts.
AIBN
The government believes innovation will be crucial to our future productivity, yet it is threatening cuts to research infrastructure that is instrumental to promoting innovation and new technologies.
TERN operates a number of flux towers that measure energy, water and carbon dioxide fluxes and their drivers in the vast expanse of northern Australia.
The NCRIS-funded Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) benefits pastoralists, business, tourism and Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Cutting it will hurt them all.
Education minister Christopher Pyne has maintained that the higher education reforms must be passed in order for science infrastructure funding to be released.
AAP/Lukas Coch
As scientific researchers, we are often surprised by some of the assumptions made about us by those outside our profession. So we put together a list of common myths we and our colleagues have heard anecdotally…
Who else will do the long-term research if universities don’t do it?
Shutterstock/bogdanhoda
Increasing university-industry collaboration and boosting the commercial return from research is currently under review by the Australian government. The Minister for Industry (and recently for Science…
Me on one of my field trips to the Nullarbor working on desert reptiles.
My decision to turn down a lucrative Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) worth A$385,000 was outlined in an ABC report broadcast last week. The DECRA is a prestigious grant given by the Australian Research…
Research excellence can be self-selecting.
Excellence via Pan JJ/Shutterstock
There can be little doubt that the research environment in universities is changing: it is now less a collegiate community of scholars than a competitive game of winners and losers. This transformation…
Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane, seen here with the Anglo Australian Telescope at Sidings Springs, is known to have a deep interest in science. So what should expect now the word science is added to his ministerial title?
AAP/Alan Porritt
“What’s in a name?” was essentially the Australian government’s response when concerns were first expressed about dropping “Science” from the ministerial portfolio titles back in 2013. That same response…
The future of the Parkes radio telescope in doubt in a climate of cutbacks.
Flickr/Steve Dorman
It’s been a year of incredible feats in science and technology but also a year of uncertainty too as the Australian government’s budget proposed changes to the funding for universities and cut funding…
It’s now ok to step out of line.
Hopscotch via bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock
Academics love games. We can’t resist playing them – but the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is our favourite. As the results of the UK’s 2014 assessment of university research are digested, academics…
Not a full picture.
Missing puzzle pieces via tadamichi/Shutterstock
Research assessment is only partly reliable as an indicator of the real quality of the work going on in higher education. It has a dual character. On one hand it is rooted in material facts and objective…
UCL has moved ahead of Cambridge in some analysis of the REF 2014 results.
Tim Ireland/PA Archive
The dominance of a “golden triangle” of universities in the latest research assessment exercise has renewed concerns that other universities may get less government research funding in future. The results…
Director, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute & Professor of Medical Biology, and an honorary principal fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
Previous Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor in Genetics, University of Pretoria, University of Pretoria