Cirrus@Austlit

'The circus is back in town. Senate Estimates hearings on Thursday 25 October, 2018, revealed that Simon Birmingham, in his term as Minister for Education, personally vetoed over $4 million worth of public funding reserved for competitively tendered research projects. These projects had been recommended for funding approval by the Australian Research Council (ARC) after progressing through one of the most rigorous peer review processes in the world. In keeping with previous statistics, the approval rate for applications in the 2017–18 funding period was below 20%.5 The ministerial rejection of these grants was not made public until the Senate Estimates session in question, and the ARC representatives present for Senate Estimates—Chief Executive Officer Sue Thomas and Executive General Officer Leanne Harvey—repeatedly stated that the “minister is the decision-maker,” and that they were never provided with any reasons for his decision to decline the funding.6 Two factors are particularly disheartening in this whole affair: firstly, each vetoed project was within the already chronically underfunded field of the humanities, with no other fields of research being similarly impacted; secondly, these rejections were largely targeted at early-career researchers, with the termination of three Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (totalling $1,057,828) and two Future Fellowships (totalling $1,691,116). Liberal Senator James Paterson immediately leapt to the defence of his government’s decision: “I just want to take the opportunity for placing on the record my appreciation to [the minister] for his careful stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”' (Editorial introduction)