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Australia’s health and medical research sector is a global leader in innovation and discovery. Yet, a hidden ethical problem in how research grants are funded threatens to undermine this reputation and the researchers it relies on.
The issue centres on an obscure detail in grant applications: how researcher salaries are costed. This seemingly technical matter has profound implications for professional integrity, workloads, workforce sustainability, research quality, and how we advance health and healthcare in Australia.
The problem
When researchers apply for grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), they are required to budget for staff salaries using the Personnel Support Package (PSP) rates provided by these funding bodies, rather than actual university salaries.
The use of PSP rates was designed to promote fairness and administrative simplicity. The use of PSPs ensures that salary costs are based on the researcher’s role function and responsibility, rather than on the individual’s expertise, salary expectations or institution. However, PSPs typically only cover around 50-70% of salary plus oncosts, which are determined by an institution’s enterprise agreement. Furthermore, as the PSP rates are not index linked, the funding deficit increases annually. This creates a large and systemic funding shortfall, which forces impossible choices:
- compromise on research quality, by spending less time on the work or hiring less experienced researchers;
- rely on unpaid labour to fill the gap, potentially exploiting researchers’ goodwill, passion and commitment, leading to professional burnout; or
- apply for a higher PSP level and time fraction than actually needed to ensure income meets expenditure, posing issues for project feasibility and compromising researcher integrity.
Each scenario undermines the transparency, fairness, integrity and sustainability of publicly funded research.
A problem with a solution
Unlike Australia, many other countries adopt full economic costing, funding the ‘true cost’ of research based on actual salaries and oncosts, infrastructure, and overheads, plus a margin for sustainability. This allows institutions to cover all expenses and invest in future research capacity.
Why does properly costed research seem such a radical idea in Australia, when it is standard practice elsewhere? The paradox is even harder to comprehend when we consider the current funding landscape.
In Australia, the MRFF was originally intended to reach $20 billion at maturity by 2020 but it has grown to $24 billion. The fund was supposed to distribute $1 billion annually to support research but has been capped at $650 million annually since 2021. This leaves $350 million per year unspent — money that could be used to address the very salary shortfalls created by the PSP system. Furthermore, Recommendation 28 of the 2024 Australian Universities Accord recognised the urgency of addressing the full economic cost of university research.
The real cost of underfunding
The use of low PSP rates (relative to the true costs of employment) shifts the responsibility for fully funding researcher salaries from grant-making bodies to employing institutions, which must then bridge the salary gap, straining internal budgets and adding administrative complexity to the process of supporting research.
The human cost is even more concerning. Over the past five years, more than 60% of health and medical researchers in Australia have left the sector. The talent drain disproportionately impacts early- and mid-career researchers, and women. Those who remain face considerable challenges including: lack of funding (72%), job insecurity (54%), lack of work-life balance (47%) and high administrative burden (42%). For researchers — most of whom are on externally-funded, fixed-term contracts — the consequences are severe:
- their professional integrity is challenged with every grant submission;
- there is an implicit expectation that they will work additional unpaid hours to compensate for the underfunded grants; and
- there is no flexibility in the system to enable them the funded time to write the next grant proposal — who or what is funding that time?
Importantly, the consequences extend beyond the current research workforce and threaten future research. The unpredictability and financial instability of academic life discourages talented individuals from pursuing research careers, particularly compared to other sectors that enjoy better job security, financial compensation and/or work-life balance.
Furthermore, it threatens Australia’s ability to innovate and respond to health and healthcare challenges. Research breakthroughs depend on sustained investment in both projects and people. When we underfund the people, we undermine the research itself.
An ethical call to action
The solution is straightforward: align Australian research funding with international best practice by adopting full economic costing, based on actual salaries and oncosts. The MRFF’s unspent funds provide an immediate opportunity to close the salary gap and strengthen research capacity.
Ensuring grants cover real costs would mean researchers no longer need to chase multiple awards to cover salaries. Some will argue that this will reduce the total number of grants funded. But this objection misses the point. Research quality depends not only on the projects initiated but also on whether they can be completed properly by adequately supported researchers. Underfunding does not create efficiency — it creates uncertainty and compromises research integrity and sustainability.
At its core, this is an ethical issue. When we, as a society, fund health research, we ask researchers to dedicate their expertise to advancing knowledge for the public good. The current, broken system asks those same researchers to absorb the gap between what research costs and what grants provide — this is evident in the numerous hours that are spent writing grants, and managing the burdensome administrative and recruitment processes for all the small grants and short-term contracts that arise from such a system, and creates pressures on researchers to misrepresent what it takes to do research. This is neither fair nor sustainable.
If Australia wishes to maintain its position as a global research leader, we must invest properly in the people who make that reputation possible. This honest and practical reform would help Australia retain its brightest researchers, maintain global competitiveness, and deliver the health advances we all depend on. The solution exists. What is needed now is the self-worth to request it and the political will to implement it. The time for change is now. Our collective health and wellbeing depend on it.
Professor Jane Speight PhD is the Foundation Director of the Australian Centre for Behavioural Research in Diabetes (ACBRD), a partnership for better health between Diabetes Victoria and Deakin University.
Dr Elizabeth Holmes-Truscott PhD is Deputy Director and Prof Timothy C Skinner PhD is a professor at the same.
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
The statements or opinions expressed in this article reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the AMA, the MJA or InSight+ unless so stated.
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The reality is all the funding schemes work on a compact with the universities and institutions where those institutions have at one stage agreed to pay the matching funds. That they do not in practice has been well known for decades – my group was entirely supported on ARC and other external grants at one institution that never matched funding shortfalls meaning many of my staff and students had to have days off each week to make up for salaries that were effectively part time. They often worked on those days on other jobs to make up the difference. The uni we were at was also receiving a lot of separate funding for each grant it got from government and as well other external monies it was charging on our external funding – we got only a fraction of that back to pay for electricity in our labs and offices. So fr over 12 yrs were subsistance running a world class research group. To top it off the bastard Deans and Heads of School paid individuals they personally liked, despite often a lack of merit, matched funding and internal grants often funded from collecting monies off academics like us. We never felt supported so its no surprise the sector decades later is in the state it is in with constant whining from university management about gov funds as it then goes and expands its admin, marketing (what a waste of money the G8 spending is!) and execs for little national benefit. In fact they have been detrimental because groups like ours could not survive for ever and so much of our technology ended up offshore. Everyone has f**ked up on this big time at a time we are entering huge instablity and likely conflict in the coming years, allowing personal greed to interfere, the gov for not even holding bastards accountable to this day.
The problem is more profound. There are too few career award opportunities for Chief investigators, often more senior and established researchers taking responsibility for the work in the grant . The NHMRC Investigator grant scheme is the only scheme clearly supporting a salary with only a 14% success rate. Others who are unable to secure that scheme occasionally secure a NHMRC Ideas grant with an even lower success rate at 8.1% and are discouraged from taking a PSP5 (designed for senior post-docs) to support themselves, but they do it anyway as the alternative is slavery. Institutions support them with the shortfall but as these institutions exhaust their reserves they are less and less able to do so. The sector is at breaking point. This leaves a huge number of so-called near-miss category 6 out 7 scored high quality individuals unfunded. So many brilliants ideas and discovery opportunities lost to our country. Surely, it is not rocket science, as a starting point is to look at how much people are cat 6 near miss and how much more money is needed to fund them plus adjust salaries. The full payment of interest from the MRFF fund would go a long way in repairing this.
In response to “anonymous” who commented on 9 Dec at 10.48pm: I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I think the tobacco industry comparison fundamentally mischaracterizes efforts to address gender and other biases in research.
The tobacco industry deliberately funded research to obscure established scientific evidence of harm—manufacturing doubt about a clear causal relationship. In contrast, initiatives addressing gender gaps or diversity in research funding aim to *correct* documented systemic biases where equally meritorious work by women and underrepresented groups has historically been undervalued in peer review.
There’s substantial evidence that bias exists in research evaluation: identical abstracts receive different scores depending on whether the author’s name appears male or female, and implicit bias training has been shown to improve evaluation consistency. Addressing these distortions isn’t imposing ideology on science—it’s removing barriers that prevent merit from being properly recognized.
The key distinction: tobacco funding corrupted the scientific process to hide truth. Equity initiatives seek to strengthen meritocracy by ensuring excellent research isn’t overlooked due to the researcher’s characteristics rather than their work’s quality.
If specific funding decisions lack scientific merit, that’s a legitimate concern worth examining on a case-by-case basis. But efforts to address documented bias in peer review shouldn’t be equated with corruption of science—they’re attempts to make evaluation processes more objective, not less.
But all of this is off topic from the ethical crisis of outdated funding that affects NHMRC- and MRFF-funded researchers. Perhaps we can bring this back on topic.
I agree with most of the sentiments expressed in the comments to this article. After 30 years in academia in Australia and having sat on NH&MRC committees and also overseas funding bodies, it is hard not to conclude that the Australian research funding system is broken and has been for the last 20 years or so. This started with the introduction of woke ideology within funding agencies that was then placed on top of existing problems of the old boys networks. While there has always been a deficiency of funds in the system this has meant that not only has it all gone to a smaller and smaller elite group, but that even within this elite group it is not allocated on research merit but instead on woke principles. This has meant that research productivity has fallen even faster than funding, as woke research ultimately delivers little other than a sense of those driving these initiatives feeling good about themselves. So while the lack of funding in Australia is a major problem, it is not the main one, which is a failure to institute a fair merit based system of grant allocation.
To Professor Constanze Bonifer: Your observation that “politicians here care little about science” resonates deeply with my own experience. I would contend, however, that the core issue lies not merely in political indifference but in the politicisation of research itself. Comments above have highlighted systemic biases – elitism, gender favoritism, and award processes that deviate from meritocratic principles. A salient illustration can be found in several Australian media reports of recent documenting the growing influence of organisations such as ACON within universities, hospitals, and research institutions. These entities have increasingly shaped funding priorities, often steering grants toward agendas aligned with specific governmental ideologies rather than scientific rigor. Consequently, scholars whose work falls outside these prescribed frameworks encounter substantial barriers. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), tasked with safeguarding the integrity of biomedical research, must reaffirm its commitment to evidence‑based decision‑making and resist external pressures that compromise methodological independence. Historical parallels are instructive. In the mid‑20th century, the tobacco industry funded research designed to obfuscate the health risks of smoking, a stark reminder of how vested interests can distort scientific truth. Today, we risk a similar erosion of objectivity if research is evaluated primarily through a “woke” lens or filtered by organisational criteria that prioritize ideological conformity over empirical merit. In sum, the scientific enterprise thrives when it is insulated from partisan interference and guided solely by rigorous methodology and peer review. I urge policymakers, funding bodies, and academic institutions alike to champion a research culture that rewards merit, encourages diverse perspectives, and remains steadfastly independent of political dogma.
I whole-heartedly agree. I have just retired and, but for the last couple of years of pre-retirement deliberate reduction of working hours, estimate averaging a fairly consistent approx 60 hrs/ week for the previous 23 years of my post-doc research career. It’s not just the costing element of research funding that’s flawed and wasteful; with (recent example) only 8% of major grant submissions funded, so many grant rounds are mostly no more than public-funded creative writing exercises on an industrial scale. I loved my job but not the level of frustration it accrued.
The article highlights some issues but by far not all. The grant application system is anachronistic. There is one deadline per year and success rates are <10%. The fellowship schemes foster elitism and cement a pyramid hierarchy where few own everything. Success is almost exclusively dependent on citations and there is a questionable gender fix that adjusts the success threshold for female applicants not based on merit. A 'fair works' legislation has been implemented to improve statistics, which punishes those on fixed term contracts that sustain the sector. This has led to many postdocs simply losing their jobs. Research in Australia is dead.
I wholeheartedly agree with this article.
I am a grant funded researcher. The PSP never comes close to covering my salary. I recently calculated the amount needed to pay for me to work 0.2 FTE on a study for the next 3 years, is actually 50% more than has been allocated.
It has long been my concern that there are never enough hours in the day to complete my work in a timely manner. Thus, long hours of work ensue. I recently worked a weekend to catch up on some data entry.
Having to “donate” time to projects also risks stealing time from other projects. All work suffers when one project is underfunded.
When I moved from the UK here two years ago, I was shocked by the way research is funded here. It was incomprehensible to me, why the politicians here have approved system that sends innovation and academic research into a tailspin. The funding rate from the recent Ideas grants was 8.1%. OR in other words: 91.9% of grants were not funded.
Thousands of hours of often unpaid work. Not only is this wasteful, frustrating, soul destroying. It is indeed unethical to cynically exploit the passion of highly educated people. Science is one of the noblest things mankind can do. And one of the hardest. That is why we do it.
I have little hope that will change.
Politicians here care little about science.