DANIEL:

Rick, I was talking to a friend recently. He told me they've been sent a questionnaire by the US government. This is something you've been looking into. Can you tell me about these questionnaires?

RICK:

They're mind boggling, really, Daniel. So I was looking at, I think it's the same one that's been sent to every researcher. I haven't seen any different one yet. But it's 36 questions.

DANIEL:

Rick Morton is a senior reporter at The Saturday Paper. In recent weeks, researchers across the country started receiving a questionnaire sent by the US government.

RICK:

And it is this, kind of, childlike, kind of, primary school level questionnaire about whether researchers are working on, you know, US funded projects or co-funded projects in Australia that have an anti-American agenda. For example, one of the questions, just verbatim to read it to you, is can you confirm that this is no DEI — that's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — project, or DEI elements of the project? It doesn't even make sense grammatically. They say, can you confirm this is not a climate or environmental justice project or include such elements? You know, it says, does this project directly contribute to limiting illegal immigration or strengthening US border security? And it goes on and on and on.

DANIEL:

The questions were designed to find out whether Australian research, co-funded by the United States, was complying with Donald Trump’s promise to cut funding from projects that support a “woke” agenda. The move has been labelled as “foreign interference” and raises questions about the independence and sustainability of Australian research.

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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is 7am.

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton, on why Australian research needs a new backer and what the government should be doing about it.

It’s Monday, March 31.

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DANIEL:

So Rick, the questions are ridiculous but what is the point of them?

RICK:

It's essentially designed to be a test as to whether the Trump administration should keep funding these things, but they're doing it in that kind of far-right agenda that Trump has been blitzing through in the first few months of his presidency.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“And our country will be woke no longer.”

RICK:

It demands all this information about whether, you know, the project can reinforce US sovereignty and limit reliance on the things that the Trump administration has professed to hate and has defunded in its own right, such as American participation in the United Nations, the World Health Organisation.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“The World Health Organisation has become nothing but a corrupt globalist scam.”

RICK:

These surveys are very serious, the threat is very real and funding has been cut and suspended to Australian researchers and Australian institutions already.

DANIEL:

Right, so these questions, they're all yes/no questions, aren't they?

RICK:

Yeah, that's the funny thing about it, right? They're yes/no questions. But they're clearly designed to make someone's job a lot easier back at head office. So the yes/no questions are meant to be scored either one or five for the first, I think, 11 questions and then for every question after that has to be scored on a scale of one to five. So, you know, very strong yes, very strong no. And essentially they don't explain this in the document per se, but it seems to me that they're tabulating these scores and using that to feed into a machine and go, right, this programme is a very low scoring programme in terms of our agenda, get rid of it. And there has been no rhyme or reason to the suspensions and funding cuts that we've had so far.

DANIEL:

So yeah, it may contain traces of DEI and that might be enough. And other than my mate, who exactly has been receiving these questionnaires? How widespread has it been?

RICK:

So I've been trying to get my head around this. Obviously it's my job to tell you and I can't tell you exactly because, I mean, I think ,people have been really freaked out by it. So the one thing I did get a sense of from people who are in the know is that there is no thematic consistency to this. So the programmes are across social sciences, they're across science, they are across political science. But what we do know is that of the eight most research intensive universities in Australia, that's the group of eight, six of them have had funding suspended or cut completely.

Audio excerpt — Unknown:

“The ANU is the latest major Australian university set to lose US funding as the Trump administration ordered the institution to justify...”

RICK:

We know, for example, that the Australian National University Vice Chancellor Genevieve Bell confirmed to her own staff that they had received the questionnaires and have already had money pulled. I don't know exactly what programme that's from but we know that it's happening carte blanche. And we know, of course, that it is not just universities. The CSIRO, the Commonwealth Science Agency, has had researchers be told to pony up information about what they're working on or risk having their funding cut.

DANIEL:

So what have the universities said to you about how big of a deal it is to lose this American funding?

RICK:

So the US is our largest research funder, our largest and, up until now, one of our most stable research partners in the world. It accounts for nearly $400 million in funding in the Australian research landscape, not including medical research funding. It's just at universities. It doesn't include CSIRO or all the other kind of non-university projects. So it's an enormous amount of money.

And so the universities are extremely upset. I was talking to Alison Barnes, who's the president of the National Tertiary Education Union. She called it what it was, put out a statement saying, this is blatant foreign interference, which, I might add has made her the target of the Elon Musk goon squad on X. Because I was tagged in a tweet that she put out and I've just seen the responses from people going, ha ha ha, you know, you now need to stand on your own two feet you hangers on, fund your own research. Like, it's become this culture war subject. And of course, her calling it what it is has made her one of the targets of those attacks.

But, you know, we have put a lot of our eggs in the United States research basket. Now the US has told us to get bent and that's a huge problem because we've kind of been ignoring some of the other major research partners that we could've had and that we sort of have around the world. The biggest one, of course, is the European Union who has been begging us, begging Australia basically, for the last almost a decade now to join the largest research fund in the world, Horizon Europe, which Australia officially walked away from. We didn't even enter the negotiations to join. We just wrote to them and said yeah, thanks, but no, thanks. See you later.

DANIEL:

So why did the government walk away from Horizon Europe? That’s after the break.

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DANIEL:

So, Rick, let's talk about this European Research Fund. What is it? What was the rationale behind Australia turning down being part of it?

RICK:

So Horizon Europe, it's huge. It's $163 billion in Australian dollars of research and some of the brightest minds in the world.

Audio excerpt — Horizon Europe promotion clip:

“Horizon Europe is open to the world. All types of organisation across Europe and beyond, focusing on cutting edge research and innovation, are eligible to participate."

RICK:

For the first time ever, the European Union opened up potential membership of its research collaborations in this, through this fund to what they call associate countries. And so you can get associate status. Now, the European Union wouldn't say how much it would cost to join but what they wanted to say before you had that conversation was they wanted a country, for example Australia, to sign a letter of intent. There was no cost to signing the letter of intent. All it said was, you know, we agreed to enter negotiations to have the discussion about potentially joining Horizon Europe. There's no money involved, but once we sign that letter of intent, we can have a discussion that tells us, you know, what we might have to pay. We didn't even have the conversation. So, Ed Husic is the Minister for Industry and Science, and his department in 2020-23 just wrote to the EU and said, yeah, no, we're not interested. Thanks, but no thanks.

DANIEL:

So what has the government said about the decision to continually walk away from Horizon Europe and what do they think about the bizarre questionnaire from US officials?

RICK:

Great question, Daniel. I would love to know what they think. I put questions into the Industry and Science Minister, Ed Husic, on Tuesday at lunchtime, and his office got back to me and said, we'll endeavour to get something to you shortly by your deadline, which was Wednesday afternoon. Thursday morning, I'm writing my story. I email them again and say, hey, I'm writing if you want to respond to the questions about Horizon Europe, please do. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I mentioned that to someone I was talking to and they said, yeah, they wouldn't respond because they don't have an answer. They don't have a good answer for why they haven't done this. It doesn't cost money to have the discussion.

Anthony Albanese was asked directly at a press conference on the Monday last week about the Trump interference and the fact that the Australian Academy of Science was calling explicitly for an emergency response because this was an emergency situation. And he literally said, you know, I'm the Australian Prime Minister and I'm focused on what's happening here, as if research isn't happening here at all and that as if Trump interference isn't happening here when that's what he was asked about. He says, I'm focussed on, you know, for example, tomorrow night's budget. And then, get this, he was asked, literally the next question he was asked, the very next question was about the Rabbitoh’s mascot in the NRL allegedly pushing a nine-year-old child. And Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister for Australia who's focused on the big issues, spent more than a minute coming to the defence of Reggie the Rabbit when, you know, he doesn't even wanna talk about Trump's interference in Australian research. What? Am I living in an upside down world?

And of course, I know that the universities and other groups were given briefings by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Department of Education about the Trump interference in our research output here, and the government said, oh, we don't really know how to respond. This is in the briefings. They said, you're best to figure out how you should respond, but it's probably best to respond to the survey, the questionnaire. Now, that's not what other countries are doing. I've been told that Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, the EU, they are deliberately not responding to what amounts as a shakedown by the Trump administration because what good can come from it? You either answer the questions honestly and you break Australian law, because that is foreign interference, or you lie to give the Trump Administration what they want. There doesn't seem to be, and that's what's been put to me by people who are begging for this, a coordinated national response to A, the interference from the Trump administration, but B, into having a coherent research and development strategy nationwide that accounts for the fact that we need stable and reliable partners in research. We don't have it in the US, which is our biggest research partner, and one begins to wonder why it's all so hard to even say the right thing let alone actually put anything in the budget about it.

DANIEL:

So Rick, we know these cuts from the US are coming off the back of a number of challenging calls for university in recent years. We've had government's decisions to cap international student numbers which is, of course, a big revenue source. We've had Coalition cuts to higher education, which has also affected research. So you've painted a pretty bleak picture so far. So, what's the end result of all of that?

RICK:

I’m the bleak picture guy. That's my whole round these days. I wish I had something better to tell you, I really do because I like to have fun. But, you know, universities are on their knees. A lot of it is self-inflicted. A lot of it is inflicted by successive commonwealth government policies and, at the core of this, is the fact that universities are no longer public knowledge institutions in the way that you and I have been led to believe they should be. And research is a huge part of that and it doesn't make any sense for a smart country, like Australia, which even if you don't want to have, you know, a discussion about public knowledge for public good, which is kind of how I come at it, if the only metric you care about is productivity leading to, you know, more gains for the same level of input, research and development is an incredibly important input into productivity gains. If you're not making yourself smarter as a nation, you are not advancing, you are not getting efficient gains, the economy suffers. People suffer. That's what this is about.

I mean, the idea that an Australian Prime Minister doesn't even want to comment about foreign interference in our research output is galling because it basically says that's not a national issue.

DANIEL:

Rick, thanks so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks Daniel. Always a pleasure.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today...

Supermarkets will face “heavy fines” if they are caught price gouging, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced.

Albanese said the ACCC, Treasury and consumer groups would form a taskforce to investigate instances of price gouging and would introduce legislation to make it illegal.

The ACCC handed down a report focused on supermarkets earlier this month following years of hearings. The report did not find that grocery prices were excessive or that Coles and Woolworths had a duopoly.

And,

The majority government is within reach for the Labor party at the next election, according to new YouGov modelling.

The poll released over the weekend found that if an election were held today, Labor could end up with between 69 and 80 seats. It shows the Coalition winning between 55 and 68 seats.

76 seats is required to form a majority.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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