Australia has a long and much-celebrated reputation globally in health and medical research. Among a long list of achievements, we are the nation that has given the world a vaccine for cervical cancer, the bionic ear and spray-on skin.
Thousands of other discoveries, though sometimes less celebrated, have also fundamentally reshaped global health. They have led to new therapies, more effective drugs, improved clinical practices, and better public health behaviours. They have also contributed to Australians enjoying one of the highest life expectancies on the planet.
Professor Graham Clarke who invented the multiple-channel cochlear implant. Credit: Josh Robenstone
To continue to achieve these incredible breakthroughs, Australia’s medical research sector must have funding that is not driven by profit.
The Medical Research Future Fund announced by the Coalition government in 2014 was supposedly set up to do just that. The MRFF was to disburse $1 billion a year for medical research once it reached maturity at $20 billion. But that has not happened. Instead, its annual disbursements have been about $650 million and they are expected to stay at this level for the next decade.
Federal politics correspondent Natassia Chrysanthos reports that new costings show Australia could lift those disbursements to $1 billion, and the fund would still grow to $30 billion by 2034-35. If it kept the fund at its current level of $24 billion, the government could release as much as $1.4 billion annually, more than double the current amount.
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The release of the costings, commissioned by independent MP Monique Ryan, could not come at a more pertinent time as the Trump administration hollows out its health and medical research institutions and makes multi-billion-dollar science cuts.
Australian medical research institutes relying on US funding have already been forced to suspend projects on malaria, tuberculosis and women’s health, as well as lay off staff. Burnet Institute director Professor Brendan Crabb has likened the cuts to “having a bomb thrown into the middle of science”.
Many Australian researchers, like their counterparts in scientific and medical organisations worldwide, find themselves at the mercy of a Trump administration that Australia’s former chief medical officer, Professor Paul Kelly, warns is embarking on an “anti-science, anti-expert crusade”.
