In October last year during Nobel Prize announcement week, Professor Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne received news that would bring international attention to a line of research he had begun almost four decades earlier. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside professors Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi, for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs.
These highly porous crystal structures can capture carbon dioxide, store gases safely, clean polluted water, and even harvest moisture from desert air. But the most interesting part of this story is not what MOFs can do today. It is how little anyone could have anticipated about their potential when the research began.
In 1987, Professor Robson received funding through a predecessor organisation of the Australian Research Council (ARC) to pursue a promising scientific idea. At the time, nobody could have predicted the extraordinary trajectory of that work, nor the range of applications that would emerge decades later.
Stories like this raise an important question: Why should governments invest public money in discovery research when nobody can predict where the knowledge created may ultimately lead?
At a time when many Australians are thinking carefully about household budgets and the rising cost of everyday essentials, that’s a fair question. Every use of public money should be subject to scrutiny, and research funding should be no exception. Australians expect public investment in research to deliver value for the nation.
The challenge is that value does not always arrive as a predictable product on a fixed timetable. Research creates new knowledge, develops skilled people and builds national capability. Governments can take on risks that individual businesses may not be able to carry, enabling researchers to test new ideas, pursue scientific curiosity and establish the foundations for future innovation.
Some ideas will succeed in ways we can foresee. Some will not work as expected but will still narrow the field and inform what comes next. Others will prove immensely valuable in ways nobody anticipated.
That does not mean governments simply trust researchers and hope for the best. Public investment requires careful choices about which questions are worth pursuing, why they matter and whether the proposed approach and team are capable of delivering the work.
Research funding relies on peer review: expert assessment of proposals by people with relevant knowledge and experience. They consider whether the problem is important, the idea original, the approach rigorous and the team capable. They also consider the potential for the research to contribute to Australia’s future needs and priorities.
Peer review is not a system for predicting which project will become the next Nobel Prize winner. It is a system for assessing which ideas are worthy of public investment. No process can reliably identify the discoveries that will have the greatest impact decades from now, but informed judgement can test assumptions, weigh risk and direct funding towards excellent research with the strongest potential to expand knowledge and capability.
The ARC’s revitalised National Competitive Grants Program will strengthen this approach. Assessment remains grounded in academic peer review, but the ARC expands the assessor pool beyond academia to bring additional perspectives on the breadth of potential research impacts and the national interest.
Clearer consideration of the why, how and who of a proposal will also help assessors understand why the research matters, how it will be undertaken and who is best placed to deliver it.
Government investment is essential, but it cannot realise the full value of research on its own. Australia’s research capability is strongest when governments, universities, industry, communities and end users bring together their different expertise, resources and perspectives.
These partnerships help identify important questions, strengthen the research and create pathways through which knowledge can be tested, applied and shared.
This matters because the benefits of research extend beyond universities. Research can lead to new technologies, products and industries. It can improve how we produce food, manage the environment, prepare for natural disasters and understand the forces shaping our economy. It can give governments, businesses and communities better evidence for responding to complex challenges.
The humanities, arts and social sciences are equally important to that national agenda. They help us understand our history, culture, economy and institutions; strengthen social cohesion; and design policies and services that reflect how people and communities actually live. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems also offer deep, place-based understanding of Country and the environment, enriching the questions Australia asks and the ways we approach them.
Investments in infrastructure, education, science and research made decades ago continue to deliver returns today. We could not know precisely which discoveries would emerge from those investments, just as we cannot know exactly where today’s research may lead. What we do know is that knowledge and capability underpin national development and prosperity.
Professor Robson’s Nobel Prize is an extraordinary example, but it illustrates a broader point. Public investment in research is not about expecting every project to produce a historic breakthrough. It is about making careful, informed decisions on behalf of the public: recognising excellence, managing risk responsibly and backing ideas with the potential to strengthen Australia’s prosperity, resilience and wellbeing.
At a time of cost-of-living pressures and competing demands on public resources, that responsibility matters more than ever. We cannot promise certainty about where new knowledge will lead, but we can assess ideas rigorously, invest wisely and bring together the expertise and resources of governments, researchers, industry, communities and end users.
That is how Australia will build the knowledge, people and capability needed to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future.
Professor Ute Roessner is the chief executive of Australian Research Council.
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.