August 2, 2024
The rarefied world of public intellectuals and scholars is braced for a bombshell, with a government review tipped to recommend a move away from the block funding that has underpinned a leading think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The government received the final report from an external review into funding for strategic policy work last Friday. It is still to decide if the recommendations will be made public.
But there is one unavoidable deadline that will force decisions. ASPI's $4 million a year in block funding from the Defence Department is due to run out mid next year, and may not be renewed on the same terms that have helped it build a reputation, particularly for its China research, in the past two decades.
The review led by University of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese comes after years of political tension between Canberra and various policy research institutes over duelling positions taken in relation to Australia's fractious relationship with an ascendant China.
With international reputations at stake in the competitive world of strategic research, the think tanks that rely on government funding are waiting anxiously. The sums involved are relatively small, but changes will have an outsized impact, insiders say.
''Four million dollars isn't even a rounding error for the federal government, but for a think tank this form of funding guaranteed and recurring is a superpower,'' said one insider.
The opposition has warned the government against cutting ASPI funding, but some other think tanks have welcomed the review, arguing the current arrangement has given ASPI a ''mega think tank'' advantage.
This is because multi-year, multimillion-dollar uncompetitive grants allow think tanks to build programs and capabilities that make it easier for them to compete for other sources of funding, said James Laurenceson who leads the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology in Sydney.
''The disparity in resources between a few mega-think tanks and the rest is stark. Taxpayers have a right to question if that money is well spent,'' Professor Laurenceson said.
ASPI points out it was set up to provide government with ''external contestability'' and says this would be more difficult without recurring funding. ''Long-term funding enables us to make constructive criticism of current policy without worrying how that might affect our next grant application. And it enables us to scan the horizon andtackle futureandemerging threats, rather than just the ones the government of the day is prioritising,'' said ASPI executive director Justin Bassi.
ASPI's block funding was, until the Albanese election win, rolled over every five years. ASPI's accounts show these funds made up 28 per cent of its revenue ended June 30, 2023. Additional funding from various Commonwealth agencies accounted for another 29 per cent.
A spokesperson for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said that ''any decision on releasing the review will be made in due course''.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson has indicated the Coalition will frame any attempt to ''clip'' ASPI as bowing to Beijing's will.
''In 2020 the Chinese embassy in Canberra shared a detailed list of 14 grievances, including the federal government's funding of an 'anti-China think tank' that Beijing accused of 'spreading untrue reports, peddling lies around Xinjiang and so-called China infiltration'.
''The reason I made a submission to the Varghese review was to highlight those demands and to make it clear it would be a political risk for the government if it was seen to be complying.'' ASPI was established by then prime minister John Howard in 2001 as ''a ginger group'' that would provide analysis independent of the public service.
Peter Jennings was the executive director of ASPI for a decade until May 2022.
He hopes ASPI's untied funding is preserved. He believes a one-size-fitsall model where, say, all think tank funding is directed throughPM&Cand recurring arrangements abolished, would not be in the national interest.
