Governments risk harming their own interests and holding back scientific progress by attempting to align research funding allocations too tightly to their domestic agendas, a conference heard.

Speakers at Times Higher Education¡¯s Research Excellence Summit: Asia Pacific, held at the University of New South Wales, debated whether global research goals were compatible with local priorities in the wake of the Australian government¡¯s introduction of a ¡°national interest¡± test for publicly funded research.

John Thwaites, a professorial fellow at Monash University, said that while he had no problem with governments setting priorities for where they wanted to spend money on research, ¡°the problem we have seen in Australia is when, having set priorities, a government minister secretly then interfered with the process and threw out the recommended projects¡±, referring to the events?that preceded the introduction of the national interest test.

He warned that national interest ¡°doesn¡¯t refer to international benefit, it seems to be limited to Australian national interest, and that is so short-sighted. The international benefit is Australia¡¯s benefit. We are a country that is totally reliant on our international relations.¡±

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Professor Thwaites, the former Labor deputy premier of Victoria and chair of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, said that although the UN¡¯s Sustainable Development Goals were focused on global issues with real implications for people at a local level, ¡°unfortunately that doesn¡¯t necessarily translate into real political support within countries¡±.

To counteract the surge in the political ¡°sugar hit¡± of short-term nationalist policies, he said, it was vital that academics and universities make the case urgently that ¡°international interests are the national interests, and are your family¡¯s interests¡±.

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Professor Thwaites said that one way they could do this was by helping the public understand that internationalism directly improves their own standards of living: ¡°to be very practical about it, if it wasn¡¯t for our international students here in Australia, we wouldn¡¯t be living as well as we do¡±.

Raina MacIntyre, professor of global biosecurity at UNSW, warned that political oversight of research could affect academics¡¯ engagement in public debate.

She said that relying on public funding ¨C as opposed to the financial independence of some of the wealthy US universities ¨C meant that ¡°we are more beholden to government¡­and that does make it more difficult to speak out¡±.

Professor MacIntyre, who leads the biosecurity programme at UNSW¡¯s Kirby Institute, also warned that nationalist politics could directly undermine attempts to control global pandemics in future.

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¡°We saw issues arising during the Ebola epidemic in 2014, when Australia itself was reluctant to commit support in the affected areas¡±, she said, warning that ¡°infectious diseases do not have passports or observe national borders¡± and that things ¡°could go catastrophically wrong¡± if the global response to a pandemic was not appropriate.

An example, she said, was the way in which vaccines were being stockpiled by the World Health Organisation. The WHO holds a stockpile of more than 30 million smallpox vaccines, in case the disease re-emerges ¡°which it could, because it can now be synthesised in a lab and we have had a declaration of intent by certain terrorist groups ¨C so there¡¯s both intent and capability¡±.

However, the bulk of the stockpile is held by the US, and Professor MacIntyre warned that if an epidemic were to break out, there is every chance that in countries ¡°going through this nationalistic phase¡­there could be a reluctance to release the vaccine to the countries with the greatest need ¨C that¡¯s quite a realistic scenario¡±.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com

Video: Universities are often too?caught up in politics, says?John Thwaites