pre-election science hick-ups

In most societies politicians or the people in the background of politics have a great influence on science. How much funding will go into science, what kind of research will be funded, how stressful and competitive it is to get funding, ... . Often enough these things might change when a new government is elected and the new responsible people have a different opinion about this topic than the former responsible people.

Struggling towards the election with all the more or less usual campaigning and political sandbox fights (see: Rudd vs. Gillard) Australia could be in such an "unstable" funding situation, but universities and research and science is actually not on their agenda. And even though it seems likely that we will get a change in government, nobody really expects great changes for the research funding.

However, the political situation still takes its toll on researchers. Endless amounts of hours have been sunk into writing grant applications at the beginning of the year. Usually the outcomes are announced in July or August. But for some reason the political situation hold up this process and right now nobody knows when the outcomes of the fellowship and grant applications will be made public - some time after the election, when the new government has warmed up their seats in the parliament. I'm sure all the reviewers and all the panel members already did their job and the decisions about who gets how much are already made. So why holding up the announcement? Because some not-yet-elected Minister of Science wants to give a press conference on that? Do politicians understand that other people's professional and to some extend personal lives depend on these outcomes? That they want to know if they still have a job at the beginning of next year or if they still can fund their post-docs?

I do think that Australia fosters scientific research very well and gives a lot of opportunities to get funding. But I really dislike the attitude of Australian politics to sometimes forget that their decisions have impact on people's lives and that giving them sufficient time to adapt to changes instead of changing the rules from one day to the other would create much more trust in the abilities of the government.

higher chances for women?

Uh, I have been really quiet for a while. Mostly because I was on conference/job hunt travel and before that it was the usual craziness to get your students on track and everything else more or less done before leaving.

Now I'm back, jetlag is pretty much conquered and I've already spend a decent amount of time in front of my office computer. The weeks away were full of different impressions, not only because I went to a really big conference so pretty much everybody was there and the whole socializing and catching up gives a colourful picture already. But the impression that stands out the most and makes me thinking a lot comes from the job-hunt part of the travel.

As the end of my fellowship slowly dawns I thought about my options afterwards, esp. the ones including getting closer to home again. One possibility to transfer back to my home country and continuing on the academic track would be if I'd applied for an early career research fellowship. The specific one is a pretty big thing and includes enough money to pay yourself, a Post-Doc and 1-2 PhD students for 4-5 years, plus money for equipment, travel and what else is needed for successful research. It's a personal award, but one needs a host professor, who'd be willing to have this person + project planted in his department. The likelihood that such a project gets funded increases if the reviewers have the impression that the hosts labs and experience fit very well to the proposed project. That's why I visited a few groups, who work in related fields, to talk to the professors, see their labs, get an impression what it would be like to work there, see if the personal chemistry fits and if they would be willing to host me. Overall, these trips were very positive and interesting for me and I see several options where to settle down with my next project (in case it gets funded). 

But there is one thing I heard at each of these visits, that makes me thinking and that is the sentence: "You have a bonus when it comes to applying for this fellowship, because you are a woman." I'm sure everybody meant this in a very encouraging way: "You should apply, because you even have a bonus which increases your personal success probability." And in the beginning I thought that this is really great for me. But by now I'm wondering if it is actually true! And if it is not true, what does this sentence really mean? Everywhere you go you hear that women in STEM fields nowadays have higher chances, because universities get asked at every project renewal why there are not more women in leading positions. And men in my age feel threatened by that. So people seem to believe, that women have higher chances to succeed. Even though in the Schools in my home country I have worked in so far there is no sign of increasing numbers of women in the permanent staff ranks - just the temporary positions are given to women quite often.

In Australia there is a huge awareness for this topic as well, but looking at the success rates for grant applications, the women chart usually shows lower numbers. And while still a third of our students up to postgrad level are female (which is a lot for a science/engineering field) the number drops to 12% for the academic staff in our School (including both fixed term and permanents). The leaky pipeline...? No sign of "higher chances" just yet.

At the moment I think the sentence "women have higher chances" is just interpreted wrong by the people who don't make the decisions. It does not mean "women have higher chances compared to men", because it does not make sense to hire a woman just because of her gender, if there is a more qualified man available.   It just means "women have higher chances compared to women 20 years ago", which maybe means that my application will not directly go in the bin but gets a decent amount of attention. And if I stick out enough it maybe even goes one the pile for the next round. But I don't think that any woman would be hired or get funded instead of a man if she is not obviously better than him - even though as a woman you get told otherwise and even though men freak out because they don't know how to compensate for the lack of "female bonus". This is all very disturbing and misleading - I hope we can settle for something a bit more honest and relaxed in the next 10 years. And if I'm wrong, I'd like to see the statistics!

School vs. university

Over the last few weeks it has been in the headlines all over: the Gonsky reform plans. The Australian schooling system suffers from a large gap between high and low performing students and the Gonsky school reform aims to improve this. The Australian schooling system is quite complex and responsibilities as well as the degree of schools autonomy vary from state to state. Schools funding is fed from both the states and territories as well as from the commonwealth and one can imagine that it is difficult to figure out how much money a certain school should actually get. And then there are very different requirements of the schools throughout the country. Schools in rural areas have different needs than schools in the city, private schools differ a lot from public schools - and the Catholic Church plays a major role in the schooling system as well. The Gonsky reform aims to account for these differences on a financial level and to close the gap between high and low performing students. Schools which e.g. have a high percentage of students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds or kids with disabilities will get more money per student to be able to provide high quality education. The whole plan sums up to a A$ 14.5 billion injection in the school system over the next 6 years.

But where is the money supposed to come from? The Commonwealth will contribute about 2/3 of it and to do that,.... well, the plan is that about A$2.3 billion of it will be stripped from the universities. About A$900 million will be taken from the general university grants and the rest will be saved by converting student scholarships into loans and by cancelling the discounts for students who pay their student fees upfront. That does not sound incredibly much in the first place and universities calculated that it comes down to a cut of about A$200 per student. The total funding of the Commonwealth to the universities will still increase, just not with the same rate as expected. But as the reform is planned to commence in 2014 we talk about money that in principle is already planned into the budgets and nearly spend. Combined with the earlier termination of the Future Fellowship program and the funding cuts from last year this adds up to a critical level. 

But besides the fact that nobody wants to have money taken away from them even if it is for a very good cause such as better school education: isn't it a weird thing to do? To aim for a better education on the primary and secondary level but then reduce the possibilities for the same now better qualified students to study at an Australian university? Esp. in a public university system which already has one of the highest student fees world wide? Isn't the higher education lifted into a new level of luxury by that?

Until now the whole Gonsky reform still isn't finalized. The states have to give their consent to it, because the schools are primarily their responsibility and so far just New South Wales has signed the agreement. And then there are elections coming up later in the year and maybe this changes everything anyways - at least that is what the opposition claims to do now in the pre-election phase.

funding and the people who pay you

A couple of days ago the Australian Research Council (ARC) finally announced the outcomes of this year's proposal round. Everything was kept on hold for a while until the government had decided where to cut a serious amount of money from the tertiary education sector. All researchers, who had put in proposals this year, kept their breath first because they were worried, that the money might be cut from the grants they applied for. And after they knew that this will not be the case, it was the usual breath-keeping during the days before the results are announced.

The very nice thing about ARC funding is that the outcomes are published online and are separated into all potentially interesting aspects: how many applications were funded, how much money did they get, what were the success rates in general, in each field, for each university, for women, for men, separated by age, separated by years after obtaining a PhD,... . And of course one can look up each proposal abstract plus names and institutions and how much money they got for what kind of topic. 

This is how it's supposed to be in a funding scheme based on tax money! Every person can look up what their tax money is spent on. And everybody can just write an email to the person who got the money and ask why they think the money is well spent in their project. Usually nobody does that, but at this point the system gives the opportunity to engage with democracy, because everybody can inform themselves very easily. Where I come from politicians don't care about the projects that are funded - or at least, if they do, it's not transported to the public. Here the opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb complained that a lot of the money goes to projects, which do not seem meaningful and innovative enough. And they made a whole list of projects, that should not have gotten funding from their point of view. AND some of these projects were mentioned in the newspapers. Sounds harsh, but it's a great starting point for some discussions. Esp. a big Center of Excellence is in the focus of this debate. The director of this center responded to the complaints and explained how this research is important for Australia and why it's worth spending the money. Stepping out of the ivory tower, getting involved in "the real world", explaining your stuff to people, who usually do something totally different. But they pay you, so they have the right to know. And if some are even interested for more reasons than just for the money - even better!

funding cuts

And the funding cuts continue. After cutting the LAFHA tax benefits for everybody on the same visa class as me since this month, the Australian government announced another great money cut just a few days ago. This time it's the universities turn to tighten the belt.

There were rumors about this since quite a while and a lot of the research staff on grant funded positions were really worried, that maybe the number of research grants or the money attached to them will get reduced.

But luckily this doesn't seem to be the case and everybody who applied for funding this year is still in the game. However, there will still be a cut of 500 million$ over the next 4 years. This money is not directly attached to grants, but used by the universities to cover the indirect costs of research. Distributed over the roughly 40 universities in Australia, this is a huge cut for all of them. The first "victims" of these cut have already been announced. I'm not sure if more big projects like that will be affected or if the cuts will be distributed "downwards" to the individual researchers, but one thing is certain: it's interesting times!

still running....

Conference/vacation time is over and the data analysis was done, the slides were prepared on time and all the students had a measurement schedule before I left. So I actually could enjoy my time off!

The only thing that was unclear was if the lecture will be on or not. The number of enrollments said "no", but the teaching committee did not meet until a week ago. And even though the enrollments were below the official threshold they decided that my course will be on - a week before the first lecture had to take place. Yeah! Great fun! That will keep me busy for the next weeks.

And of course not everything worked out with my well planned measurement schedules for the students. One of them needs access to a shared lab and for some reason her electronic access was not activated during the last weeks, even though all the paper work was done - most likely because the main person in charge was on leave and nobody felt particularly responsible to take over the job. As the student is just with us for a couple of weeks this "laziness" delayed her project a lot and so her schedule will be busy as well - and mine with it.

Additionally, there are some reports with deadlines coming up, so it seems that at least until the lecture is over I'll be the first one in and the last one out of the office. Double-yeah!

A post-doc colleague of mine said once to me, that I should enjoy the first 18 month of my post-doc time. Afterwards it would start to be very stressful. He seems to be totally right!

Oohh, and one thing about the financial situation: the commencement of the new taxation rules (LAFHA) has be moved to September and even then it's still not clear who will be affected how much. I guess, everybody who moved house, sold their car, quit their job,... because of the expected massive net pay reduction, feels a bit taken for a ride. Everybody else is quite happy about this new announcement - me, too!

bad finance karma

The money story goes on and it becomes apparent, that I don't have a good touch with this topic at the moment. Our payroll people calculated my new net pay as it most likely will be after the LAFHA tax changes come into effect in July. It’s devastating! My net pay will decrease by 1k AU$ per month! That is A LOT! And still there is no final official statement about the whole process, so nobody who will be affected can actually make any sophisticated arrangements - 1.5 month before it all gets started! And it does not seem as if paying the full tax rate would come with getting the same benefits as the general full tax rate person.

But that's not the only bad news! When I signed my contract I was told, that I have to join a superannuation fund. That's in principle not so bad - but I was wondering what happens to this money, when I leave Australia for good. So I asked this question and was told, that I'll just get the money back. Sounded good, so parts of my salary are just parked somewhere, where it might even grow a bit (which it actually doesn't - that's part three of the bad karma story) and when I leave the country, I just get it back. This is correct in principle, just that the lady I asked forgot to tell me about this tiny tiny extra bit of information, that BEFORE the money is transferred back to me, it will be taxed with at least 35%. this is much higher than my current tax rate!

So, this is all very slow and bad information politics and I feel quite ripped off! And I'm still in a good position, as I don't have any big financial burdens. What is with the people who have kids, a sick family member, have to pay a credit back... and they planned with the net pay as it is right now? Can we please be informed about such harsh cuts so much beforehand, that we have the chance to adjust our lifes to it, dear Government?

happy too soon

If the government suddenly changed their strategy or if it is just based on communication problems, who knows. The latest news say, that all of us on temporary visa will not recieve LAFHA anymore from the 1st of July on - this year, not next year. In 1.5 month we all will have to arrange our lifes with a much lower net pay - yeah! Very thoughtful strategy, thank you!

good news

In a recent post I wrote about the governments plans to stop the Living Away from Home Allowance (LAHFA), which would lead to strongly reduced income for a lot of people on temporary visa. This income cut is about to commence in July and until today there was no additional information about how the whole process will be going on and who will be affected in which way. But today - finally - they let out a tiny bit of information, that at least for people who already could claim this tax cut, there will be a delay of the commencement date until July 2014. So people have a bit time to adjust their life styles if necessary - and I'm sure in a lot of cases it will be necessary - maybe search for a job with higher income or make arrangements with their current employers. We'll see how these taxation changes will affect the employment of international researchers at Australian universities.

money makes the world go round

The Australian government is recently discussing the pro's and con's of the Living away from home allowance (LAFHA). This allowance means for people from overseas, who come to work in Australia and are not a permanent resident, that they get some part of their salary tax-free. The idea behind it is that somebody who comes to Australia for maybe a year might still have financial responsibilities in his/her home town and this tax-free money is supposed to compensate for that. The LAFHA is mainly split into two parts: part one says that what one pays as rent will be tax-free, part two gives a certain amount of money "for food" as tax-free (how much that is depends on how man people belong to the household and the amount is calculated fresh every year). The weird situation is, that the more rent ones pays the more salary becomes tax-free and from the governments point of view, this possibility as been abused too much during the last years.
But instead of finding a better way to regulate that, it seems that the current plan is to stop the whole LAHFA thing completely - already from July on. This of course would bring in quite a bit of tax-money, but for a lot of people it would mean a very sudden and sharp decrease of their net income. If one can trust the numbers I saw in an information session of my uni, we talk about something like 10k per year less. That's tough!
In general, I must say, that when I came here I was surprised about this kind of "free money" and the amount of it. So I would have no objections, if the government would reduce this amount a bit or bring in different rules, that prevent the abuse. But cutting it off completely is a bit like changing the rules in the middle of the game. I'm sure a lot of people informed them self much better about how much money they'll have in their pocket, than I did. And I'm sure that quite a few of them would have reconsidered the job offer if they were told that they will earn 10k or 15k less per year.
If the new taxation comes as planned, recruiting new staff from overseas will become much more difficult for universities and its very likely that quite a few people, who already work here, will think about the duration of their stay once more.
Interesting times...