Health scientists are making a determined bid for more money from the taxpayer. Leaders of all 19 projects financed by the Government's Health Research Council warn that an increase in the council's funds is needed urgently to stop scientists leaving the country for greener financial pastures. They have found support for that fear in a report lately commissioned by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology which has worked out that New Zealand spends a smaller share of its national income on health research than most of the countries it chose for a comparison. It also argued that although the Government's allocation to health research increased by $5.5 million in this year's Budget, the money actually spent on projects has been reduced by a decision to let universities use some of it for "overheads".
Next year's allocation, the report calculates, will need to rise by $16.5 million just to cover the universities' charges for overheads, and on top of that the grant needs to rise by $17.8 million to bring New Zealand into line with the investments of comparable countries. Those sums would raise the level of public spending on health research by about 75 per cent. Would it be justified?
In any valuable service the best justification for any level of investment is its ability to attract private finance with the prospect of a profitable return. Some scientific research can pass that test, some cannot. Public funds are properly reserved for the second category but the problem remains that "pure" research - the pursuit of knowledge that may not produce a patented product - cannot be financed willy nilly. There needs to be some reliable means of assessing its likely social value if it is to be granted a share of a finite public purse.
The Health Research Council is charged with assessing the competing merits of research applications and it applies various tests as objectively as it can. But it is no judge of the total amount the state should be spending in its field; naturally the council will support a case for increasing its allocation overall. The larger its purse the less it will disappoint claimants.
A better means of setting and rationing public research patronage might be to tap the competitive impulse of universities, which the Government has begun to do with its performance-based funding. Universities compete for status, which can be as socially useful as a competition for commercial profit. When universities can win research grants on the international standing of their scientific work, we can be reasonably confident the money will be spent in areas in which they have particular international expertise and are likely to produce knowledge of most value to the world.
Knowledge is a universal commodity and national funds for pure research cannot be allocated for exclusively national benefit. But the case for more national funding should be based on something better than crude comparisons of this research spending as a proportion of national income. The way the money is allocated is more important than the total amount. The world is unlikely to derive much benefit from New Zealand's research dollars if that money is reserved for favoured insiders of a small, self-perpetuating network of health academics.
If the Government is minded to consider the case for such a substantial boost to research funds, it should at least commission a tough audit of the value of projects favoured by the Health Research Council so far. Too much of what passes for publicly funded research, although not necessarily in the health field, appears to be ploughing familiar territory to confirm impressions that were always obvious and of little practical use. Too much of it sets out to document a problem rather than discover a solution. When more of New Zealand's state-sponsored scientists can point to worthwhile discoveries and give reasonable promise of more, they will find the public more willing to pay to keep them here.
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