Two years after he introduced a law to end ministerial vetoes of research projects, Australian education minister Jason Clare has quashed 13 grants on national security grounds.
Clare told parliament that he had directed the Australian Research Council (ARC) Board not to approve funding for the 13 projects “for reasons relevant to the security, defence or international relations of Australia”.
The order affects six applications that the ARC Board had intended to fund under Discovery Projects, the primary scheme for supporting fundamental research.
Funding has also been refused for five applications to the Linkage Projects programme, which bankrolls collaborative research, and two to the Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities stream, which supports universities and industry to share their research hardware.
The ARC said it would provide no details about the affected applications “for national interest reasons”.
