As Australia’s fiscal muscle shifts inexorably to Canberra, so too does the focus of everyone, from the premier down, who is seeking funding decisions from the national capital. And they are just as likely to be disappointed by the process as Colin Barnet
As Australia’s fiscal muscle shifts inexorably to Canberra, so too does the focus of everyone, from the premier down, who is seeking funding decisions from the national capital. And they are just as likely to be disappointed by the process as Colin Barnett has been of late.
Tertiary educators, medical researchers and arts bodies are among the growing crowd for whom the federal budget has become a major event in the financial calendar.
And, like Mr Barnett’s view on the state’s falling split of GST funding, people from these specialist areas are also concerned that Western Australia is failing to get its fair share.
In the last federal budget, newly created nation-building fund Infrastructure Australia committed to $6.28 billion in major project funding. None of that was for WA.
Since then, the federal government has announced $769 million in funds for big ticket items in WA such as the Northbridge Link, Oakajee Port and the Ord River Scheme expansion. But whether this will be above the notional 10 per cent is difficult to know and, when combined with the 2009 commitments of Infrastructure Australia, it’s still likely to be underweight in WA.
Professor Margaret Seares, who sits on the board of the federal government’s Education Investment Fund, is one who has expressed concern at the shortfall of funding on a per capita basis in a number of key funding areas, including EIF.
EIF is one of the three major funds, along with the Health & Hospitals Fund and Infrastructure Australia, created for nation building expenditure by the current federal government.
In two tranches of EIF commitments worth $1.51 billion, WA received about 1.3 per cent.
The fund, which is meant to support world leading, strategically focused infrastructure investments that will transform Australia’s tertiary education and research, has allocated just $20 million in funding to Curtin University of Technology.
Talking generally about federal funding, Professor Seares, who has retired from the University of WA and acts as a consultant, said that the blame lay at both federal and state level.
She said policies pushing for developments such as interstate collaboration created a bias against WA-based institutions due to their isolation.
But Professor Seares added that the WA government had to communicate its strategies better because other states had attracted funding through clear visions and offers to match federal funding.
According to numbers extracted by UWA senior deputy vice-chancellor Bill Louden, Australian Research Council funding for WA was about 5.7 per cent in 2009 and the National Health and Medical Research Council funding was also underweight at 8.4 per cent.
Offering something of a counter-balance is the Health & Hospital Fund, which has made $3.17 billion in spending commitments, including $454 million in WA, which represents 14.3 per cent.
Professor Louden said that WA universities did not mind competing with each other for WA’s slice of the pie.
“If the state’s whole portfolio of universities can’t get 10 per cent then we feel the state as a whole has been let down,” he said.
Professor Seares said that another area WA consistently lost out for a number of reasons was the arts. The academic said an example was national companies which received additional federal funding yet none were based here and they rarely, if ever, came to the state.
“Because of the changes that have occurred over time, a full review is absolutely called for, and that will enable WA to address the issue of the percentage of federal funding going to the state, both directly and through visits, or lack of them, from national companies,” she said.