Professor Gina Ravenscroft

She only wants a man if he's really, really good.

It was pretty incredible hearing that we were going to have this completely entirely new scheme and entirely new pot of money for medical research.

And I think it's probably equivalent to the spending from the NHMRC.

So it represented perhaps a doubling of the investment in health and medical research at the time.

Yeah, so a few years ago now, I think 2021, the government put a cap in place on the MRFF at around $650 million.

So there's a massive gap in what it should be dispersing of this taxpayer funding versus what it's actually dispersing.

And it's really unclear to us why that money isn't being fully dispersed.

And noting that fully dispersing the fund at the billion dollars would still completely protect that principal investment.

Yeah, my understanding was that it was implemented to sort of ensure the security of that scheme, that sort of market pressures, I guess if investment collapsed, that that fund would be protected.

But it's now actually grown to $24 billion.

So because of that underspend and how well the investment has performed,

there's now even more money there than was originally intended for the scheme.

And so estimates from the Parliamentary Budget Office suggest that you could actually double the disbursement up to $1.4 billion without risking the principal component of that investment.

Not that I'm aware of.

There's obviously the sector would really love for that to happen and many of the sort of patient advocacy groups would also love to see that happen.

I guess some of the other challenges might be specifically around sort of the funding success rates or the rejection rates for some of the schemes.

So the real challenges for our junior scientists, our early and mid-career researchers, the success rate for those particular schemes targeted specifically

at postdoctoral researchers is 4 or 5%, which is incredibly low.

And that, you know, as I said, speaks to the huge waste in the system, but also the lack of that pipeline.

If we don't have the next generation of researchers coming through, who are going to be our research leaders in the future?