It’s time for the government to spill a secret: whatever happened to its ‘independent review’ of think tanks and universities, and what’s the future for any organisation looking for government funding to continue this work?

Back in February, the government appointed Peter Varghese to conduct an independent review of think tanks, universities and others funded by government to ‘inform the public debate, provide expert input to policy processes, and/or strengthen partnerships relevant to Australia’s strategic circumstances’.

His review was widely seen as targeting ASPI – the government-owned think tank that receives the largest funding grants in this very small sector – although government spokespeople and the review team itself deny this.

But there’s an obvious reason to have a review: Australia is living through increasingly dangerous and chaotic times and we’re planning to spend $765 billion in public money on defence and security. So it’s the right time to ensure our public debate in this area of policy is vibrant and diverse, with government funding playing a role in enabling this.

Mr Varghese is an eminent Australian who is now the Chancellor of the University of Queensland and was the head of Australia’s national intelligence assessment agency. He understands the tango between bureaucrats and ministers, and the internal knife fights that go on as departmental secretaries and agency heads arm wrestle for ministers’ attention.  And he knows how these senior bureaucrats, however much they may jostle for influence amongst themselves, like to protect their role as a primary source of advice and insight to the government of the day.  They tend to find alternative sources of ideas and advice that can disturb their own policies and directions deeply uncomfortable – or in the formulation common in the foreign policy world “unhelpful”.

Those insights mean that in many ways he was a logical choice to look at the issue of funding for think tanks and to universities for public policy work in the area of strategic and defence policy. He will, of course, have had to put aside any favour he might show towards the university sector from his role at UQ (university leadership tends to get very interested and motivated when funding is involved). And he also needs to not fight his old corner as the head of the prime minister’s own intelligence agency, but he is no doubt well capable of doing so.

I know from my time at ASPI and now in a tiny think tank that doesn’t seek or receive government money that our Commonwealth bureaucrats only like external ideas when these agree with or support their own.

For them, a happy think tank is one they have on a string. Their preferred funding model for think tanks like ASPI or Lowy would be a ‘pay as you play’ approach, where they commission work on specific questions they set. That minimises discomfort and ensures that the receiving think tank or uni knows they have to keep the customer happy if they are to get any future work. Government consultancies understand this model well.

The review has to go to through a committee of departmental Secretaries before it finds its way to Mr Albanese and Cabinet, so Mr Varghese will need to navigate this default view in the Public Service folk he is reporting to along the way.

The only way to get independent analysis and a diverse set of views into the Australian public debate on defence and security is to have some reliable funding to the small number of organisations that do this work, and to ensure that that money is not at the whim of powerful Canberra mandarins.  A wealthy backer like Frank Lowy in the case of the foreign affairs-focused Lowy Institute is one model – although there has only been one Frank Lowy for the Australian foreign affairs and security community, making the limited amount of government money that goes to the sector more important.

That’s why John Howard established ASPI over twenty years ago. As its charter makes clear, he wanted alternative ideas and advice on defence to what was served up by the usual suspects in the Canberra bureaucracy, and he knew that public servants were routinely awful at participating in public debates. 

In the years since then, ASPI had a multi-year block funding grant as its core financial foundation – somewhere in the order of $4m per annum according to its financial reports, which enabled it to do longer term and objective work as a result, including work that made ministers and senior officials uncomfortable from time to time.  Confident governments and ministers know that is part of the deal and, like John Howard, see diverse views as giving them space to make decisions. Anxious leaders see different views as threatening.

But the funding model that enabled ASPI’s work– and as importantly, the amount of funding involved – are both at risk from whatever Mr Albanese decides to do as a result of the review.

At least one key stakeholder outside Australia would be happy with this situation – Xi Jinping’s government in Beijing.  They called for ASPI to be defunded as one of the 14 demands they made of Australia to ‘reset’ the bilateral relationship onto the correct path – as specified by Beijing.  The Chinese embassy is no doubt watching to see what pops out of the review and hopeful that noisy think tanks get the message to shut up if they want Australian government cash.

Think tanks are worth funding when they question the status quo. In past years ASPI did that on the transparency of defence budgets, on failing equipment projects, on cyber’s emerging role and on China’s increasing belligerence. Mostly the bureaucracy didn’t like the results. But the analysis has held up well against how China and the world have developed. Mature governments should embrace new policy thinking that think tanks like ASPI can offer when they’re funded and working well. And mature think tanks need the confidence to push back against orthodoxy, otherwise why fund them?

So, what’s happened with the review?  That’s hard to tell.  Ten months of consultation, data gathering and deep thinking may or may not have resulted in a set of recommendations to Mr Albanese’s Departmental Secretary, and the review’s recommendations may or may not have been considered by Cabinet, as its terms of reference said would happen.  I’d expect that a number of individuals and organisations gave Mr Varghese submissions to assist his work – but unlike multiple other reviews, none of these have been made available for anyone to see. That seems unusual in a review of public funding of this type. It’s not a step that builds confidence in the review’s purposes or outcomes.

This is all very odd, particularly if the review has done its work independently and well.  And there’s a deep irony in the way the review has been commissioned and handled.  It is, after all, all about arrangements to ensure that there is an informed and diverse public debate on strategic and security issues in Australia. And it’s also about the government – and you’d hope the Australian public and taxpayer – understanding how and where their money is being spent for this purpose. So keeping it all a secret is surprising.

It’s not too much to ask that Mr Albanese unshackle Peter Varghese and let him release his actual review and the submissions and data he gathered to support it.  That would be a refreshing demonstration by the prime minister of the open government he promised us his would be.

It should also be business as usual to have the prime minister or one of his Cabinet colleagues give us the results of their decision making on the review and tell us how they see government funding for strategic policy work operating into the future.  Of course, the particular results for the one government think tank in this picture – ASPI – will need to be made clear.

Keeping advice and decisions about funding for public policy work and open debate secret is behaviour better suited to Mr Putin’s Russia than to Australia. In a word, it’s unhelpful.