A parliamentary committee is inquiring into the administration of government grants – one member spoke from lived experience

A hearing last week was burdened by bumf, as officials explained process but this did not deter medical researcher Michelle Ananda-Rajah, the new, Labor, member for Higgins.

Dr Andanda-Raja acknowledged the Commonwealth’s grant notification system worked, but after that applying to the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Medical Research Future Fund, “becomes a nightmare for an end user,” what with “arcane submission requirements.”

“I’m talking about things like margins, the size of your font, this, that, where you put your name, how you number your pages and so on and so forth.”

“I can tell you now that there is not a single happy medical researcher in this country—not one.”

Nothing researchers don’t know, or the officials at the hearing can fix – but it never hurts to get an issue onto the parliamentary record.