Labor will ‘dump ARC public interest test’ if elected

Shadow science minister Kim Carr has told a Senate hearing that a Labor government would scrap a recently introduced national interest test for assessing Australian Research Council grant applications.

Carr described the test as “crap from beginning to the end” and suggested it was intended to act as a form of political censorship for research funding.

“If there’s a change of government, this will change. I just make that clear to you,” he told ARC staff attending a Senate estimates education and employment committee hearing in Canberra.