news
campusreview.com.au
Best ethics
money can buy
Academic says nHMRC must increase
financial support for committees that guide
the morality of human medical research.
T
he National Health and Medical Research Council must
lobby government for funding to properly support human
medical research ethics committees, an internationally
renowned expert has argued.
Professor Linda Shields, American Academy of Nursing fellow and
Charles Sturt University nursing academic, said the NHMRC needs
more Commonwealth support to properly manage the various
Human Research Ethics Committees (HREC) under its jurisdiction.
Any research project the NHMRC funds is required to have the
approval of one of these committees before it goes ahead.
Shields said the organisation needs sufficient money to audit
these committees to ensure they’re acting appropriately.
“One of the remits of the NHMRC is to ensure that all guidelines
are being met appropriately but there’s not enough funding given
to the NHMRC to do this,” she explained. “The NHMRC is between
a rock and a hard place, because it needs extra funding to do audits
of HRECs, which they’re meant to do. They rely on the HRECs
themselves to be ethical and act appropriately. It would be good
to see a whole lot of government funding thrown at the NHMRC,
to try to help it have an auditing role over ethics committees to a
higher level than it’s got at the moment.”
While there haven’t been any high-profile cases of misconduct
by HRECs recently – or of unethical behaviour in human medical
research – proper funding is just a good precaution, she said. She
also pushed for HRECs to organise and promote their work, and
role, to government and the public.
“HRECs are usually too busy to blow their own trumpet,” Shields
said. “It would be good for someone to promote the terrific work
done by ethics committees, and to point out to government that
here’s this whole system that basically works pretty well, even
though it’s notoriously underfunded and done by volunteers. We
need some sort of awareness, and perhaps a campaign to show the
world and the voters how important ethics committees are, and how
underfunded they are and how they could do with a bit more help.” n
Higher education
cost explosion
Billions in unpaid
loans blamed
for much of the
soaring expense
to taxpayers.
H
igher education costs, for
both university and vocational
training, have blown out to more
than $42 billion, with a quarter of these
government-funded HELP loans unlikely ever
to be repaid.
A 10-year projection for these loans,
conducted by the Parliamentary Budget
Office, estimates accumulated loan costs of
$185 billion, of which about $50 billion will
go unpaid.
“Since 2009, in a demand-driven system,
taxpayer funding in higher education for
Commonwealth-supported places has
increased by 59 per cent, as compared with
29 per cent growth in nominal GDP [in that
time],” read a statement from the education
minister, Simon Birmingham. “Funding of
university students has, essentially, grown at
twice the rate of the economy.”
Birmingham’s office placed much of
the blame for this on the expansion of the
VET FEE-HELP program, which has led to
alleged rorting. The ACCC is investigating
four separate VET providers for using shady
tactics to sign up new students who would
never have been able to complete courses
and pay back loans from the government.
“To ensure that those with the ability to
study at university are not impeded and not
deterred from doing so, it’s important to
understand the value of the student loan
scheme we have in Australia,” Universities
Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson
said. ”It has been an absolutely central feature
of the success of higher education policy in
Australia for many, many years.”
The primary reason HELP loans go
unpaid is because a student is not working
in a job paying more than $54,000 a year
long enough to discharge the loan. This
is especially true of VET FEE-HELP loans,
because recipients’ jobs often pay less and
students are sometimes not properly prepared
to complete courses and start working. n
5