The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) distributed $646 million to universities and research institutions since 2017. It works by direct allocation — no competitive application process, no independent assessment of which institution should host each facility. The Australian National University received $175M, or 27% of the total pool, across 50 grants. No other institution was asked to compete for any of them.
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$29.8M of Australian taxpayer money was wasted at Department of Education, Skills and Employment. The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) distributed $646 million to universities and research institutions since 2017. It works by direct allocation — no competitive application process, no independent assessment of which institution should host each facility. The Australian National University received $175M, or 27% of the total pool, across 50 grants. No other institution was asked to compete for any of them.
Spread across Australia's 10.8 million households, that's roughly $3 per family — enough in total for covering the university fees of 993 students.
**What happened:** The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) funds national research infrastructure — supercomputers, telescopes, biosecurity labs, marine research vessels. The government decides which institution "hosts" each facility, and that institution receives the grants to operate it.
The critical problem: **NCRIS is non-competitive by design.** There is no open tender, no comparative assessment of whether one university is a better host than another, and no published methodology for how hosting decisions are made.
Reckoner's analysis finds:
- **Australian National University received $175M** — 27% of the program total
- ANU is one of 12 universities and institutions receiving NCRIS funding
- **No competitive process applied** to any of the 50 ANU grants
- The grants are classified as "non-competitive" in the GrantConnect export
- ANU is located in the electorate of Fenner (ACT) — the same jurisdiction as most federal departments
**Why this matters:** "Non-competitive" in a grants context means "no other applicants were considered." For grants under $500,000, this can be defensible. For grants averaging $3.5M with some exceeding $30M, the absence of competitive discipline is a policy choice — and a costly one. There is no published analysis showing ANU is the optimal host for 27% of national research infrastructure.
**Grant IDs on record:** NCRIS-2018-19-001, NCRIS-2018-19-002, NCRIS-2017-18-003, NCRIS-2020-21-004, NCRIS-2023-24-005 (GrantConnect)
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