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from the corral-coral-cachet-cash,-eh? dept.
PM personally approved $443m fund for tiny Barrier Reef foundation
Malcolm Turnbull was at the meeting where $443.8m in funding was offered to a small not-for-profit foundation without a competitive tender process or any application for the money, an inquiry has heard.
Anna Marsden, the managing director of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, told a Senate inquiry on Monday the organisation was offered the funding at a meeting in Sydney in April between Turnbull, environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg, the foundation's chair John Schubert and environment and energy department secretary Finn Pratt.
The inquiry is examining the process by which the foundation, which had just six full-time staff at the time, was awarded the funds and whether it has the capacity to deliver work required under the government's reef 2050 plan.
Also at The Sydney Morning Herald.
(Score: 2) by corey on Thursday August 02 2018, @04:06AM (2 children)
My bro in-law (stem cell med researcher) spends 75% of his time writing proposals and complains endlessly how government funding of medical research is so constrained.
The government climate change body who gives out funding to programs has had its budget cut.
The ABC has had its budget cut a number of times in the past 5 years, and things are getting pretty bleak.
Half a bil, phew that's some money. If this were the opposition who'd done it, you'd hear endlessly about 'what about the schools and hospitals' from these clowns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @05:58AM
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:11PM
Medical research is over half unreproducible in principle crap due to not reporting what you did accurately and precisely, then like 80% of whats left is unreproducible in practice crap due to phacking, etc. Then about 90% of the remainder has at least a dozen plausible explanations of which only one "favorite" is considered since it is "sexiest" or whatever other non-scientific reason.
Your brother in law could easily be funded 10-100x more if he runs the parasites producing this crap out of town, assuming hes not one of them. Id say it could be as high as a 10,000x funding increase per good project by stopping the crap.
https://www.jove.com/blog/editors-notes/studies-show-only-10-of-published-science-articles-are-reproducible-what-is-happening/ [jove.com]
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/01/14/paul-glasziou-and-iain-chalmers-is-85-of-health-research-really-wasted/ [bmj.com]