Dr Reti wanted the HRC to:
“have an increased focus on Government priorities and improved health for New Zealanders when being considered for funding.”
Dr Reti then expected:
“…a sharper focus on real-world projects leading to improved health and/or health system outcomes, such as improving timely access to quality healthcare for New Zealanders.
With the first funding for 2025 announced, did the Health Research Council heed Dr Reti’s memo or did they chuck it into recycling and continue as if Grant Robertson and Dr Verrall were in charge? Sadly for Dr Reti the answer seems the latter with the first 78 grants for 2025 out.
Here are some “low lights”:
Dr Reti then expected:
“…a sharper focus on real-world projects leading to improved health and/or health system outcomes, such as improving timely access to quality healthcare for New Zealanders.
With the first funding for 2025 announced, did the Health Research Council heed Dr Reti’s memo or did they chuck it into recycling and continue as if Grant Robertson and Dr Verrall were in charge? Sadly for Dr Reti the answer seems the latter with the first 78 grants for 2025 out.
Here are some “low lights”:
- $481,400 to research if a “…significant gap exists in Aotearoa’s equitable assessment of food security, as current strategies are influenced by colonial, capitalist ideologies that focus narrowly on financial access to food.” Can someone please tell me how “colonial capitalist ideologies” on food reflects a single priority of the Government’?
- $411,819 to provide practical knowledge about the roles that Māori men had and can have during child birth “by gathering experiences and stories from tāne Māori, speaking to experts in hapūtanga and the roles of tāne and working in collaborative ways with multiple stakeholders, the project team will identify actions and work to implement change.” While common sense how will this lead to “real-world projects leading to improved health and/or health system outcomes”? It is surely the domain of Social Development and Te Puni Kōkiri and not ‘health research?
- $265,000 to develop a culturally appropriate marae-based psychedelic-assisted therapy for Methamphetamine use disorder, delivered by Māori using a Māori rongoā treatment model. The Health Research Council continues to fund psuedo-science faith healers and naturopathy under the politically correct “rongoa” label. A quarter of a million for faith healers dispensing magic mushrooms to treat meth. What could possibly go wrong?
- $407,980 for a “culturally appropriate model that rangatahi can use to describe their hauora, that also accommodates different ages, cognitive and learning abilities, will improve health outcomes.” This project reflects deep concern the HRC is funding projects that go over the same ground as previous studies have. An inexhaustive search revealed 16 previous projects worth $6.8 million related to rangatahi and is not cognitive and learning abilities related more to education?
- $101,050 for reconceptualising musculoskeletal care from a Māori worldview. At first this sounds legitimate until you read the lay summary: “The health system of Aotearoa, New Zealand is not meeting the needs of Māori. The injury and rehabilitation realm of health is no exception. It is a responsibility enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and national legislation such as the Pae ora (Healthy futures) Act 2022 to provide equitable, culturally appropriate and responsive health services…. to explore how best indigenous practices such as rokoā, and a western practice such as physiotherapy, can better support injury prevention, care and rehabilitation..” A shorter summary is six figures decolonising physio using Māori pseudo science (rokoā). Fantastic and just what Dr Reti did not want to see.
The Health Research Council continues to fund on the basis of race with roughly half going for Māori /Pasifika and the balance on ‘medical research’ that you and I naively think ought to be its priority. As many of the grants go over the same ground as previous ones, the HRC is using our money to reinvent the wheel delivered by academics that is not the real world.
The way forward for Dr Reti and for Nicola Willis is clear. That is to follow what Judith Collins is doing with the Marsden Fund. If those handing out tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers money can;’t be trusted to reflect government priorities, then you just have to remove their discretion – or abolish them.
I want taxpayer money for health research to go on treatments for cancer, not fighting “colonial capitalist ideologies” on food.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.
13 comments:
Yes the Argentinian model will work best simply eliminate the various departments until you have a surplus.
The big spinoff is the productivity of the country will rise.
i was quite despondent when the Marsden Fund dispensers woke up. But I did not know about the HRC fund.
Seems even more generous. Creative writing is not my thing but with a few days concerted work I should be able to pull a few hundred thousand. I have been considering a trial of meth to improve my imaginative fantasy writing.
Dr Reti should make that $60-$70 million immediately available for frontline medicine rather than throwing it into the bin of garbage those grants represent
The HRC need not change its focus - it should be disbanded immediately, its personnel completely incapable of function.
I'm sorry but Dr Reti seems a decent bloke, however he is clearly out of his depth and asleep at the wheel on this. Just saying something is or will be so does not make it happen, a lesson most learn in primary school. He needs to show his mettle and deal with this summarily (and that is the polite version!).
There are so many questions to be answered.
Are the members of the Health Research Council anonymous ?
Are they qualified to be making calls on financing these Dr Zeuss topics ?
Do they seriously believe that any of this is of any value to anybody ?
Are they being intimidated into agreeing to funding this nonsense ?
They must be aware that they are being conned - surely ??
Have Netsafe been advised about this scam ?
Is there anything shady going on ?? Absolutely clean ??
Are there audits of how the grants are spent ?
Who is doing this so called "research" ?
Any cross checking on the "research", or can the grantees just fabricate any nonsense they like, knowing full well that their reports will never be read, and simply shelved ?
Would this ever be contemplated by a private organisation ? No
This is some of the worst waste of taxpayer's money ever and not only should all funding be stopped immediately, attempts should be made to recover funds already fraudulently granted.
And what was one of the stories on TV1 News last night about those having their palliative care support finding cut? And here we have yet more $millions wasted on this crappola! That and what's spent on te reo lessons could fund, support and cure a lot of unwell people. Minister Reti, pull your finger out and demand action!
This is an appalling misappropriation of taxpayer funds - a complete and utter waste. HRC is a wanton disgrace. Heads should roll. If people really want to do these kinds of research projects they need to fund it themselves. According to their website Lester Levy is Chair of HRC. How has this funding achieved HRC approval?
It's quite acceptable to rail against cherry-picked publicly-funded research topics if there is rational evidence to suggest there is deliberate fraud or malpractice at work. Unfortunately the opinions expressed on this platform, including those of Farrar, are generally emotional and unsupported by such evidence. All research is built around a hypothesis and is essentially a shot in the dark until the data is collected and analysed. Only then may the hypothesis be declared true or false.
Research scientists need to be held accountable by the same standards applied to all other recipients of public funds. That's what the Government Auditor is supposed to do. If it were shown that the outcomes of past HRC grants consistently had no measurable public benefit, then that would be a valid reason to ask why these projects continue to be publicly funded.
So lets see Audit New Zealand perform an independent audit of all previous HRC grants to confirm:
(a) the project was actually completed
(b) a coherent peer reviewed paper emerged documenting the findings in a reputable journal
(c) there was an economic benefit to the country from the findings that justified the public expenditure.
Critics need to remember that many valid scientific projects since the time of Copernicus on have been dismissed as rubbish by the ignorant and superstitious of the day, and even now the social sciences are regarded with suspicion by those competing for research funds. So be rational folk. Get some verifiable evidence before condemning something you don't understand.
The Minister had to sign off on these, surely? That was standard practice with Marsdens for decades, and it could delay reporting of the results if the Minister was unavailable or unsatisfied by the funding decisions. I’d expect that HRC works the same. If so, perhaps his aim is to give the HRC enough rope…
To ‘The Jones Boy’:
It’s not obvious that the grants here are ‘cherry picked’. To many reasonable NZers the topics themselves are clear indication of some serious ideological capture of HRC. Grantable research should not be considered ‘a shot in the dark’. There should be a considerable research foundation behind the proposals/hypotheses. And many considerate and well-intentioned NZers would argue that HRC should not be funding multiple projects which centre on just one race.
To Anon 6.53, of course Farrar has cherry-picked his "low lights". He is trying to make a point so will inevitably select the cases that suit his argument. If prior grants involving Maori knowledge were spent on bogus research, or consistently produced no benefit to the taxpayer, then you have grounds for questioning the selection system. But who knows. Perhaps something positive may be added to the sum total of human knowledge. It might even help resolve the vexed question of whether Maori science is a reality or a rort. But to condemn a project just because it doesn’t fit your personal world-view is not a rational way to go.
>"It might even help resolve the vexed question of whether Maori science is a reality or a rort."
There is no 'vexed question' here to those who understand the term 'epistemology'.
We’re not talking about ordinary research which is part of the regular jobs of university staff on research or research-and-teaching contracts. We are talking about competitive, contestable, external research funding, which, in the case of HRC, comes from the NZ taxpayer. So ‘who knows… it might…’ is not appropriate here. Maybe it’s appropriate for these researchers’ day jobs. Maybe it’s appropriate for hobby interests outside their jobs. But when it’s contestable, tax-payer funding, then old-fashioned merit should be the deciding factor. Fitting a world view has nothing to do with it.
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