However, one piece of work which she has progressed with her tertiary education minister hat on will likely be greeted with near universal enthusiasm: the end of the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF).
The likely demise of the PBRF had been well signalled by the government — an advisory group was set up by the Tertiary Education Commission in 2024 to review the tertiary research funding system and, in anticipation of change, the planned next PBRF round was cancelled.
The principle is sound — to increase and reward excellent research — but it has proven to have a few problems in practice.
One is philosophical: the PBRF provides bulk funding for tertiary institutions based on the success of its research, a system which can leave some high-performing academics and departments feeling that they, in effect, subsidising other researchers whose work is not as excellent, or has not proven to be as marketable.
The other, and this is is the main gripe of professors, lecturers and researchers, is that the system is appallingly cumbersome, labour intensive and time-consuming.
For each funding round they have to compile a portfolio of their work, and demonstrate how it matches the scheme’s criteria.
That is then assessed by a peer review panel, but it is often subject to revision and reworking before then.
The better the portfolio matches the criteria the better it scores and the more money the institution receives, so a lot rides on getting it right.
It is a $315 million-a-year scheme, and even an additional 0.5% of that adds up to real money in a business the size of a university.
That all takes time away from academics — and that is estimated to costs thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars.
On top of that is the opportunity cost of the excercise: in simple terms, do you want your brilliant scientist searching for a cure for cancer, or re-writing a report on that research to try to elevate its PBRF rating?
The system also likely artificially skews priorities. While bulk funding was meant to ensure opportunities to research in all fields of endeavour, inevitably institutions probably favoured departments which were bringing in the bacon, so to speak.
There will always be competition for the scarce dollars allocated to research, and arguments over what the research the taxpayer should prioritise supporting, so some sort of system is needed to referee the inevitable disputes.
Given the PBRF’s shortcomings, it is for the high jump. Cabinet signed off on its replacement, the Tertiary Research Excellence Fund (TREF), in August last year and the then minister of universities, Shane Reti, in consultation with the then minister for vocational education — none other than Simmonds — to draft a final design for how it was going to work.
Subsequently, of course, Reti announced his retirement from politics and Simmonds became the Minister of Tertiary Education — and was well-placed to hit the ground running on this piece of work.
She presented a paper on TREF to Cabinet a few weeks back, which outlined what for many academics will be a key change: that assessments will be annual, not every six years as now.
That factor, as much as anything else, led to the lengthy nights doing paperwork. It also, as the paper revealed, cost about $40m.
More broadly, funding will be allocated to universities based on research degree completions, external research income, academic citations, commercialised research and citation of research in government policy papers.
Polytechs and other tertiary education providers will be able to obtain access to 2.5% of research funding based on their performance in the latter three areas.
‘‘The TREF will complement the creation of a strategy-driven science system by providing a simpler, more transparent mechanism for incentivising and rewarding research performance across the tertiary education system,’’ Simmonds’ paper trilled enthusiastically.
‘‘The TREF would primarily rely on external datasets rather than reporting by providers, significantly reducing compliance costs, and enabling all measures to be updated annually.’’
And with that, her colleagues signed it off. The Tertiary Education Commission has started work on operational designs, and it is scheduled to be fully in place by 2029.
Perhaps indicative of how unlamented the soon to be late PBRF will be, the Tertiary Education Union —no friend of the government — shed few tears over its demise.
It was worried how humanities researchers would fare under the new system, and also panned the static level of funding for effectively being a cut for the academic research sector — both legitimate concerns.
But least they will no longer be burning the midnight tracking down citations from six years ago.
But wait, there’s more
Just in case reading this column each week does not satisfy your political appetite, the Otago Daily Times has launched a new feature on its website www.odt.co.nz.
Election 2026 is a weekly, subscriber-only feature leading up to the election on November 7.
Initially we are streaming a recorded interview by this author with an MP on the issues of the day. As polling day nears we are considering the possibility of electorate debates.
We kicked off with Finance Minister Nicola Willis in Budget week, and Labour MP Damien O’Connor and Greens MP Scott Willis have followed.
This week is New Zealand First deputy leader Shane Jones who, rest assured, is his usual eloquent self.
