Pidge's Pink-Off

All told, your man Pigeon - that's Glenn Donald McGrath AM to his mother and the tax office - didn't have a bad few days at the Sydney test. Sure, he had Nine's producers trying to get him to break down in tears on camera every day for five days, bud Pidge held stoic. And he did manage to rake in quite a fair swag of coin for the breast cancer foundation named for his late wife, Jane. Over the course of five very pink days in Sydney's inner-east - cue lazy jokes about that making fuck-all change from usual - the Nine commentary team dressed up like an explosion in a Barbie factory, Tony Greig's hat looked even more stupid than ever, over half a million of your Australian dollars were donated to the Foundation, and the pink-frilled lizards of Australian cricket team even got in on the act by winning the game in the second last over for the second year running. Your Correspondent has two unbroken hands and two functional wrists and even he wasn't keeping out the ball which castled the (grudgingly mumbled) heroic Graeme Smith. Then again Your Correspondent has a forward defence which wouldn't look out of place in Under 10s Kanga Cricket, largely because it hasn't developed any further since then.

So all good then. Except... not really. Half a mill sounds like a decent swag on paper. But what does Pidge's Pink-Off Payout actually buy him? Let's say, for argument's sake, that the admin costs are trivial. They won't be, but let's say they are. Say he wants to fund research into breast cancer. He doesn't, but let's say he does, since a lot of other cancer foundations do. How far does his five hundred gorillas get him?

Let's take the average cost of NZ research. The Marsden Fund, who are the 'basic science' fund of NZ, cap the amount you can apply for at $250K per year over a three year grant, plus or minus a bit depending on what discipline panel you apply to - i.e. biomedical research costs more than humanities so they figure you need to ask for more. That $250K would need to cover at least 20% of the time of the principal investigator - even if their salary was already paid for by their employer (it's called salary buyout, and it works really well, and by that I mean it doesn't fucking work at all because the money isn't used by the host department to buy the PI out of their lecturing time and have a teaching fellow do it instead so they can actually do the work... but I digress), plus you'd want a postdoc for three years (so some shit actually gets done), maybe a PhD stipend if you can afford it (probably not), a bunch of consumables money so you're not sitting on your arse playing poker on Arsebook for 3 years, some travel money so you can go to conferences and actually tell people what you're doing so you have some chance of getting another job after this, and... that's it. Oh, and overheads.

Overheads are the real problem. I know Pidge's foundation doesn't actually fund biomedical research. If he did, these figures wouldn't even get near the crux of the issue, because Marsden research is the cheapest research funded by the country which funds research more cheaply than pretty much any other place in the world. HRC (Health Research Council) grants, which are targeted squarely at medical research, often go over a million for a three year project. It's not that salaries are exactly stratospheric - starting salary for a first-year postdoctoral researcher in NZ is less than the starting salary for a first-year field assistant at a coal mine in Gunnedah. AND you get your own ute and satellite phone if you go work for Dawso. But overheads, which pay for... well, overheads I guess... are charged as a proportion of the salaries on the grant, and they're usually the single highest line cost on the grant, more than the salaries themselves. And that's not a problem limited to university research, or even universities in general. The cost of overheads kills productivity in any large bureaucracy. Even, for instance, the cost of running a charitable foundation... or, more particularly for Pidge, the cost of funding Breast Care Nurses in rural Australia, who like the rest of us, can't operate in a vacuum. Funding the salary of one fully paid-up nurse in a decrepit, barren environment with no other facilities would be as morally dubious as a Christian charity encouraging sponsors to give money to one - and only one - starving African child, while the rest of their community dies around them. And obviously no Christian organisation would encourage that, would they?

This isn't, in any way, saying that the work of Pidge's foundation isn't worthwhile - if they'd been around forty years earlier, I might have got to meet my nonna - or that you shouldn't send them cash by the bucket because most of it gets pissed away on admin and bullshit, because there is absolutely no way to avoid that happening. It's just that it's disingenous, and bordering on fradulent, to claim that this is going to make a massive amount of difference. For that reason, the song and dance Nine made about reaching the half-mill at the end of play - even stage-managing the finish by turning the tea break into something resembling the NBN Telethon, although noone phoned up to pledge $500 if Chris Bath took her shirt off - ended up coming off a bit hollow. The wonder wasn't that so much was raised, as Nine wanted you to think. The wonder was that after five days of saturation coverage, it was actually so little.

Then again, that might have been because Australia decided any cause championed by the almost completely objectionable Tony "I'm South African this week" Greig in a fuck-off-horrible pink hat possibly just isn't worth supporting, no matter how right or upstanding the reasoning behind it might be.

The Doctor is OUT.