Recently at a meeting of SME’s, I found myself in a conversation about accessing government grants, initiated by a guest speaker. She was a very impressive woman with significant experience delivering grants from the Department of Industry.
The notable omission was, in my opinion, a view that reflected the experience of someone contemplating investing the time and energy into an application should consider.
Full disclosure: I ran a small grant funding business called Agri Chain Solutions as a contractor for almost 3 years from 1999 to 2002. It was a company limited by Guarantee, with a commercial board, and ranks as the only time I am aware of that a task has been outsourced by the federal Bureaucracy in this manner. The department concerned, then called Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries Australia (AFFA) was implacably opposed to the exercise, and only complied after express instruction from John Howard, as the then new PM.
Following is a list of the irritations you can expect.
- Ambiguous guidelines, and sometimes they appear to be on roller-skates as you seek clarification.
- Unusable templates, seemingly designed to frustrate applicants.
- Bureaucratic time and commercial time do not match. The process will always take longer and consume more resources than you think would be possible as you initiate the process.
- The revolving door of ‘officials’ who will manage your application, through to the approval and then implementation. You will constantly be covering the same ground, again, and again, as departmental personnel rotate.
- Commercial in confidence: it does not exist.
- Rounds and the money has run out. For ease of management, most grant programs operate in ’rounds’, and when the money for that round has been allocated, bad luck. You could reapply in the next round. This system disregards overall merit, replacing it with merit in a particular round. The result is weak projects in less competitive rounds are sometimes approved, when in later more competitive rounds, highly meritorious projects miss out.
- The effect of influence of competitive rent seekers. Who you know is always important.
- The time taken to prepare without any indication of the probability of success usually challenges resources of SME’s. This leaves the field open to larger companies with the staff, who probably need the grants less.
- Having inexperienced young bureaucrats believing they’re important, and can dictate to you particularly in grant implementation.
- Recognise at the outset that an application will take a long time, consume significant resources, and you may not be successful. When you are not successful, the reasons for the failure may never be clear.
- Grants are taken into account as revenue, and therefore if you make a profit, you pay tax on it.
- Finally, what is important to you is usually absolutely irrelevant to those responsible for assessing and progressing your application for ‘their’ money. They are just people with their own baggage, ideas, perceptions, ambitions, and worries. Your application amongst all the others in the pile hardly rates on their radar.
Header credit: Cartoon by Tom Gauld from New Scientist magazine.
