Grants and achievements

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Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA)

In the 2010 ERA exercise conducted by the Commonwealth government, which rates the quality of university research, the discipline of 'law and legal studies' at QUT was ranked at '3', which is equivalent to a 'world standard' quality rating. The national average for law was '2'. The field of Justice at QUT made a significant contribution to the Law discipline submission.

Grants and other funding for research

Category 1 funding successes include:

• $172,000 from an ARC Linkage grant (2011-13) for research into family objection to autopsy and the Queensland coronial system
• $324,000 from an ARC Discovery grant (2010-2012) for research into the legalities of a sustainable carbon cycle
• $287,000 from an ARC Linkage grant (2009-2010) to investigate medical decision-making through doctors' compliance with the law
• $277,000 from an ARC Discovery grant (2007-11) to investigate masculinity and violence in rural settings
• $269,000 from an ARC Discovery grant (2008-2010) to research a new legal framework for identifying and reporting Australian data breaches
• $95,000 for the QUT share of an ARC Linkage grant (2009-11) on building the rule of law in international affairs
• $20,000 for the QUT share of an ARC Linkage grant (2009-2009) on corporate governance, regulation and accountability
• $143,226 from an ARC Linkage grant (2011-2014) led by the Faculty of Education for research into a legally-informed for schools to prevent and intervene in cases of cyberbullying
• $338,444 from an ARC Linkage grant (2011-2014) led by the QUT Business School for research into the value of financial planning advice – process and outcome effects on consumer well-being
• $13,714 from an Australian Criminology Research Council grant (2010-2011) to research sentencing outcomes of Indigenous offenders in the law courts of three Australian jurisdictions

Funding has also been awarded by other funding bodies for the following projects:

• $220,000 from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (2010-2011) for research in socially inclusive learning and teaching in higher education
• $297,000 from the Australian Responsibility to Protect Fund (2010-2011) for research in protecting civilians in armed conflicts
• $208,000 from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (2009-2011) for research in final year curriculum design in legal education
• $215,000 from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (2009-2011) for research in developing a cross-disciplinary approach to teaching and assessing reflective writing
• $390,000 from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (2009-2010) for research in scholarship of law
• $140,000 from the Legal Practitioner Interest on Trust Account Funds (Department of Justice, QLD) (2009-2010) to establish a Centre for Credit Commercial and Consumer Law
• $135,000 (2010-2011) and $142,000 (2011-12) from the Consumer Advocacy Panel for advocacy relevant to Queensland's participation in the National Electricity Market
• $80,000 from the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund (2008-11) to investigate ways of protecting critical infrastructure from denial of service attacks
• $60,000 from the National Financial Services Federation (2010-11) on the impact of interest rate cap regulation in Australia

Major research consultancies

Our staff have been called upon to undertake consultancy work in a range of fields, including:

• Review of the Environmental Protection Act, funding of $94,000 provided by the Department of Environment and Resource Management in 2011
• $481,000 to fund a research secondment to the Queensland Law Reform Commission to conduct various research, including into Jury Selection Practices and Procedures in Queensland (2011-14)
• The Queensland Department of Public Works is funding work in 2011 to review the Queensland Government's Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) policy ($80,000)
• The Department of Justice – Victorian Law Reform Commission funded work to Review of Victoria's guardianship laws with particular respect to those with impaired decision-making ($18,000)

Staff and student achievements

Fiona McDonald is part of an international, interdisciplinary team working on the project Articulating Standards: translating the practices of standardizing health technologies funded by an international competitive grant. The project will evaluate knowledge translation between scientists, clinicians, industry, regulators and communities, producing accounts of systematic patterns of communication and mis-communication between stakeholders engaged in standardization.

Targeted areas will be identified to facilitate more effective engagement and knowledge translation between stakeholders in future, and produce a model of participation in biomedical standardization which will aid regulators, policy makers, researchers and practitioners involved in assessing and implementing new standardized health technologies. The grant is hosted by Dalhousie University in Canada.

A project on tort law and environmental litigation involving Barbara Hocking and Rowena Maguire has been awarded CDN$10,000 under the International Research Linkages program of Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The project, which is with a team of two Canadians, Professors Robert Solomon and Erika Chamberlain from the University of Western Ontario, will start in July 2012.

The project will identify and translate the lessons learned from tort law's role in promoting responsible alcohol consumption to the emerging sphere of liability for environmental harm. It argues that the private law courts are crucial in relating scientific knowledge regarding alcohol-related or environmental harms to doctrinal concepts like causation and damage, while taking particular note of the differing approaches to the crucial policy issues in tort law apparent in the Australian High Court and Canadian Supreme Court. From those comparative differences the project will use public interest litigation to link alcohol and climate change tortious liability to ask whether, if at all, tort liability may provide the "teeth" necessary to enforce more general environmental policy in Canada and Australia.

Rowena Maguire was recently successful - in collaboration with the International Project Unit at QUT - in obtaining an AusAID Australian Leadership Awards Fellowship worth close to $200,000.

The funding has been provided for the development of a program which examines climate adaptation and renewable energy policy and practices. The funding allows for 10 candidates from Kenya to travel to QUT for a one month intensive training program in November this year.

On 14 January 2011 HDR student Keith Loft was admitted to the Australasian Institute of Policing as a Fellow in recognition of his contribution to the Institute and policing profession. To date only nine individuals have been admitted as Fellows and fifteen as Honorary Fellows. Keith is the first Queensland Police Officer and Queensland University of Technology representative to be awarded this honour.