Flinders University’s research agenda is being shaped by 30,000 responses to its annual Flinders Wicked Problems Report, a survey machine that turns ordinary Australians’ worries into the university’s priorities for research, policy, investment and collaboration programs.
Who Sets the Agenda
The 2026 report found Australians were most anxious about the cost of living, cited by 65 per cent of respondents. Housing affordability followed at 40 per cent, and crime at 37 per cent. Those numbers are not abstract. They are the raw record of people living under pressure while institutions decide which problems deserve attention and which ones get managed, packaged and studied.
The report said crime and safety ranked as the most important worry in the Northern Territory and were a matter of increasing focus in Victoria. Other national concerns included difficulty accessing quality healthcare and community care at 26 per cent, fears about the environment, including climate change and degradation, at 21 per cent, misinformation in the digital age at 16 per cent and trust in government at 15 per cent. The survey also measured happiness and optimism by state or territory, producing a neat statistical map of public mood for the university to work with.
Flinders consulted different community groups in urban, regional and remote areas, along with government agencies, to determine the types of questions that should be included in the surveys. The annual survey now provides detailed and wide-ranging data on the specifics and weight of community concerns. That’s the apparatus at work: collect the anxiety, sort it, quantify it, and feed it back into institutional planning.
What People Said First
Professor Ray Chan, Flinders deputy vice-chancellor (research), said: “We want to engage the community, we want to engage government, we want to engage industry in shaping our agenda.” He also said: “We need to make sure that research is done for Australian people, for the benefit of our community. We want to reassure the community that their concerns are key.”
The university says it is now establishing doctoral scholarships in the areas of most concern, and those students will work as part of transdisciplinary research teams focused on solving complex social, economic and environmental problems. Chan said: “We asked members of the community to expand on the problems and to come up with solutions they think should be considered as well.” He added: “With the advent of AI, we can now get to community-derived solutions at pace.”
That language sounds participatory. It also shows who holds the steering wheel. Community members are asked to supply the problems and the solutions, while the university, government and industry remain the ones shaping the agenda and deciding what gets funded, studied and scaled.
Money, Power and the Research Pipeline
Launched in 2025, the Flinders Wicked Problems Report has been recognised in this year’s AFR Higher Education Awards. The report’s data also fed directly into a bigger institutional project: crime and safety were of such concern in the 2025 report that Flinders instigated and leads an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Prisoner Reintegration.
The centre will focus on the root causes of incarceration and the problem of reoffending, with broad-based statistics showing that half of all prisoners reoffend within two years of release from prison. Flinders took the report’s data to the South Australian government and asked for support for the federal government’s competitive funding process. Chan said: “We showed them all this data about how people feel unsafe in the society, and we told them that this was a huge problem the community were asking us to address.” He said that led to “this $35 million centre, with a range of partners including corrective services departments across Australia.”
That’s how the funding pipeline works: public anxiety becomes institutional evidence, evidence becomes a grant pitch, and the result is a $35 million centre with state-linked partners.
Healthcare follows the same pattern. The report found 31 per cent of Baby Boomers and 34 per cent of the interwar generations are worried about access to healthcare, compared with 19 per cent of Gen Z. Flinders is looking at ways the billions already spent on home care packages can be optimised to help increasing numbers of elderly Australians live safely at home for longer periods.
Flinders’ $3 million Centre of Research Excellence in Optimising Health Care in the Home for Older Australians will bring together experts from research, healthcare and aged care. It will focus on care coordination, health and quality of life for older Australians, and on whether the skills of nurses and allied health professionals sent into homes are suited to recipients’ needs. Flinders also leads the Registry of Older Australians, or ROSA, which includes details of the health requirements of 3.85 million older people, according to Chan.
Chan said: “Flinders’ strength is in ageing and aged care research. With these data sets and the Centre of Excellence we will have national and international impact.” The university’s own words make the hierarchy plain. The people at the bottom supply the worries, the data and the lived reality. The institutions above them turn that into programs, centres and impact statements.