Conventional research is slow and costly, often solving problems in isolation focused on treatment solutions rather than prevention and early intervention.
The Kids Research Institute Australia (The Kids) and Murdoch Children's Research Institute Australia (MCRI) - Australia's largest children's research institutes - are collaborating on a joint submission to the 2026-27 Federal Budget to outline how modern cohorts can address the urgent health and wellbeing needs of children and families across Australia, now and into the future.
New strategies are urgently needed to:
- Help children and their parents thrive and prevent illness
- Test the effectiveness of real world intervention and prevention treatments
- Provide strategies to cope with the projected rise in Government spending on the care sector (health care, NDIS and aged care) to 10.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2062-631.
What is Generation Australia?
Generation Australia is anchored by GenV, Australia’s largest-ever children’s cohort (MCRI), and ORIGINS (The Kids and Joondalup Health Campus). These contemporary cohorts include 60,000 consented Australian families, and a unique capability to test interventions at scale, in all service sectors and populations.
Generation Australia is not a single-issue cohort, but a nation-wide platform where the complex, interconnected and emerging challenges to health and social inequities for children and their parents can be tackled individually and together.
Generation Australia offers the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and the Australian Research Council (ARC), an existing and ready-made opportunity to leverage Australia’s child and parent cohorts to enable world class Australian and International research.
Combined with the once in a generation policy convergence of the draft National Health and Medical Research Strategy, Thriving Kids and the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to support government investment in prevention and early intervention2, Generation Australia provides a ready-made solution. Cohorts are also cost effective.
The WA Busselton Health Study found that using established cohorts delivered a social return on investment of $3.20 for every $1 invested (Commissioned report, unpublished).
Funding Request
The Kids and MCRI are seeking a one-off bridging co-investment of $39m over four years from the Australian Government.
This co-investment will build on the $100m already invested in these two cohorts, including $30m from the Victorian Government and $1.5 million from Western Australian government.
- $2m (2026-28) to co-design the coordination, governance, business plan and sustainable operational funding of “Generation Australia”, to be led by MCRI and The Kids. This will be co-designed with Australian children’s cohorts for potential delivery to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy’s (NCRIS) next roadmap in 2026;
- $31m of bridge funding for Generation Victoria (known as GenV), the largest and most inclusive child and family cohort of 50,000 families crucial to enable the potential of Generation Australia; and
- $6m of bridge funding for ORIGINS in 2026-30: a leading Western Australian based state cohort that has a proven track record of accelerating world class research and is equally crucial to enable the potential of Generation Australia.
To address the gap between no sustained research infrastructure funding in Australia cohort operations, and The Kids and MCRI unable to sustain these cohorts without a co-investment for operational funding, MCRI and The Kids are working to secure funding via the 2026 NCRIS roadmap.
If the NCRIS application is successful in 2026-27, only $19m (of the $39m) of investment sought in this proposal will be required (until 2028-29), reducing this proposal cost by almost 50% and saving $20m.
