Foreword
AUSTRALIAN
SENATE
Employment,
Workplace Relations and Education
REFERENCES COMMITTEE
7 November 2003
Senator George
Campbell
Chair
Employment, Workplace Relations
and Education Committee
Parliament
House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
Dear Senator Campbell
The subcommittee formed to deal with the inquiry into the
proposed budget changes to higher education has completed its report: Hacking
Australia’s Future, Threats to institutional autonomy, academic freedom and
student choice in Australian higher education, and we commend it to the
full committee.
Yours sincerely
|
Senator Kim
Carr
Subcommittee
Chair
|
|
|
Senator Trish
Crossin
|
Report formally adopted by the committee on 5 November 2003 for tabling in the Senate.
|
|
Senator Natasha
Stott Despoja
|
|
|
Senator John
Tierney
|
Senator George
Campbell
Chair
|
FOREWORD
Any comprehensive view of our universities should also take
account of how the public universities help define what it is to be Australian.[1]
...if we create market universities run purely on market principles
they may be of their age, but they will not be able to transcend it.[2]
As society advances, the world for individuals becomes more
complex. Knowledge, and the institutional generators and custodians of
knowledge, become more crucial to peoples’ ability as citizens to negotiate
their world. Knowledge creation and knowledge transmission become essential for
collective social and economic wellbeing and progress.
Thus, higher education must more closely intersect with public
policy making. Australia is slow in recognising how important this is, compared
with other OECD countries, which are leading the way by reinvesting even more
public funds in their universities.
The policy direction embodied in Backing Australia’s Future
would tear public investment out of the university sector and shift an
unprecedented level of costs direct to students. As it is by no means certain
that students are able or willing to take up this new cost burden, the new
funding arrangements could be unsustainable. At the same time, in a contrary
move, the Government’s powers to direct the minutiae of daily academic and
administrative decision-making in universities would rise in a manner
unparalleled in the history of Australian education and unseen in other
democratic countries.
This extraordinary expansion of the Minister’s powers in
university governance and administration is a consequence of the policy
decision to abolish the legislative distinction between established public
universities, on the one hand, and small, sometimes fly-by-night private
providers on the other. These peripheral providers will seek Commonwealth
funding on the same basis as universities. In a ‘market’ where all providers
compete for the custom of a sole purchaser – the Commonwealth – it is
apparently unconscionable for public universities to enjoy the comparative
advantages and the flexibility accorded by their current levels of
institutional autonomy. With new private players in the wings, the Government
feels compelled by the doctrine of competitive neutrality to institute
draconian regulation of the sector which has hitherto been unnecessary for
public universities.
Finally, the Government has used the occasion of this
legislation to attack the industrial rights of university staff and the
democratic rights of students to form associations that provide them with
services and representation. These matters are entirely dissociated from the
other policy aims of the package and indicate a bewildering preoccupation with
ideological concerns which have no relevance to the practical needs of
students. The committee joins the almost unanimous voices of members of the
higher education community in expressing dismay and alarm at the direction
taken by the Government in this legislative package. It calls on the Senate to
reject it in its entirety.
Navigation: Previous Page | Contents | Next Page