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Speech
Edited Transcript of Address Given to the South Australian Press Club
26 April, 2002
BRENDAN NELSON:
Members of the South Australian Press Club, ladies and gentlemen.
I must say that I didn't expect to receive the privilege of being
able to serve as the first Education, Science and Training Minister in
Cabinet for the first Government elected in the 21st Century. Every day
that I have the privilege to do this job is a blessing and it's a
blessing because it's all about our future.
When Sir Robert Menzies addressed the founding members of the Liberal
Party of Australia in October 1944, he said to every good citizen the
state owes not only a chance in life but a self-respecting life, and
embedded in those two statements by two statesmen from two different
countries is not so much where Australian education has been but very
much a philosophy and a driving force which I intend will see us through
whatever period I have the privilege to be the Minister.
At the war's end, the world was characterised by 100 segmented
markets and Australia's place in it had been defined culturally and
economically by engagement in two World Wars and agrarian land and
labour-intensive industries based primarily on the exploitation of
natural resources – in mining, agriculture and manufacturing. And when
you think of us as Australians today we look back on that from the safe
and paradoxically insecure distance of sixty years; in a world and a
country that's rapidly changing; in a country that's moving onto new
horizons and challenges undreamt of perhaps only a decade ago -
especially for those Australians living at the epicentre of economic and
cultural changes that are being worked into our society. You can
understand why there is a sense of unease in many parts of this country,
and perhaps it is into that context that in particular our consideration
of where Australian higher education should be placed needs most
important to be put.
We're a population of 19 million people with 0.3 percent of world
population. We’re still only 1 percent of world trade and 6 percent of
APEC. And we’re living in a world that is now coalescing into three
major trading blocks and there’s no place to hide from the winds of
reform. By that of course we mean the things that we as human beings
most fear and that is change.
I am privileged to represent the electorate of Bradfield on Sydney’s
upper north shore. Most of the people that I represent want Australia to
be a republic; they readily embrace the share market; they see Australia
in every economic and cultural sense as being a part of the rest of the
world. When they raise issues of information and communications
technology with me, it’s usually about slow internet access. When you go
from the Opera House or Melbourne Cultural Arts Centre or the Brisbane
Exhibition Centre; to the outer suburbs of our large cities, some
regions of Australia and indeed much of rural Australia, you find that
many Australians feel a sense of economic and educational and
technological disengagement from many of those Australians perhaps that
I am privileged to represent.
I was opening the Tweed Heads campus of Southern Cross University two
weeks ago which was attended by 60 people. It’s a facility which,
specialises in particular, in information and communications
technologies, interactive video-teleconferencing and a whole range of
new modalities. I said to them that if you think back, 100 years ago
there probably would have been 2, maybe 3000 people there to open the 20th
century equivalent of what that and other institutions of learning are
doing across Australia. And that is a century ago we would have been
opening train lines. Most Australians, and I know South Australians in
particular, understand the importance of rail infrastructure and the
importance of the role that it played in the development, economic and
cultural, of the 20th century and that it will continue to play in this.
But the rail lines for the 21st century will be increasingly
based in knowledge and education and information. And those industries
that made this country what it is will continue to be important, and
enhancing and adding value to those traditional commodities will be
found very much in knowledge and in the application of science. The next
generation are more likely to find that their careers will be based very
much in industries of knowledge, in health, in education,
telecommunications, biotechnology and a whole range of emerging
industries.
In thinking about and articulating a vision of education in
Australia, one thing that drives me is two photographs. The first is
when you walk into my ministerial office in Canberra is a large framed
photograph of the late Neville Bonner. Bonner was of course the first
aboriginal Australian elected into federal parliament. And the reason
that it is there is Bonner had only one year of formal education at
Beaudesert High School; did three grades in one year, had been denied an
education by virtue of poverty, and by the fact that non-indigenous
parents would not allow an indigenous person to attend a primary school
south of Lismore. Bonner said before he died that his grandmother had
taught him a number of things but the most important was that if he
could learn to read and write and communicate and have the courage to
express his ideas and treat people with decency, that he would go a long
way. He also said before he died that in his experience of the world,
the two commodities that we needed more of were human compassion and
understanding.
The second photograph, which is a more recent edition to my office,
which sits immediately behind my desk, is a photograph of me with a
young woman called Tara Thompson. Tara Thompson lives in the southern
suburbs of Adelaide. She is one of a number of young people in this city
whose lives have been turned around by virtue of Hallett Cove Youth
Pathways project and a series of programs run through the Southern
Adelaide Educational Program. The reason that her photograph is there is
because I think that our vision of education in Australia needs to be
that all of us should see education as about learning – a process that
begins not long after we are born and which continues fairly much
throughout our lives until the end of it. We should see education as
different from training, though each of them are important and
complimentary. We need to understand the difference between education
and training but also the importance of knowing that difference. That
acquiring a set of skills for a job, a utilitarian objective is one that
will give us skills that might last only five to seven years before they
need to be upgraded or indeed trained. It’s education that gives us
resilience for life itself. That we should encourage young people to
remain at school for as long as they are able, to preferably complete
year 12 and to see a horizon that includes higher education and the
importance of undertaking a university degree. We are equally determined
that young people in the early and middle part of their secondary school
education know that there are choices available to them which include
vocational education and training, which include TAFE, which include New
Apprenticeships and Traineeships and that the decisions that they make –
if they choose to undertake any one of those choices, that the young
person who decide that they will undertake training through TAFE or do
an Apprenticeship, that their lives, that their educational choices are
no less important to us than those who choose and are able to go onto
higher education.
And Tara Thompson is important. I’d only been in the job five days
and I rang this young woman, and she had just completed a First Aid
Certificate, and she is just as proud of that First Aid Certificate as I
am of my medical degree. She is now undertaking a course at TAFE, and
the whole message to remind me is that when I go to Australian
universities, and a group of students say to me the only thing we care
about is what happens to students and what happens to students in this
university – what I say to them is of course, it’s important what
happens in universities, but you should not ever forget the hard work of
many Australians individually and in business whose taxes essentially
underwrite education in all its forms, including in higher education.
I was standing outside the Queensland University of Technology and I
said to this woman standing next to me, ‘what do you think about
universities?’ She said ‘I don’t know really – I applied to go to one
once but I didn’t get in.’ She said, ‘Are you going in there?’. I said
‘Yes I am – I’m going into meet the management team, meet students and
get a good feel for QUT.’ She said ‘You might tell them something for me
when you’re in there – I work really hard, I know that my taxes help pay
for what people learn inside that university but when they apply for the
same job that I’m applying for, they’re more likely to get it. You just
let them know that.’ And I think that whatever our concerns are, as they
should be for Australian higher education, we should not ever forget
that there are Australians whose determination is to feed their kids,
pay their car loans and their mortgages, who have not ever seen the
inside of an Australian university – who dream that their children might
do, whose needs and aspirations in this regard are no more or less
important than of anybody else who has spent a lifetime committed to
higher education.
When I came into the portfolio, within three weeks, I had made a
decision – the culmination of which I am about to outline to you. The
decision that I made is that the status quo of Australian Universities
will be very difficult to sustain. There are people in the sector that
argue that there is a crisis in Australian higher education. I
understand why they argue that there is a crisis. Can I just say to
those that argue that there is a crisis in Australian higher education
that if you want to see a crisis in education, go to the Northern
Territory and go to places outside of Darwin and Alice Springs. Then
come back and you’ll be able to me that only 16 of 378 Aboriginal
children can pass a basic Year 3 reading test and only 23 of 369 can
pass a basic Year 5 reading test. I’d suggest that’s a crisis in
education. Where only a quarter of the kids in Arnhem Land even attend
school – that’s a crisis. Also if you want to go and speak to Reverend
Bill Crews who runs the Exodus Foundation, based in Sydney’s inner west,
when he’s not feeding the poor, looking after prostitutes and drug
addicts, he runs with Macquarie University a program out the back of the
school for kids who spent five years in the education system and then
come along and say, in a mentoring and tutoring program, ‘oh it’s the
black stuff you read’. You want to talk about crisis, maybe that’s a
crisis. Or you ought to talk about Australians at least, Australians of
a working age (still two generations) who hear us talking about emails
and internets and connectedness to the rest of the world, who still
don’t even know how to turn a computer on. Maybe that’s a kind of a
crisis to which we need to turn our minds, the first instalment of which
I’ll be making an announcement about shortly. And then I could also say
that a sector that’s got $20 billion in fixed assets, $4.4 billion in
liquid assets, borrowings for the sector at $426 million representing 2%
of asset value and revenues this year of $10.4 billion – almost $2
billion more than it had 6 years ago, I don’t consider that there is any
serious grounds for arguing that there is a crisis.
But if you think about where we want Australian higher education to be –
not this year or next year – but where it’s going to be 10 or 20 years
from now, we have to make very important decisions now about putting
Australian higher education on a sound footing for the 21st
Century. Today I am releasing the first of what will be a series of
discussion papers to inform public debate on our challenges, the real
challenges, serious challenges, facing Australia’s higher education and
what our choices are as a society in relation to the policies we might
choose to adopt and implement, and the debate should not – under any
circumstances – be confined to those who are privileged to work in
Australian higher education, or who are students of it. It is a debate
which all Australians should be party to and to which we all owe –
whether we have ever been to university, whether we understand what goes
on in Australian higher education or whether we think our children might
ever need to do so.
It’s time also, I think, that we have the maturity to undertake this
debate in a way that is free of highly politicised and emotional
language which has characterised the past. It seems that every time an
Australian education Minister says "we need to have a look Australian
universities and think about changes, and think about the future" we
seem to descend very quickly into a kind of not only a partisan
political kind of modus operandi, but it’s almost as if people in the
higher education sector are digging into an entrenched position which is
often out of step with where the rest of the community is. The ideas and
the different choices which are promoted in this first discussion paper
are not Government policy, but they are intended to stimulate a
discussion and hopefully inform a discussion which is a little bit more
informed than some of which has passed for debate in the past.
I have (with the support of the Secretary of my Department, Dr Peter
Shergold, who is here today) established a specialist unit within the
department who work specifically on higher education reform. That
specialist unit is being overseen by Mr Bob Goddard who has been
recommended to us by the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee, I have
also formally invited the Business Council of Australia to nominate
another person to join that specialist group, that group is producing
the discussion papers who will be digesting the responses to them, and
will also be undertaking some focussed response work with organisations
and individuals. I’ve also established, and am announcing today the
composition of a Reference Group which will directly advise me on the
issues that are being put into the public arena, the responses from not
only the broader Australian society but the different parts of the
Australian higher education sector, and seeing we’re in South Australia
you should know that Madeleine Wooley who is the director of the
Adelaide Institute of TAFE and the Deputy Chairman of the TAFE Directors
Australia, will be on that Reference Group. She will be joined by
Professor Denise Bradley, the Vice Chancellor of the University of South
Australia and Mr Robert Champion de Crespigny who, of course, has
impeccable business credentials, as well as being the Chancellor of
Adelaide University.
It’s my intention that the subsequent discussion papers will cover
governance, administration within the sector, the interface between
vocational education and training and Australian higher education. We’ll
also be looking specifically at finance; quality of teaching, research
and scholarship and a final paper on specialisation within the sector
and regional engagement. 13 years after John Dawkins amalgamated the
colleges of vast education and universities and the introduction of
HECS, we need to ask ourselves what defines a university? To what extent
does scholarship, teaching and research define a university? One Vice
Chancellor said to me, recently, that of another institution – he said
"I don’t think things are all that good there, they put a lot of
emphasis on teaching and there isn’t much research", Similarly there is
an argument raging in Victoria about whether Melbourne University
Private should be stripped of its title of a university because its
research is entirely driven by business interests and
commercial-in-confidence arrangements. Whatever the legitimacy of those
two points of view as examples, it is important that not just
philosophically, but practically, we say now what does define a
university? Could a university, for example, be an institution that
engages in high quality teaching, in scholarship, and in research which
is predominantly focussed on the regional, economic and social needs of
the area in which it is based? Is that an appropriate thing for us to be
looking at?
Another fundamental question is who is going to university? Why are
they going? We know that four out of ten don’t complete, one of those
four comes back to it, of the three who don’t complete half leave in the
first year; why do they leave? Why are they there in the first place?
What should be we doing to support those students to see that they are
less likely to leave? And one of the reasons why I am so determined that
young people feel that they can make choices, in terms of education to
which they in their hearts feel they are best suited, instead of meeting
the unfulfilled ambitions of their parents, and of society that are
projected on to them, is that if that young people feel that instead of
doing what their parents often argue that they should do, or society
says they should do (because as a society we say to young Australians
increasingly – success is a mobile phone, fashionable clothes and BMW’s
and outstanding results in year 12 and if you don’t achieve any or all
of those things in all kinds of ways, then perhaps you are a
disappointment). They are the messages that young people pick up early
in their secondary education, and if any of you have spent much of your
lives dealing with young people who are disengaged and you’ve scratched
the surface, you find beneath it, that is one of the things. So apart
from the human dimension of this, there is also a question as to whether
university places, where there will always be an attrition, always,
let’s just make sure that as best we can, as a society, as
educationalists and as parents, that people go there for the right
reasons. Another issue, which is covered in this paper is how are
students being taught? What’s going to lead to more customised
approaches to degree acquisition that recognises models of learning
completed through different providers at different times. Can you enrol,
for example, the University of South Australia and undertake courses in
another institution and graduate from the University of South Australia
with that degree? Of course you can. We, at the moment, do not run a
funding and Government arrangement which makes it easy. How can we
improve access for people from low socio economic backgrounds – to
indigenous students, students with disabilities, and in particular
students from rural and isolated parts of the country?
One of the key issues that’s canvassed in this paper, and will be the
subject of standalone paper is specialisation. I went to one Australian
university that runs 167 courses, 96 of the courses have fewer than 5
students enrolled. 20% of the units being offered in Australian
Universities have less than 5 students enrolled. More than 4,000
university units have only one student enrolled, now in many cases there
are sounds arguments why that should be the case, but in many others
there are not. At the moment what we do as a nation, and what we the
Commonwealth Government does, is we effectively say to universities
offer a smorgasbord, and we penalise (in a sense) universities that try
to specialise and differentiate, notwithstanding the fact that many of
them had sought to do so under the current arrangements. We also have a
one-size-fits-all funding model, and if I look forward into the future,
which is such an important part of the job, there are 38 publicly funded
universities, can we have a funding arrangement which puts a sound
foundation under universities that are in (inaudible) and universities
which are described by some Vice Chancellors as "equity universities".
Can we put a solid foundation under them financially which encourages
them to specialise and to collaborate, at the same time we might be able
to enable one or two of Australia’s larger institutions to genuinely
aspire to be world class as international competitors? Under the current
arrangements, if we continue as we are, neither will be possible.
Governance and administration is another area that will be the
subject of a specific discussion paper. We need to look at governing
bodies and who is on governing bodies. Why are they on governing bodies?
What roles do they have? What skills do they bring to the group? And at
the moment, the university Acts which establish universities are all
different throughout the country, so what govern commercialisation,
intellectual property, or the management of physical resources in one
state, is quite different from that in another, and in that regard in
particular the last thing that I want to do as Minister is to strive to
say to State and Territory Governments what they should do in this
regard. We should come to this recognising that we as Australians,
whatever our politics, have a common set of problems, and we should work
as best we can together to see that we can address them. There are
issues of workplace relations and universities needing the flexibility
to be able to rapidly change course structures and course offerings to
meet the needs of particular students, the commercialisation of
intellectual property, (inaudible) of private sector investment in
university infrastructure – they are again part of the issues we need to
address. In other parts of the world, universities rely fairly heavily
on business and industry engagement and investment. That is not the
culture in Australia, and (inaudible) taxation and corporate Government
arrangements make it relatively easy for a university and industry to do
just that.
One of the other real concerns, in fact I often say to my colleagues
that it’s not the economic indices with which we are so, understandably,
concerned that will define our future and our destiny as a people. It is
our values, our beliefs, the way we relate to one another to see our
place in the world. And universities – as John Niland the Vice
Chancellor of the University of New South Wales said to me a few months
ago, he said "universities pass the soul from one generation to the
next", and one of the concerns I think we should all have, where
universities increasingly -as they must – look for private sources of
funding – is what is the role for humanities, fine arts, philosophy,
literature, language and all of those things that define who we are and
give meaning to our society. How do we protect them? How do we make sure
that their place is secure in an environment which increasingly looks at
commercialisation and private sector investments, and that will be
covered at length throughout the course of the review.
One of the other problems facing the sector, I think also is us. It
is Commonwealth regulation. The extent to which my Department regulates
Australian Universities is in itself an area that needs serious reform.
We’ve entered the realms of public accountability, but I am determined,
and in fact the secretary is currently looking at this, I am determined
to see that we cut some of the red tape which exists between us and
Australian universities so the universities can spend more time teaching
and researching, and less time reporting to the Commonwealth Government.
And, finally, I am currently also working on some reforms which will
(inaudible) the internationalisation and marketing of education from
Australia and its universities.
Thank you
[ends]
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