In Senate Estimates, David Pocock (ACT) asked what ANU had spent this year on a Nous Group consultancy. The answer was “circa” $50,000, which the senator heard as $750,000.” He was quickly advised the correct number, “which explains why you are not the public service and the ANU,” the Senator responded. They do things more modestly north of the lake.
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International students are arriving en masse before quotas kick-in. 47,000 had their passports scanned on arrival last month, 4% more than the previous peak in October 2019. The rush to enrol is in universities, with 30,650 starters, a third more than in ’19. Voced arrivals are way lower, 7,800, down on 10,100 on 2019. This would be good news for the Government if it was focused on stopping education visas being used as cover by people here to work, rather than being seen to be doing something, anything to reduce immigration. The arrivals number is well-timed for the government, with the quotas bill scheduled for the Senate on Monday. The program is packed, but it is legislation the Government needs to pass for the new limits in international enrolments to be in force for the new year.
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Charles Darwin U is marking time on its quick-step march to med-school glory. VC Scott Bowman announced the campaign to create one in October ’21 and in May the feds announced funding for 40 students in 2026. However, the university was keen to get going and had accepted 20 applicants to start next year.
But the Australian Medical Council has rained on the parade, rejecting the university’s application for a 2025 start and accrediting it from 2026. “This extra planning time will ensure CDU will deliver one of the most relevant and tailored medical programs in the country,” CDU now states.
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Swinburne U bails in Sydney, announcing its mainly IT masters delivered there by Education Centre Australia will be taught-out. The university attributes the move to “various external factors, including uncertainty around international student numbers.” Last month Swinburne U VC Pascale Quester denounced the government for leaving in place the existing “evidence level” process for setting institution’s international student numbers until the proposed quotas pass parliament. “We are now faced with knee-jerk decisions, black-box decision-making processes and unprecedented levels of uncertainty,” she said.
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Rod Balding is in-coming CEO of Standards Australia. The agency’s announcement mentioned his work with sporting organisations, his generic skills and that he has a “a genuine character and social purpose that aligns with our values.” But there was no mention of the job he is leaving – a 16 year partner position at PwC.
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Apart from absolute terror of the Green vote in left-Labor city seats at the next election, want to know what possessed the Government to disappear $16bn in study debt for no policy reason at all?
The Australian Unity Wellbeing Index for 2024, created by a Deakin U team, reports “Young adults were doing it particularly tough. As well as having the lowest personal wellbeing scores, 18-34-year-olds reported the highest feelings of mental distress and loneliness. “
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The Australian Research Council announces $29.9m in Linkage Grants for 56 projects and $38m for Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities.
Overall success rate for projects is 32%, with Griffith U winning six grants, ahead of
RMIT, Uni Melbourne and Uni Sydney all with five. QUT and the universities of New South Wales and Queensland have four each.
Engineering (22) is by far the most funded field. Ditto for LIEF funding, with 15 of 36 projects.
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At the beginning of the week, the new Queensland Government announced it was having a look at the State’s $470m commitment to the Commonwealth investment in a company working to build a quantum computer. Which makes quite a coincidence, Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic releasing the first State of Australian Quantum report. According to Mr Husic, everything is ticking over nicely. “The Government is backing Australian quantum companies at every stage in their growth – from when they have the first spark of an idea, right through to selling their tech on the world stage.” Whether that is governments plural will depend on how sceptical is Queensland Premier Crisafulli.
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Leia Greenslade (Griffith U) and Linda Briskman (Western Sydney U) invite Australian Jews to respond to a survey on “Israeli policies and practices” (sic) in Gaza and the West Bank. Not all Jews, just those agin what Israel is doing, including on “settlement expansion, resource control, economic blockade, land appropriation, military operations, border control and humanitarian access.”
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The National Tertiary Education Union in Victoria states “Monash and Melbourne have signalled no funding for sessional staff in 2025.” To which Monash U responds it “will continue to rely on the engagement of casual professional and academic staff through 2025.” And it adds that 545 previous casual or sessional staff have moved to continuing or fixed term employment.
A spokesperson for the University of Melbourne stated, “we will employee casual employees in 2025.”
The NTEU has campaigned hard across the country to create continuing positions, especially for casually employed academics.
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In backing new system management in submissions to the Accord inquiry, universities knew what they wanted. And now they are, as H. L. Mencken put it, about “to get it good and hard.” The Department of Education advises that the first student support policy is due from universities on March 25. This delivers on an Accord priority. The DoE appears to know what it wants to be told and provides a template, to “simplify and standardise the reporting process.”
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Lest anyone forget the Government is not much interested in private training providers, Skills Minister Andrew Giles made it plain to the Parliament in his second reading speech on the new Free TAFE bill (100 000 places per annum from 2027). “You can’t have a strong VET sector without strong TAFEs,” he said. “Free TAFE will give Australians the confidence to take on study without the extra pressure that paying for courses can bring,” a line Education Minister Jason Clare may not welcome, given constant complaints about HELP loans
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CHEGG has abandoned its Federal Court application for a judicial review of how the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency deals with it. Perhaps CHEGG has decided to concentrate resources on TEQSA’s case in the court which alleges CHEGG contravened 2020 laws that prohibit providing, offering to provide or arranging for a third party to provide an academic cheating service to an HE student.
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Jobs and Skills Australia saves course developers a bunch of research by using 2022 employment advertisements to report “emergent roles” across four broad skills areas, health, care and medical (13), data and technology (ten), “net zero” (nine) and science/engineering (five).
JSA defines “emergent roles” as jobs appearing for the first time or increasing off a low base. Most of the care category was in mental health and assistance for the aged, although “lifestyle assistant” is a support just about anyone could use. The top new tech job was “cloud developer” and electric vehicle technician was number one in the “net zero” category. “Reliability engineer” led the science category.
Demonstrating how long ago was 2022 there was only one job listed in artificial intelligence, AI engineer.
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The Australian Medical Research Advisory Board announces 2024-26 priorities for the Medical Research Future Fund, including,
* better integration with NCRIS and the National One Stop Shop for clinical trials
* supporting biomedical research industries
* “facilitate” progress along the translation pipeline and “de-risk” projects to support
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Adrian Barnett (QUT) announces a new model to speed the research process by publishing first and asking questions later. The model is researchers publish on a pre-print site and send the link to the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science which arranges peer-review and posts reports, plus puts the paper on its site. In this instance it is research papers on the research process. “We will make better use of our community’s scarce and valuable peer review resources, as our reviews are open and free to re-use, he says.
“This removes the expensive and slow journal process and imposes no costs whatsoever on authors. The entire process is transparent, efficient, and community-owned.”
The project launches at the AIMOS conference, in Canberra, next week.
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The party-line won’t always apply if the National Tertiary Education Union gets rule changes approved by the Fair Work Commission. The comrades’ council proposes explicit statements that, “no decision requiring a member to hold or express, or not hold or express any opinion is binding” and that the union cannot direct members to “act in a particular way” related to their employment or to union affairs.” Dial down the plotometer there is no dark plot here – the union is simply correcting ambiguities in drafting.
