There was the usual guff from lobbies congratulating ministers on Monday and mentioning important issues they need to address. Many issues from the Academy of Science, which listed seven. The top one is for Industry and Science Minister Tim Ayres, who should, “embrace the Strategic Examination of Research and Development.” Perhaps Senator Ayres should read the review team’s discussion paper first – lest he gets stuck with his predecessor’s agenda.
Universities Australia was also quick to congratulate the new Opposition leader, Sussan Ley and the Nats re-elected David Littleproud. ““Our sector has a strong working relationship with the Coalition, and we look forward to that continuing,” said the impeccably polite Luke Sheehy. Given the regular roastings universities copped in Senate committee hearings from education shadow Sarah Henderson, he is too kind.
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Three Uni Queensland researchers scanned House of Reps and Senate Hansard from1901 to now to research how arguments have changed about “unparliamentary” language. And if you enjoy Question Time you will find fascinating the paper by Sam Hames, Michael Haugh and Simon Musgrave, HERE. They didn’t wade through the 1.8 million speeches across 15,000 sitting days themselves, downloading all of Hansard and searching the dataset.
It’s a great way to support the case for HASS researchers accessing the data-crunching capacity of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure. But it is about to be obsolete. The first Senate sitting week after the election is looming large.
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The Mumbai market just got tougher for Uni Western Australia, which has Indian Government permission to establish a branch campus there. So does the Chicago-based Illinois Institute of Technology, which presents a powerful pitch, “democratising access to experiential learning and ensuring that the next generation of engineers, scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and leaders can emerge from every part of the globe.”
There is no mention of pathways and IIT-Mumbai will teach full degrees but brand-recognition wise, everybody, everywhere knows where the Blues Brothers came from.
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A Uni Newcastle team invites “anyone involved in academic work” to complete a survey, “to provide to provide insight into the experience of academic work in Australian universities.” There are multiple choice and discursive questions, the latter providing opportunity for venting. Of which FC suggests there will be a bit. Let the researchers know what you think here.
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Two takes on International Nurses Day (Monday for anybody who missed it). Unis Aus was out with its standard message that the world will end without university trained (insert occupation here). However Swinburne U was making the case for more TAFE training nurses as a way to meet a projected 70,000 shortage in a decade. Dual-sector Swinburne U teaches nursing in both HE and VET divisions. FC wonders what those in the former made of the idea to expand the latter
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The NTEU is pleased indeed to announce Charles Darwin U staff have approved a new enterprise agreement and that union-negotiated wages and conditions are in place at campuses across the country. So, is CDU the last of Bargaining Round Eight or the start of Round Nine? Perhaps a bit of both. FC understands the CDU deal extends the existing agreement, with benefits, to next October. More unis are likely to follow – it appears there are bad cases of bargaining fatigue around the traps and few are up to arguing whether clause MMCCCLI (tea breaks) contradicts MMCCCLI (morning coffee).
Delaying bargaining might also suit candidates for mid-year union elections who may not want live negotiations to be an issue during the campaign. Around half the public universities in the country have agreements up for renewal in the first three quarters of ’26.
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Adrian Barnett (QUT) regularly reports on quality-control in research publishing. A new paper sets out how he found 4,000 common spelling mistakes in 21 million abstracts of health and medicine papers with 1,916 appearing 48,000 times.
Professor Barnett expected to find an increase in errors over time, because of an “average decline in research quality.” He did not – the incidence peaked at 27 per 10,000 in 2016, but has fallen since. He suggests this could be due to better spell-check software, more use of LLMs in writing or even human scrutiny – based on the principle of the more authors, the fewer the errors.
This matters; the more the spelling errors, the fewer citations, he points out. “Some researchers may not cite a paper after reading a spelling error in the abstract, as this may undermine their confidence in the paper’s robustness.” This is harsh in the case of the most common mistake, authors writing “odd ratio” when they mean “odds” (single number, but it is a ratio).