Guess what the Senate Select Committee on Productivity is inquiring into?
And guess what submissions from HE don’t address?
Correct on both – there are ideas from many on what could be done to improve productivity with more public money, but that rather misses the point. Especially for the non-market sector, including education – the committee quotes the Australian Bureau of Stats suggestion that productivity there is now negative.
And when HE lobbies do actually engage with ways to work more productively, the focus is not what they can do better, but what Government should stop doing to them. Universities Australia recognised a gift-horse when it saw one – riding hard on an example question in the select committee’s discussion paper, whether universities or miners were more over-regulated. UA certainly thought its members were burdened by government, diverting resources from teaching and research.
“Too many capable people are spending too much time on tasks that minimally reduce risk yet consume substantial effort – filling in forms, chasing down data, creating reports and undertaking mandatory compliance processes,” Universities Australia stated.
“The safest course becomes doing what has always been done. Innovation, agility and experimentation are discouraged because deviation carries regulatory risk.”
But it was effectively silent as to how universities could lift the quality and quantity of teaching and research from existing resources.
The National Tertiary Education Union, was even quieter, not making a submission. This seems strange, given the union’s long-standing claim that its members are over-worked by management and it could negotiate more productive work practises through enterprise bargaining.
Perhaps that is because the NTEU does not want to get into an argument based on change in workplaces. It is one management representative, the Australian Higher Education Association, wants to have. AHEIA warns that the Fair Work Commission can only arbitrate on wages in university enterprise negotiations – all other terms and conditions must be the same, or better, than the enterprise agreement to be replaced.
This means, “unions have little to lose from allowing deadlocked clauses to proceed to arbitration, while employers are discouraged from pursuing productivity-enhancing reform through bargaining over salaries.”
But like the union, AHEIA exists to protect its members – and university managements are not big on disruptive productivity.
Among the professoriate, Matt Pinnuck (Uni Melbourne) voiced his concerns about productivity during another Senate inquiry last year (FC here). “Universities do not operate with the goal of producing efficiently and minimising costs. Instead, universities aim to spend all available revenue, on an unlimited list of ‘grand’ projects, in an effort to increase their prestige,” he wrote.
And what they spend per student varies, to understate it. Professor Pinnucki used 2022 figures to show the average annual spend varied from $9,350 at Charles Sturt U to $37,390 at ANU – nearly twice the lowest-cost Go8, the then Uni Adelaide.
Perhaps universities do not know they have a productivity problem. Unless they do and just hope nobody else notices.