Universities Australia says its members can improve national productivity, they just need the government to help them first. UA’s pitch is in its submission to the Treasurer’s Economic Reform Roundtable, which meets this month.
How universities can help
Mostly by doing more of the same, “continue to educate the domestic and international graduates … our economy needs.”
But UA does offer specifics, including:
- A strategy for life-long learning
- “Designing new qualifications to upskill or retrain students in line with industry needs”
- “Breaking down real and artificial barriers between VET, TAFE and universities”
- Undertake research aligned with Australia's industrial needs
- “Continue to engage with the government’s initiatives to improve university governance.”
With a little help from the Feds
Mainly in the form of money, for:
- Correcting the “perverse incentives” in the student funding system by replacing the Job-ready Graduates model “with equitable student contribution rates”
- Extending HELP funding to micro-credentials
- Raising the PhD stipend
- Collaboration vouchers for SMEs to access university research capability at zero/low cost
- Re-establishing the Education Infrastructure Fund, “to provide a pipeline of investment to finance teaching and research infrastructure to serve the nation.”
No, people in the Treasurer’s office won’t recognise it either. The EIF was established by a Howard Government only to be ransacked by the coalition, with Labor support, in 2019.
And then there is one that undoubtedly has nothing to do with sector self-interest; getting bureaucracies off HE’s back by merging ASQA and TEQSA and reducing reporting to government complexity, including ATEC, which has not even started yet.
Meanwhile, university managements’ IR lobby point to problems they say are crippling university growth.
Craig Laughton (Australian Higher Education Industrial Association) points to four failings, blaming the feds for “good intentions gone wrong.”
- Universities creating continuing jobs for small numbers of casuals: has “disenfranchised people who like the flexibility of casual work”
- The “clamp” on fixed-term contracts generally in research “is faltering so far as job creation is concerned”
- Anachronistic” redundancy provisions in enterprise agreements are a reason not to hire permanent staff, “why should an employee of just six months be eligible for more than 50 weeks of redundancy?”
- Errors in paying staff created by complex systems. “Simplifying pay structures and reducing the number of variable rates would not only improve compliance but also free up resources currently spent on manual checks and corrections”
According to Mr Laughton, the prospects of simplifying employment conditions to expand economy-expanding teaching and growth are slimmer due to the government’s new intractable bargaining rules.
He says they make it easy for unions to shut-down discussion of needed change by refusing to budge on obsolete conditions with unintended consequences.