When the Senate committee inquiry into the ATEC founding legislation takes evidence on Friday, it will not be an endorse-a-thon; at least if the Liberals have anything to do with it. Plus, Independent member for Fowler Dai Le, explains what ATEC looks like in the neighbourhood she shares with Jason Clare.
There were second reading speeches in the House last week and Liberal education shadow Julian Leeser got stuck into the legislation, largely on the lines of submissions to the Senate.
“It is a turgid technocrats' policy that entrenches more bureaucracy,” he said. In particular, Mr Leeser pointed to:
- ATEC as an unnecessary regulator, with a “suite of powers that is clearly designed and intended to regulate behaviour within a very important sector of our economy.”
- It being set-up more to serve Labor’s political objectives than teaching and learning. “The point of our tertiary education sector is not social development and environmental sustainability. It’s education,” he added.
- The bill “largely” ignores the 166 non-university HE providers and 3700 “tertiary education businesses.” “It is unclear how the ATEC can achieve harmonisation and mobility across the whole of the higher education sector in these circumstances.”
- Opposition from institution and experts across the education community because the Bill does not enact the original ATEC ideal: “unions, government bodies, universities, independent providers, experts—all of these are saying that the ATEC legislation currently before this parliament is not fit to pass.”
Or as Dai Le put it, “I recognise the intention behind the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Long-term planning is good, but, in Fowler, we have seen commissions and taskforces come and go. Without real accountability, there is a risk this Commission becomes just another layer of expensive Canberra-based bureaucracy; well-intentioned on paper but disconnected from students' lived realities.”
As to Government members, all who have followed Education Minister Jason Clare’s announcements for the last year or so will know the case for ATEC, which is generally expressed in generalities about the importance of higher education.
Skills Minister Andrew Giles asserted it yet again in the debate. “We know Labor is the party of education and of training. “We know the power of education and training, which transform lives and transform communities. … The future success of this great country in large part rests on the success of our education and training system, and its ability to meet the needs of Australians and of Australia. This isn't and cannot be a set-and-forget proposition because we can't anticipate all the changes we will see in 10 or 20 years' time. But we can act now to enable the system to work better for students today and into the future, so that their learning journeys can reveal their full potential and that our national potential can be unleashed.”
Good-o, but it had sod all to do with the arguments against ATEC as about to be legislated – that it is another bureaucracy and an extension of the Department of Education’s authority.
Back in August 2024, the independent committee of university panjandrums advising Mr Clare on implementing ATEC dug in against a Department of Education push to control it. And some thought the Minister got their message. “I hear what people are saying about it needing to be necessarily independent of government and there is work going on to make sure that is represented,” he said.
But now, just about every submission on governance to the Senate’s ATEC inquiry warns the Bill makes the Commission a creature of the DoE.
Which creates a question Senators might want to ask on Friday: how did that happen?