Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Perhaps it is second to Yale, which I think certain honourable members may have been to, but I am a Harvard fan myself—much to the disappointment of the member for Flinders. Harvard are rewriting their MBA. It certainly has respect as probably the best MBA program in the world but they are rewriting it. They are saying, ‘We need to keep up. We need to go ahead of the pack. We might have the best course in the world but we’re going to do it again. We’re going to make sure that we are always continually improving.’ I wonder whether Harvard needed to check with Washington DC. I wonder whether they needed permission from the Secretary of Education in the United States. I doubt it very much. As I say, we have this government holding back innovation in our tertiary education sector, strangling education, with these controls instead of letting vice-chancellors do their jobs. Instead of letting academics come up with new and innovative ways of managing our university sector, everything has to go through the minister and through the minister’s office.

I have only a couple of minutes left, but I do want to give credit where credit is due. This week I read of a new initiative from the minister that I thought was quite good—the graduate passport, which would explain what goes into Australian courses to people overseas. That sounds like a reasonable approach, so I congratulate the minister on it. It could be improved dramatically, as could the status of our education throughout the world, so that perhaps we would not need a graduate passport, if the government embraced Labor’s approach of the Higher Education Quality Agency. We do have an agency at the moment with very few teeth and, I would argue, limited resources to ensure that the quality of all our universities reaches world’s best practice. We need the Australian Higher Education Quality Agency and we need it to have real teeth.

I congratulate the Deputy Leader of the Opposition for that idea. It came through the white paper that my honourable friend the member for Kingsford Smith referred to. It is one of the best policy documents I have read in a long time, especially considering it was done with the meagre resources of opposition and not the mega resources of the department. The meagre resources of opposition have put together what I think will go down as one of the very significant policy documents in the future of tertiary education in this country. The reforms embraced in it, which will form the basis of the reforms of a Labor government, will in time be compared with the Dawkins reforms of 1988 for their impact on higher education.

Australia will be paying a price for this government’s neglect for many years to come. It will take a long time to catch up after the seven per cent reduction in university funding that we have seen over the last 10 years. It will take a long time to catch up with the rest of the OECD, which has had a 50 per cent increase in tertiary funding over that time. We do not have a long time to wait but I fear we will have to wait for a Labor government to get it.

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