Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Mason has given us an insight into his experiences on the Australian National University Council, and I appreciate his reminiscences. I would have to agree with him that our performances were very different. Nonetheless, Senator Mason, I am disturbed that the coalition are so out of touch and so locked into the past that they choose to proceed with a disallowance of this type and then try to suggest to this chamber that they are not really about reintroducing AWAs; they are only interested in the national governance provisions of the previous government’s regulations with regard to the operations of universities.

The truth is that the regulations that he speaks of lock together the national governance protocols with the higher education workplace relations requirements for publicly funded and private providers with approved national priority places. That is set out in the relevant regulations at 7.15—with regard to the national protocols, for instance—and 7.12, which goes to the industrial relations matters. The industrial relations provisions of the regulations which were contained within the national governance protocols were an integral part of the coalition’s approach to the mismanagement of universities. The simple facts in life were this: when in government the coalition took the view that universities were not to be trusted, they could not be relied upon to manage their own affairs, they should not be treated as autonomous academic institutions and they should be micromanaged by the minister.

In essence, the coalition believed that the intellectual elite of this country were hostile to them and that they were to have their capacity to exercise their responsibilities as persons running our national academic institutions circumscribed by the Big Brother of the Liberal Party education ministry. They took the view that university vice-chancellors could not be trusted because they would end up with a sweetheart deal with the NTU. Senator Mason is a former academic. I do not know what scarred him so badly or what terrified him so badly that his whole psychology has been warped by the experience. It is tragic that this sort of frustration has led to such a distorted view of public policy. We have seen it with many of the others and Senator Abetz is a classic example. His experience as a student politician, a failed student politician, led him to the view that universities were places of sin—