Natasha Stott Despoja (SA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

But some of us are aware of his former role as an academic. I would have thought someone with such a close association with the university sector, particularly in Queensland, would have been at the forefront of the fight for institutional and academic autonomy. Having said that, it is a bit like we are living in an alternative reality at the moment, just looking at the motion and the principles behind it. There is a lot of irony in this place at the moment. With this motion and the legislation to which it refers, we have got the Labor Party at the forefront, it seems, of arguing for institutional autonomy and reduced red tape and, on the other hand, we have now got the coalition calling for a prescriptive, big government approach.

It is an irony that the previous government was the only one in the OECD to reduce funding for higher education over the period of 1995 to 2004 and yet at the same time felt inclined to dictate terms to the higher education sector, arguably more than any preceding government. The level of interference in institutional and academic autonomy and the amount of ministerial discretion afforded to the minister for higher education under the previous government was unprecedented, quite extraordinary.

I also find it ironic that the previous government campaigned for universities to become more diverse but then instituted generic rules of governance for the entire sector. It is quite something that a political party which frequently claims that government does not know best and should get out of the way as much as possible would support regulations that seem to do the exact opposite.

My party is uncomfortable with an approach that tries to enforce a governance model upon universities and then—and this is even worse—penalises them if they fail to comply. It suggests that universities somehow cannot be trusted to manage their own operations in a way that is beneficial to themselves and the nation. We need to remember that universities, while dependent on public funding—and we have all seen how that has been drastically reduced proportionally over many years—are operating in what I thought the Liberals would find attractive, and that is a so-called competitive market. They have a vested interest, presumably, in self-improvement. They do not have to have it dictated to them.

I acknowledge that some universities have said that the protocols process has in fact improved their system of governance. That is welcome. I make two points following that. Firstly, if the protocols have done their job, why does the opposition insist on their being retained? Why does the opposition feel they need to be retained now if they have had the impact that the opposition desired them to have? Secondly, how can the opposition be so certain that the governance rules laid out in the protocols are so right for each and every university that a financial penalty should be imposed if they are not adopted?

Despite the positive feedback from some universities about the protocols, the sector is broadly opposed to their retention because they subject universities to a very prescriptive formula. I support the principle that universities should be accountable for the public funding they receive, but I believe this could be handled in a much more sensible and better manner than through the blunt instrument that is the national governance protocols.

We should be focused on the outcome we want for our investment of public money, not the process. Presumably that outcome is a successful, well-managed and accountable university institution. How the university achieves that, in the main, is going to be up to them. In fact, prescribing specific governance rules could actually reduce the opportunities for university governance bodies to explore their own innovative and diverse ways of running their organisations.

The government ought to approach this as an investor. I think that, of all the protocols, No. 10(c) offers a useful model in this regard. It stipulates that the university:

... documents a clear corporate and business strategy which reports on and updates annually the entity’s long-term objectives and includes an annual business plan containing achievable and measurable performance targets and milestones.

That contains all the government needs to know.

The university could establish a business plan, with targets and milestones, that was agreed to by the Commonwealth. It would then report against those each year and the government would make a determination on future funding agreements on the basis of how well those milestones had been met. So there would be a specific formula—target, goal, whatever it may be—that was designed by the university institution itself. This, or a similar approach, would be focused on the outcome, and that clearly would be university performance. It would not and should not, in my view, be concerned with how the universities go about achieving those goals.

It will be interesting to see how the concept of ‘university compacts’, to be instituted by the Rudd government, will operate and what it actually involves. Will it focus on an approach similar to the one that I have outlined? We do not know the detail at this stage, and many of us look forward to getting some detail of that. I am not sure if the government even knows the detail on the university compacts at this stage. But it is certainly an interesting idea. It could encourage excellence—