Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

That is what I am saying. It is not the only thing, but I think it needs to be central to the way in which it operates. I did not see that in relation to many of the former government’s changes but just in the two that we are talking about today—the higher education requirements and governance.

Senator Mason, you said at the beginning of your remarks today that the governance protocols had been developed in consultation with the higher education sector. I do not think that is a genuine representation. You may have a slightly different perspective on what the higher education sector incorporates and therefore that consultation. I remember reading many submissions. I remember going to universities. I visited almost every university in this country and talked with people there about the higher education review—the Nelson review as it was called—and the implications of that for universities. There were submissions; there were Senate inquiries. Many of the issues which those Senate inquiries dealt with, particularly in relation to governance, were about the role of academics, staff and students on university councils. For me, this is what is important about a university council. Arguments can be made, and you have started to make some of them already, such as: you are on the ANU board and are representing the government, Senator Carr is representing the opposition, the unions are representing themselves and businesses are representing themselves.

That is an argument that can be made and we can debate the detail of that, but that is an argument, as you defined it, about interest groups. That is an entirely different argument from that of the role of academic staff, general staff and students on a university council. A university exists because of the staff and the students at that institution. It is fundamentally important that they are able to be involved in the governing body—the council that makes decisions about how that organisation operates. You can make your argument about government, opposition, unions and business, but I separate that entirely from the argument about the absolutely important role that academic and general staff and students have to play on university councils.

Part of the impact on institutions from the one-size-fits-all approach of these governance protocols was to diminish the number of representatives from the student body and the staff body, whether they were academic or general. Whatever arguments you might have about financial governance or fiscal responsibility, having representation of students and staff on university councils is important, and it must be ensured. I was not aware that it was part of UNESCO’s recommendations concerning the status of higher education teaching personnel where they talk about the right of university staff and students to be actively engaged in and critique the functioning, management and governance of higher education institutions, including their own. I see it as fundamental. I was not aware that that was the level at which it had been adopted by the 1997 general conference of UNESCO. I think that is fundamentally important to how the governance of universities needs to operate.

The Greens’ criticism around the national protocols of governance is that they are part of a corporatisation of universities. There are various different financial arguments for that, but I do not see the corporatisation of a university as being about improving necessarily the quality of the education that is provided at that university. There are all sorts of arguments about that—they are a big entity; the way in which they operate; the management of them—but I think central to their operations needs to be the quality of the education. I do not think it is just about governance. We have seen a range of other changes. Calling somebody the CEO is bringing a different approach to the way in which that university operates.

If we are interested in the quality of education, if that is the driving motivation, then that is about ensuring that there is adequate funding, research facilities, support, access, and support for students in order to have that institution able to thrive and really provide quality education and to ensure that students are not working so many hours a week that they are not able to get the benefits of a quality education. They are the sorts of things that we need to ensure are there, rather than changing the name of the vice-chancellor to CEO. If we are interested in higher education as the fundamentally important premise behind improving the quality of the education reform that is made in the sector, that needs to drive it, and much of the change that we saw elsewhere was not about driving that. It was a privatisation, a corporatisation. Indeed, we see that of course with the funding, and others have made comment about the reduction in funding that happened under the Howard government. Really it just removes your ability to produce quality education, but I think some of these structures are similarly not designed to improve the quality of the education.

So, for a whole range of those reasons—whether it be about the right of employers and their workplaces to come together and the union to play a role there that is fundamentally important, in order to ensure that we are about improving the quality of university institutions and the education that occurs there and ensuring that staff and students have a voice—I really hoped we could see the end of not just the higher education workplace requirements but the government’s protocols in their current format. That is because I see them as about diminishing all of those things: the voice of students; the voice of staff; the rights of academic and general staff about negotiating their wages and conditions; and the corporatisation of our universities, rather than the flourishing of quality higher education in this country. I thought we had seen the end of those dark days. I am really disappointed to have to be here representing the Greens to say we are going to have to vote against these changes we thought we had already gotten rid of, but we will vote against them again today.