UK PM to Australia: "Step Up a Gear" and Invest Much More in Higher Education. (March 28, 2006)

    The UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, may be a lame duck but he had some gratuitous advice when speaking to the Australian-UK Leadership Forum yesterday.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair

    The Age reports that he told the forum that western countries must "step up a gear" and invest much more in higher education to compete with the massive emerging economies of China and India.

We are going to be competing more and more with low-labour cost countries who are, [like] both India and China, already deciding that they do not want to compete simply in the mass production, low-value-added sector, but are moving now into the high-value-added sectors and are going to compete with us at a rate and with a depth that I don't think we've even begun quite to contemplate in the years ahead.

 

China is building over the next few years world-class universities that are going to be places of research and development and academic excellence that I believe will compete with anything in the developed world, including in America . . . we've got to gear ourselves back up again.

He might be right, but then again he doesn't have Australia's mineral wealth to dig out of the ground for export. And anyway, let some later government worry about it -- sometime.