The AVCC Receives its Report Card and is Told it's Time to Reinvent Itself. (August 14, 2006)

    At the beginning of this year the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC) commissioned PhillipsKPA "to undertake a review of the AVCC’s 'structure and operational
arrangements'", and recommend future directions for it to take.

The current president of the AVCC, Gerard Sutton, vice-chancellor of the University of Wollongong, said that the AVCC's 10 member Board of Directors (nine vice-chancellors plus CEO John Mullarvey) has given broad support to the directions of the report which will be discussed in detail by all 38 Vice-Chancellors at a retreat scheduled for next month.

Vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Glyn Davis, speaking as Chair of the Group of Eight said the, "Go8 Vice-Chancellors looks forward to engaging with the AVCC leadership and all other relevant parties about the proposals over the coming months. [The report] provides the foundation for what the Go8 hopes will be a constructive and open discussion across the sector."

During the past year the Go8 had indicated that is was at least considering forming a breakaway group of universities and leaving the AVCC.

The PhillipsKPA report says bluntly, "We believe that the [current] environment compels the AVCC to remake itself as a new, highly professional industry peak body for the university sector... [It] must be able to project powerfully the contribution of Australia’s universities to the nation and to advance the long term interests of the sector... We believe that this is achievable despite the divergence of views among universities on some issues."

One thing is clear, the report strongly advocates a marked restructuring of the AVCC beginning with a name change to reflect that the new organisation's members are the Australian universities, which are represented by their Vice- Chancellors/Chief Executives.

The new organisation should pursue three broad sets of functions: advocacy, analysis and services, of which advocacy should be the highest priority, and it should develop a more sustained and strategic approach to advocacy that goes beyond mere self interest.

The Full report with its 20 recommendations is available online.

An area of particular interest is PhillipsKPA's advice in regard to a revamped organisation's advocacy role.

Recommendation 7

(a) The broad advocacy function should operate at three levels:

(i) High profile, sustained activities in the public interest;
(ii) Activities designed more directly to advance the positioning of the sector and build constituencies of support; and
(iii) Targeted engagement with and lobbying of government in relation to policy development and implementation.

(b) The balance of effort should be shifted somewhat toward levels (i) and (ii), while maintaining a strong capability for activity at level (iii)

(c) In pursuit of these functions the future peak body should:

(i) Develop a small number of strategic activities in areas where the university sector clearly has standing and an important contribution to make, but which lie beyond the immediate self interest of the sector

(ii) Look for opportunities to engage with potentially supportive and influential third parties

(iii) Build support with politicians who may not be the primary decision makers within the Commonwealth Government but who have significant influence with them

(iv) Note the value of University Chancellors and university councils as conduits to business, opinion and political leaders

(v) Build sustained, sophisticated, dispassionate intellectual arguments designed to engage central agency officials and to strengthen the case of the sector’s supporters within government

(vi) Develop a stronger external communications capacity and an improved set of publications and other materials tailored for specific external audiences.

(d) The future peak body should develop a multi-year advocacy strategy, including a sustained focus on a limited number of key themes or objectives, supported by annual plans with identified priorities, critical success factors and reviews of performance.

The report states that there is evidence that universities do not rate highly in community priorities and that the community certainly places a much higher priority on schools. Why this is so is certainly understandable as the majority of the population is much more intimately involved with primary and secondary schools than with the universities. Nevertheless, the report continues:

[It] is clear is that the AVCC has not been as successful in its top priority function as its members would have wished, and that there is a widely held perception, among both internal and external stakeholders, that it partly has itself to blame. Of greatest concern is the view held by senior figures on both sides of Federal Parliament, that the AVCC is a “negative organisation”, characterised in its dealings with government by “political naivety” and “whingeing self interest”. These harsh words are not ours, but direct quotes from key players consulted for the purposes of this review. Some tension is to be expected from time to time between any lobby group and the Government, but these perceptions go beyond normal tensions and are not confined to representatives of the current government.
 

Regardless of the fairness or otherwise of these views, there is no doubt that they exist. In the absence of significant change, they will continue to impede the effectiveness of the AVCC as an advocate for the sector with the Commonwealth Government.

And as an advocate, the organisation must possess "strong capabilities in policy development and analysis, and information management and provision."

In short, competent professionalism.

The report emphasises the interaction between the organisation and government but points out what it considers to be:

A more strategic approach to advocacy

We have recommended that [the new organisation] should approach its core advocacy role at three levels:

1. Activities in the public benefit;

2. Activities designed to advance the positioning of the sector and to build constituencies of support; and

3. Engagement with and lobbying of government in relation to policy development and implementation
 

The current balance of effort is weighted toward the third level. We propose that [the organisation] should rebalance its efforts somewhat toward the first and second levels while maintaining a strong capability for activity at the third level.

What is left unsaid, or no more than sotto voce is that the most powerful influence on government behaviour is public pressure, that engaging the support of the public will be of profound importance in elevating support for higher education, and that this is of greater importance than in almost any of Australia's OECD cohort.