Chair of the Group of Eight Faces the Press. (April 4, 2008)

On Wednesday April 2 Professor Alan Robson spoke to the National Press Club (NPC). TFW published the transcript in Full. His 30 minute address was a remarkable tour de force.

Below is an edited version of the question and answer session that followed. It's taken from the transcript supplied by the NPC.

KEN RANDALL: Thank you, Professor Robson. As usual we have a period of questions today, starting with Alex Symons.

QUESTION: Professor Robson, Alex Symons from The Financial Review.
... I know that you’ve been a big advocate of student support and giving them adequate resources. Do you think if students don’t get additional support and are able to be mobile and move to diverse offerings, that the compact system might fail?

ALAN ROBSON: Well, I think it’s a very important thing. The arrangements for student financial support have deteriorated greatly. The survey conducted for Universities Australia demonstrated that between 2000 and 2006, financial conditions for students starting in universities was very much depleted. A recent study, which is yet to be published, demonstrates that for rural students of low socioeconomic status, financial factors are a major factor in stopping them from participating in tertiary education. So, if it’s a major factor in rural students not participating in higher education, it’d be a major factor in getting people moving from one institution to another institution to take advantage of comprehensive strengths in those particular institutions.

QUESTION: David Denham from Preview magazine.

I’d like to ask a question about the delivery of the outputs from the innovative research. In recent years, as you know, there’s been a big push to make publicly funded research publicly available very quickly... In fact, the Group of Eight just last year received something like $250 million commitment from ARC for its discovery and basic research. So the question is, in that context, what strategies are the Group of Eight adopting on this particular issue, and in particular to make sure that there is public access available to innovation results? Because without that, you may as well not do the innovation.

ALAN ROBSON: Yeah. I agree absolutely. And the Group of Eight have put out a manifesto, if you like, which says that we support the public availability of research, - the right to publish is an important part of all research.

I also think that a lot of what you’re saying has come about because there has been an overestimation of how much income we’re going to generate from the commercialisation of research. And figures say that if you make 3-5% of your total research spend from commercialisation activities, you’re doing remarkably well.

And in fact I think that protecting the intellectual property and not releasing the information is a difficulty because the best people to take that idea to its very next level and to move it forward to end up with a product are frequently cut out of the action. So I think we are committed to public information and information being made available.

Of course we have to protect intellectual property where it’s important to do so, but you raise a very important point. I can say, as an agricultural scientist, you’re funded largely by the rural research and development corporations. If you weren’t out there telling the farming community about what you were doing, you wouldn’t get funded the next time around. So it’s a pretty short circle if you want to sustain your research activity.

QUESTION: Simon Grose from Science Media and The Canberra Times.
Earlier - well, last month, your Minister Julia Gillard brought out a press release on student numbers last year. And they rose 5.5%; in the first half of 2007 -- there were 899,000 university students,  and the rise in Aboriginal students rose 6.6%. Then she says that this happened despite more than a decade of neglect by the previous government.

I wonder if you buy this mantra of neglect by the previous government over 10 years? If so where did it cut in. And, if so, how was the university sector able to do so well in terms of student numbers over that whole 10 year period?

ALAN ROBSON: I think you raise a very important concern. I’m only going to be a Vice Chancellor for a relatively short time and it’s unlikely to be a Liberal Government again while I’m a Vice Chancellor... so I’m, you know, pretty free to comment. The OECD figures show it. If you look there, the average of the OECD countries was a 49% increase in public spending on education. In Australia we had a 4% reduction. And that - so it’s pretty clear that there was a period. This is - this started actually under a Labor Government when Simon Crean was minister for education, and the grant was not indexed adequately.

A lot of the reduction in public funding has been offset by an increase in student numbers. So what we’ve seen is a growth in the sector, which is very desirable. You’ve seen an enormous growth in international students. And international student fees are a very important part of the economy of most universities.

So there are some very positive things in terms of universities in the Howard years, in terms of more opportunities for students to go to universities. Big increase in growth. There was a very big increase in the contribution that students make to their education. Australia, I think, is now fourth in the world for the percentage of the total cost of university education that’s met from private sources. I think we’re behind United States, Japan and Korea. And - which reflects a different balance. Now we’ve got to have an appropriate balance between private expenditure - there is a benefit in going to university, and hence it’s quite right that students should meet some part of the cost. But there is also an enormous public benefit, and it’s quite right that the government or the public should meet some other part of that cut.

Now, I’m hoping - I’m not expecting anything in this budget, but I’m hoping in the next budget that we will end this and start on a more positive frame in terms of university funding. Three important factors that have to occur: funding per student has to increase, student/staff ratios in Australian universities have increased from 14 to 20. Fourteen students per staff member to 20, we’re about the highest in the world. Apart from some European countries. But very, very much higher than the US, the UK, Canada.

The second thing that’s got to happen, we’ve got to get adequate research infrastructure funding, what I talked about today, that the competitive research funding NHMRC’s gone like that, ARC’s gone like that, but the research infrastructure’s been steady. So, in my university when our research income, external research income was $70 million, we had $54 million worth of research quantum. Our research income is now $150, and we’ve got $62 million worth of research infrastructure support. So, you’ve just got $62 million chasing $150, when you had $54 million chasing $70 million. It can’t work.

And the third thing that’s got to happen is to do with financial support for students, because it is now getting to be very difficult for students to support themselves through university.

QUESTION: Carlos Selna Australian Associated Press.

We’ve touched on students, but I’m just wondering, what do you think, or how much of an impact is the so called brain drain having on research and development in Australia, and secondly, is there a need to forge greater links between research organisations and industry?

ALAN ROBSON: Well, let me deal with the brain drain. The figures suggest that more graduates come into Australia than leave Australia, but that doesn’t say about the quality of the graduates, and I know, of very good scientists and researchers who have chosen to relocate elsewhere because of better research opportunities.

I was recently involved with a review of a Canadian research scheme, and I met several Australians working in Canada, and they tell me it’s because there’s better support for their research within the Canadian environment than there is within the Australian environment.

But it’s an interesting thing, most researchers are not as concerned about their personal salary as they are about their capacity to conduct world class research. So, in terms of support for scientists, it’s more important to support the conduct of the research, than it is necessarily to pay very large salaries.

[With regard to Industry and research] we clearly need to do a lot more. If however you look at the data, industry are now funding quite a lot of activity within universities, and that has increased considerably. But, you know, it’s like communication in an organisation, increasing links with industry, you can never do enough. You’ve always got to be out there doing more, and I think it requires both ways. We often get industry wanting to come but don’t want to pay the full cost of what they want to be done. They say, you’re funded by the government, therefore you should be able to do this piece of work and not charge us any overhead. I always say, "well, we’re not funded by the government to do research of direct value to you. That you know, so we require some support from you."

I think [industry funding is] increasing in Australia. You know, in my own university, two major firms, Woodside and BHP, have each contributed $5 million to assist us to appoint really outstanding people in the business world to develop up a world class business school activity.

QUESTION: Simon Grose.

When you’re talking about the research funding you haven’t brought into the conflict between your Group of Eight universities and the other Australian universities. Let’s assume in two budgets time there is an increase in funding for research and for research infrastructure. Would you argue that it should be weighted higher and more in favour of the Group of Eight, and if so how?

ALAN ROBSON: Well, there I could make myself very unpopular.
No, no look. My view is quite straightforward: excellence should be funded wherever it occurs. And it should be fully funded wherever it occurs. We’ve got a competitive process, we run the competition and when there are - the people who win in that competitive competition after peer review they need to be adequately supported. So it’s not an argument, and I’ve never heard the Group of Eight argue that we should by right be given anything. It’s about in the competition when we do win we shouldn’t be penalised by not having adequate research infrastructure to support the research mission of the university.


QUESTION: David Denham.

Well a double-barrelled one actually. How much money are we talking about to restore the infrastructure funding and the student funding that we need, how many billions of dollars?

ALAN ROBSON:

Well, the infrastructure we estimate to be a shortfall
just in the Group of Eight universities. Because they’re the older universities they probably have the biggest shortfall. And we estimate $1.5 billion there. And I would say, you know, because I have been critical of the Howard Government, the HEEF fund was an excellent initiative and I would be hoping that in the surplus to this budget that some of the surplus will be put into further supplementing the Heath fund, the Higher Education Endowment Fund so that that could build up to a larger amount. Now I don’t have in my head the figures but I do know that if universities had been funded at the proper rate of indexation there’s about a billion dollar shortfall in - between what they are currently being funded and what they would ha… what we would be receiving if we’d been indexed at CPI.

QUESTION (2^nd part): David Denham. 

If you were sitting in Minister Carr’s office and you had the power to implement the recommendations from the innovations study and the Treasurer says no more money I’m afraid, what would you do? What would be the key decision that you’d make in this situation?

ALAN ROBSON:

That’s why I’m a vice-chancellor and not a politician.

No look, you know, the reality is I am expecting that in this budget if you’re going to have an efficiency dividend of 2% on top of the ongoing 1% there will not be funding for very worthwhile activities. I personally think that we make a mistake in Australia in that whenever we have a surplus we have a tax cut. And my position would have been we should be re-investing in building the infrastructure for the future with that money rather than passing it on and fuelling inflation and undermining other aspects of our society.

It’s interesting, Canada is doing better than Australia in R&D in my view, and when we had the petrol levy just before an election so many years ago, Canada had a similar surplus and it put it into establishing Canadian research chairs, which have been incredibly successful and attracting very good people from the United States and elsewhere in the world to go and work in Canada. Part of building their system has been this not going for the tax cut.

And I think that’s pretty important in terms of infrastructure.

Thank you.