Bradley Higher Education Review Seeks Advice from the Professionals. (August 27, 2008)

Once upon a time there was a spinster who owned an oversexed tom cat and when he came back yet once more after a night on the tiles licking his wounds, he was informed as she took him off to the vet to get him patched up, that if it happened again the vet would undertake more that wound healing.

He didn't take heed, so the next time she did indeed honour her threat, and a very sorry tom cat lay by the fire and for several months all was calm.

Then one midnight on a full moon, the cat slipped out and the racket in the neighbourhood was horrendous.

Next morning the cat strode in without a mark on him.

"What's with you, you're neutered, and the caterwauling was worse the ever, I must have heard twenty cats carrying on"

Puss smiled a patronising smile as he explained -- "I'm a consultant".

Denise Bradley and her three colleagues who are developing the Higher Education Review for the Rudd Government have received, according to the listing on their website, 345 submissions.

Now Guy Healy reports in The Australian that the committee appears to feel they need help in dealing with the deluge because they have called in David Phillips, the founder and Managing Director of Phillips Curran now PhillipsKPA after the merger with KPA Consulting.

According to the PhillipsKPA website: "[H]e was the head of the Higher Education Division in the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training. He was previously Senior Advisor and Consultant to two Commonwealth Ministers for Employment, Education and Training."

And the task he has been given is to work on the "highly sensitive and confidential details of financial reform options" for the higher education sector.

Just as a matter of speculation how much of a legacy from the Howard years will he bring to his assessments and to what depth will he do his modelling, i.e. what will be the cost to the commonwealth and its citizens over the next generation (say to 2035) following one scenario or another.