Government's Revised Indexation of Higher Education Costs Approaches Reality. (June 2, 2010)

Following an assessment of the Federal Government's revised indexation of higher education costs, the Group of Eight announced that it welcomed new indexation arrangements for higher education which will deliver an additional $2.6 billion to universities over five years. Taken together with the increased funding for the indirect costs of research, the new indexation arrangement is a significant recurrent funding improvement. The new formula for higher education funding indexation will be made up as follows:

• Professional, Scientific and Technical Services labour price index (75%)

• Consumer Price Index (25%)

The Higher Education Support Amendment (Indexation) Bill 2010, was tabled in Parliament on 13 May 2010.

Full resourcing for research oncosts is still significantly in the future and it will be sometime before the damage done over the past decades can be hoped to be addressed. In the meantime forced redundancies and retrenchments remain a fact of life in our universities and CSIRO while undereducated individuals continued to be in charge of primary and secondary school teaching of maths and the sciences. 

DEEWR = Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations DIISR = Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research