News & Views item - November 2010

 

 

 Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Legislation Far from Complete. (November 24, 2010)

Andrew Trounson in today's issue of The Australian's Higher Education Supplement (HES) reports that after addressing a plenary meeting of Universities Australia (UA) in Sydney on November 23, during which the Federal Department of Education's group manager for higher education David Hazlehurst was present, the UA chairman,  Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake, spoke optimistically to the HES: "I'm hopeful there will be further opportunities for discussions between now and Christmas."

 

Professor Coaldrake was referring to the inability of the government and the tertiary education sector to reach a consensus on legislation to create a new national tertiary education regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA).

 

The UA chairman told Mr Trounson that the government had shown itself to be "very receptive" to the sector's concerns on the legislation to create TEQSA. "I'm very confident that there has been a shared understanding across our sector and with government on the issues of concern and that there will be further opportunities to discuss those matters."

 

Professor Coaldrake then listed three principal concerns of the UA's membership:

He then added: "The government has said it wants a risk-based and proportionate approach to TEQSA, and we wanted to see that adopted fairly explicitly," and while he agreed that the same standards should be universally applied, "the nature and track records" of different institutions needed to be taken into account. "You need to be careful you protect the cachet of the system, and if you are being proportionate and risk-based you are going to be careful of new providers. [The legislation must be] tailored to the nature of the sector; that is, for education as opposed to any different activity."

 

Furthermore, in Professor Coaldrake's view the additional time needed to formulate the legislation properly would not delay its implementation scheduled for January 2012. But despite his protestations that: "Universities Australia has always, and continues, to support the idea of TEQSA as a national regulator and we support having a regulator with teeth," and that the discussions were not about weakening TEQSA but about ensuring TEQSA did the job government wanted it to, it is becoming increasingly clear that the tertiary sector and the federal government are far from agreement as to the form of the legislation.

 

Recently, the 1999 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, Cal Tech's Ahmed Zewail, made the observation that "creative minds and bureaucracies do not work harmoniously together"*. That observation might be best characterised as an axiom.

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* Nature 468, 347 (2010) | doi:10.1038/468347a