The scoop in higher education news last week as reported by The Australian's Andrew Trounson was the migration from the Department of Finance and Treasury of bureaucrats David Hazlehurst and Kathryn Campbell sent for redeployment in Julia Gillard's department of Education.

According to Mr Trounson, the hope is "the appointments will bring additional clout, along with fresh energy and ideas.

      "Observers note that strong Finance and Treasury experience is likely to be useful as the department embarks on the crucial review of teaching costs".

What fresh ideas and energy for doing the departments sums isn't revealed, but we suspect finding additional pockets of funding with which to upgrade the human resources of Australia's university sector isn't among them.

Of course Education Minister Gillard and Science and Research Minister Carr tell us that the higher education and research sectors are streets ahead compared with their positions during the "Howard Years", and they are. The problem is that much of the rest of the developed world is moving away from us in what is referred to as "investment in knowledge", while China and sections of Southeast Asia are catching up and look to move past. Since we live in an ever increasingly relative world, that ought to send warning signals to the government as well as the private sector to get seriously proactive about upping their investments in knowledge.

Instead, both Ms Gillard and Senator Carr behave like the kid that just got a hammer for Christmas -- all things begin to look like nails, i.e. now they are in the position to legislate and above all regulate, they're into it with a vengeance. We see what looks to be a relentless progression toward compacts, a Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), Research Excellence for Australia (REA) -- which resembles evermore a Research Quality Framework (RQF) with numbers sans impact, and a possible My University governmental ranking system, not to mention hubs and spokes. The difficulty appears to be that this passion for regulation and micromanagement is increasingly an "instead of" rather than an "as well as" approach.

Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven told Mr Trounson that the Department of Education: "...has got a massive range of issues, all of which are hitting the nasty implementation phase at the same time," and while he conceded that "two senior bureaucrats from Treasury and the Finance Department could be advantageous since they are traditionally strong at prioritising, he worries at the prospect of design faults being embedded in TEQSA, warning that initially the formulation of the regulator seemed to treat universities like "dodgy property developers", and noted that the sector was concerned that money hadn't been set aside to fund the classroom infrastructure needed to support the student expansion agenda. And more money was needed for teaching and learning. For example, "If we are going to bring all of these different sorts of students into universities, as we should, they are going to be taught in different ways, which may be very expensive."

Former public servant now higher education consultant David Phillips says: "I think there has been a level of naivety in the materials that have been put out for discussion," and follows with faint praise one can well do without: "On balance they are doing as good a job as could be expected given their resources and the enormous task," and adds, "I don't think there is a disaster looming or anything like that."

Nevertheless, while Universities Australia CE Glenn Withers claims that discussions with the department on implementing the reforms "are progressing well and the views of Australian universities are being incorporated into planning", he follows immediately with: "what is still needed now for the higher education revolution is not only finalisation of the new regulatory framework but the complementary funding to make this work".

There is a finite world pool of human resource available for "investment in knowledge" and it's a very competitive market if you want top quality; therefore, we would disagree with David Phillips; there is a disaster looming but it is chronic rather than acute like the inexorable-slow deposition of amyloid plaques inducing progressive cognitive degradation.