View From the Back Row


"Backing Australia's Ability" -

Excerpts from the Hansard transcripts of the Senate committee hearings on The Capacity of Public Universities to Meet Australia's Higher Education Needs
 [The numbers given below [pXX] refer to the PDF page in the particular transcript]

The exchange below between the Lady and the Senator is placed outside chronological order because it throws into question whether the hearings make an attempt at non-partisan objectivity in assessing the submissions of witnesses. As Professor Browne herself points out in her written submission, hers "is confined to term of reference (f) section iii which deals with the capacity of public universities to sustain our national research capacity for the longer term." Committee members have before them the written submissions of all witnesses of the day. You can judge as to how appropriate is Senator Brandis' examination of Professor Browne on this point.

July 18th Sydney

Emeritus Professor Mairead Browne (Private capacity. She was for four years Dean of the Graduate School,  University of Technology, Sydney ).
    I can speak most competently and confidently about research education. In the case of research education, there has been a lack of consistency through the policy. I think there has been some wonderful rhetoric through the green paper, through the white paper and through the Backing Australia's Ability, but unfortunately there are major problems of  inconsistency in the implementation and, indeed, there are cases of implementation strategies operating precisely against the very goals that have been set out in the statements on policy.[p1069]

Senator Brandis (Liberal)
    Professor Browne, you referred to the wonderful rhetoric in Backing Australia's Ability, but there were also a lot of wonderful dollars there, too, weren't there?

Prof. Browne
    There are some dollars there.

Senator Brandis
    In fact, isn't it the case that it is the largest single investment in Australian research that any Australian government has announced in dollar terms ever?

Prof. Browne
    I am unable to say in relative terms whether it is or it is not.

Senator Brandis
    I am telling you that it is.

Senator Carr (Labor)
    That would be highly charged and highly arguable...

CHAIR (Senator Collins, Labor)
    Order, Senator Carr!

Prof. Browne
    Let me come back to the nub of my comment, which is that Backing Australia's Ability failed to address the issue of the numbers of research students in Australia. It has aspirations to lift the game in terms of our international comparability and our performance but there is no mention anywhere of how we are actually going to achieve that. The warm bodies are simply not there.

Senator Brandis
    What about in terms of the investment that Backing Australia's Ability commits - $1.9 billion? It was not previously appropriated for that and now it is...

Senator Carr
    It cut $5 billion out of the system...

CHAIR (referring to previous questioning of Prof. Browne)
    Senator Carr, you have had your chance.

Senator Brandis
    What do you say about that?

Prof. Browne
    I am not a politician, Senator. All I am saying is that my...

Senator Brandis
    But you are making a political point, Professor Browne. You are, in effect, saying that as a matter of public record this document was purely rhetorical, and it was not. If I may say so, that is on the verge of being almost intellectually dishonest.

CHAIR
    Senator Brandis, can you let the witness finish, please?

Prof. Browne
    The point of my comment about the rhetoric is that the rhetoric is grand but it does not actually deal with the issue that I have addressed in my submission, which is the total number of research students in Australia. It is my belief that the policy document has not dealt with that and it will not succeed unless there are the people to drive it.

Senator Brandis
    But what about the commitment of funding which was not there before and now is? Why are we dealing with the rhetoric, as it were, the presentation of the document, rather than what it actually does which is appropriate all this additional funding - I maintain the biggest single commitment in one policy announcement that has ever been made in Commonwealth history - to research? Why don't we talk about what it does rather than the way it is packaged?

Prof. Browne
    What would you like me to say, Senator: that I applaud it? I do.

Senator Brandis
    You do applaud it?

Prof. Browne
    Last January when I opened the newspapers - or I did not even need to open the newspapers - I saw that there was a commitment to doing something about our research. But believe me, when I turned to the detail I was very disappointed.

Senator Brandis
    Are you saying it did not go far enough?

Prof. Browne
    Correct.

Senator Brandis
    I understand that and may I say, Professor Browne, that most people who have come before this inquiry - and, indeed, I daresay most people who come before any Senate hearing into the allocation of Commonwealth funds who are stakeholders - would say, ‘We are not getting enough.' But it is one thing to say the document is just rhetorical; it is another thing to say you applaud it but you wish it went further. Is that your position?

Prof. Browne
    Could I just make a correction. I did not say it was ‘just rhetorical'; I said there was a lot of rhetoric in those policy statements. I think ‘just rhetorical' is a dismissive statement which I did not make.

Senator Brandis
    No doubt there is a lot of rhetoric in all government policy documents, and no doubt there is a lot of rhetoric in the Knowledge Nation document. That is just the way things are presented to the public. But when you get into the detail, that document announces a lot of specific policy proposals, which - as I understand from your evidence - you applaud, but you say, as one would expect you to as a stakeholder, that you wish it went further. Is that the position?

Prof. Browne
    Absolutely. It is more than a wish. I am saying that, if it is to succeed as a policy initiative, it needs the power to drive it. It needs the intellectual capacity, which can be contributed to by students who go through research and higher degrees. [p1070-71]

 

March 22nd Brisbane

Senator Carr (Labor) (to Professor Roy Webb, Vice-Chancellor, Griffith University)
    You... describe what I presume you believe to be a better model - that is, the Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE]. Can I take it from that that you are saying that the federal government's knowledge and innovation policy statement was in fact short on vision and placed too great an emphasis on market forces, reaffirming competition efficiency and other such terms? [p88]

Prof. Webb
The particular point I wish to make there is that running through research policy documents since the early 1980s - and it is repeated in knowledge and innovation and Backing Australia's Ability statement - there has been strong support for or an assumption about the value of critical mass. I am making a comment there, with support from the recent HEFCE report in the UK, that casts doubt on the value of continuing to endorse that particular concept in relation to research funding. One could say more. I mean, critical mass is open to a number of criticisms as a principle of research funding, not least the economist's criticism that eventually you might encounter diminishing marginal productivity in any activity. So adding more funding to any given activity is not necessarily a smart move. That is an example - I admit only one - of an outmoded concept I am referring to [p89]

(to Senator Tierney Liberal)
    ...the Backing Australia's Ability statement was not only about research. I should mention here that it perhaps unexpectedly embraced a move on the places question. There were 2,000 more places per annum in the areas of science, information technology and mathematics to be offered per annum, building up to 20,000, and that is a very important addition to the national funded load total, which we will be strongly bidding for from Queensland's point of view. [p93
 

June 22nd Canberra

Senator Allison (AD) (to the Government's Chief Scientist, Robin Batterham)
    The Council of Engineering Deans says that university engineering laboratories in Australia are of a poorer standard than those in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Did you form any views on the comparative standard of engineering laboratories in Australian universities? Is that an accurate claim?

Dr Batterham
    Their claim, to the best of my knowledge, is reasonable. I did not look in detail at hard measures, so my observations, as personal observations, are somewhat superficial. I did look overall at the level of infrastructure - the standard of it - and I must say my view is that I was delighted to see more infrastructure funds allocated in the Backing Australia's Ability package, because they are needed. We do have to consider with infrastructure that some courses, engineering being the most obvious one, have considerably higher costs than others, and the question becomes: does that mean that government should intervene in the funding models used by universities to try to force more in the direction of the engineering and the science faculties or not? One answer to that, which leaves a lot of the funding decisions with the institutions and is not quite so interventionist, is to say: why shouldn't we have with the funding bodies - that is, the ARC and the NHMRC, the principal funding bodies of competitive grants - a significantly higher infrastructure block funding go with the grants? I do not mean on a grant by grant basis; I mean blocked up for the whole year for the ARC, for that particular institution or the NHMRC, as the case may be. We are somewhat below world practice in this particular area. That sort of approach would allow a lot more flexibility in handling infrastructure questions. [p512]
 

July 2nd Perth

Professor Millicent Pool, Vice-Chancellor and President, Edith Cowan University
    Because we do not have a medical school, large science or heavy engineering, we have not been able to access a reasonable proportion of research infrastructure money because it is very targeted to particular disciplines. We would argue that, as a new university which has distinguished and differentiated its mission in terms of serving the new knowledge nation - for example, we have professions such as teaching, nursing, information technology, multimedia, creative and performance arts - these professional areas need to have research also attached to them. We would say it is not only research in the highly expensive medical and heavy science and heavy engineering; we would say it is important in terms of national priorities to have health delivery, education delivery and IT delivery better researched and analysed. So we feel that we lost in the recent Backing Australia's Ability, and the transfer of gap higher degree places in the research area was very disadvantageous. We lost 36 per cent of our postgraduate places in one fell swoop. It was a devastating approach to a new university that is trying to serve its region well. [p717]

Senator Crossin (Labor)
    Did you recently lose 36 per cent of your postgraduate places?

Prof. Poole
    Yes. [p730]

Senator Crossin
    Why was that?

Prof. Poole
    That was because of the system in Backing Australia's Ability in terms of how the gap places were to be made up. We argued strongly against that approach, but the GO8 was a very successful lobby group and its members were the winners in that; everyone else lost. Edith Cowan University lost the second highest number. p[731]
 

July 4th Adelaide

 Professor Malcolm Gillies, President, Australian Academy of the Humanities
    I would like to say something about libraries. It ties in quite closely with what I have said about languages. There is great stress on library resources, but we must look to the new technologies to find the way forward. The National Site Licence proposal, which is built into the Backing Australia's Ability proposal, and which is now being negotiated through its final stages so that all Australian universities and a variety of state and national libraries have access to accumulated data sets such as Elsevier's Web of Science, is an exceedingly important way of transcending the difficulties we have with the declining purchasing power and the declining number of actual physical books and journals we can take into individual libraries. What I am suggesting is that, if we have a national response to an issue, as has now emerged in the library sector with digital data sets, we will then have the ability as a nation to come up with much better access for all our citizens and students and, with that, to have better quality research. If we had such a national strategy in languages I think we could have some of the breakthroughs that have been seen in the last four or five months in terms of digital data sets and the effect upon scientific and, in fact, all areas of research. [p749]

Senator Stott Despoja (AD)
    What do you really think is required, in terms of dollars? In your letter urging the Prime Minister, you recommend in the strongest possible terms that the Chief Scientist's report should be implemented. We know that, to an extent, that Chief Scientist report was implemented or contained in the Backing Australia's Ability innovation statement. But we also know that the $2.9 billion over four years still amounts to a slowing of our investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP. What is really required?

Professor Anthony Thomas, Chair, National Committee for Physics, Australian Academy of Science
    I do not know overall. I know in my own area that a very small amount of money could have a major impact. For all the talk about research and development support by the government, you will find that many of the figures are incredibly padded. I have given some examples in the notes here. If you look in the science and technology budget papers for last year you will see more than a billion dollars of the imputed expenditure on scientific R&D attributed through indirect support in the university system. That is a nonsense. It is some imputed fraction of academic salaries. It includes academics across all areas, not just science and technology. When you come to the coalface and ask what do you really need, the ARC funding for physics in Australia is about $7 million or $8 million a year. If you doubled that you would have an enormous impact on morale. It is tiny amounts of money, but it is just hidden away in there. If you were clever about where you allocated key amounts of money, it could make a major difference both to morale and to productivity. It is not huge amounts of money.

When you talk about doubling of the ARC budget, that is a wonderful thing. However, if you look at what happens, the moment money is allocated somewhere, first of all it tends to be taken from something else. I do not know whether that is the case now, but every past experience suggests that it is. Secondly, the Australian National University is allowed to compete for it. Thirdly, CSIRO will probably be allowed to compete for it. So I doubt that in the end the success rate will be any different from what it is now. [p803]

Senator Stott Despoja
    You refer in your submission to the parsimonious state of investment in research and development and innovation in the context of the innovation statement. Would you like to elaborate on what you mean by that for the committee, Professor Davey? [p809]

Professor Ian Davey, Pro Vice-Chancellor, and Vice-President, Research and International, University of South Australia
    We welcome Backing Australia's Ability, like the whole sector has welcomed it, in the sense that it was a commitment. However, we had great concerns, once we had read the fine print, in that most of the dollars are in the out years, two elections away. That is a real concern for us. We await with interest the Labor Party's commitment when it finally releases its policy position on this issue. We are also concerned, as I said before, that the single most important issue from our point of view, which is the boosting of deep research infrastructure, was not in Backing Australia's Ability. That makes it extremely difficult for a university like ours to continue to grow our research at the rate we have been growing it. We are concerned about that. We are also concerned that, in the direct research infrastructure associated with programs like the Australian Research Council, there seems to be a commitment to maintaining that at 20 cents in the dollar when we know that the UK is funding at 44 cents in the dollar and the Americans are funding at 55 cents in the dollar. It seems to be a commitment to a fairly low level of research infrastructure at universities which can only impact in ways that concern us.

On the other hand, I do not want to completely denigrate Backing Australia's Ability, because it contains some programs that we strongly support. As a university, we have positioned ourselves quite directly in terms of collaborating with industry, and a high proportion of our research is associated with industry partners. We have a strong commitment to commercialisation. We have ISO9001 accreditation for all our research and consultancy projects. We have business development managers located in all our divisions and research centres, and we have a commercialisation vehicle named ITEK whose job it is to incubate spin-offs from our research. We believe that the programs in terms of pre-seed funding and in terms of improving the ability to commercialise ventures are to be welcomed, as, of course, are the doubling of the ARC grants and several other proposals in Backing Australia's Ability.

Professor Kym Adey, Pro Vice-Chancellor, and Vice-President, Access and Learning Support, University of South Australia
    May I add that we obviously welcome any initiative in support of research, but we would also welcome initiatives in support of teaching and learning. [p810]

Professor Christopher Marlin, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research), Flinders University of South Australia
    I can explain later how some of the recent experience with the programs under the
innovation action plan, Backing Australia's Ability, illustrate this frustration. That information is as recent as the last few days. [p842]

CHAIR, Senator Collins (Labor)
Professor, could you please elaborate what you indicated earlier?

Prof. Marlin
Do you mean the research and infrastructure in particular?
CHAIR
Yes.

Prof. Marlin
A couple of the programs under the innovation action plan have been implemented so far. There are the major national research facilities and the federation fellowships. They are both in progress at the moment. With the major national research facilities, what we saw was approximately 160 expressions of interest in putting in proposals, which they developed into 86 full proposals, and now 37 of those have been short-listed in the last few days. What is clear from looking at the expressions of interest and the level of activity that went on within universities and other research organisations to develop those 86 proposals that went forward is that there is an enormous range of areas in which our research infrastructure is clearly inadequate by international standards. It is a pity, in a way, that it is all going to boil down to what is in the first year $5 million worth of expenditure and $155 million projected over five years when in fact there is clearly a run-down in our research infrastructure that means that a great deal more expenditure is required.

A particular concern of mine is the extent to which researchers have put their research to one side for the last few months in very large numbers in order to produce these proposals of which only a very few are going to be successful, given the size of those facilities. You would have at least seen the price tag on something like a synchrotron in the press, but some of the other facilities being projected are certainly of the order of tens of millions of dollars. We are not going to get very many of these things in the end. What it does illustrate is that there has been a decline in the research infrastructure. There is a huge shortfall, and we need to address that if we can. [p843]
 

July 12th Townsville

Professor William Macgillivary, President, Australian Council of Deans of Science
    I attended the FASTS forum a month or so ago where the information technology centre of excellence, as mooted under the government's Backing Australia's Ability was discussed in some detail. There is very real concern in the science and IT community that that centre will strip university information technology departments of their top academics. It is a problem from the research context, but it is an even greater problem from a training context. In the departments of some universities there is staff turnover of over 50 per cent as it is. To have good graduates for the IT industry, we need to stabilise that situation. The development of a centre of excellence that is stand-alone and not based on a university and that will absorb up to 250 IT research scientists - and a lot of them will come from the university sector - is of some concern. [p853]

Senator Tierney
    That is a very interesting idea. You mentioned the importance of blue sky science, and this leads me to basic research and the funding of that. The federal government has recently announced, through Backing Australia's Ability, the backing of ARC grants, for example. Would you see that as a major boost perhaps for what you are talking about - that is, basic research and the possibility for a better chance for blue sky science to happen in Australia?

Prof. MacGillivray
    It has the potential. It depends on how ARC utilise that money, because they have two sections to their programs. They have the discovery program, which is the fundamental blue skies area, and they have the linkage section. I know that Professor Sara [Vicki Sara Chair Australian Research Council]  is very keen to enhance the linkage side by completing the symmetry of the personnel career path, which currently only exists on the discovery side. I know she is very keen to introduce a career path on the linkage side as well. I am not privy to her and her council's thoughts. The impression I get is that probably a higher percentage of the new money will go onto the linkage side rather than the discovery side. [p858]
 

July 17th Sydney

 Professor Ian Chubb, President, Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee; and Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University
    Australia is failing to keep pace with developments in other OECD countries. I do not mean all of them necessarily, I mean those ones with which we would normally compare ourselves. There are about 13 of those, and we are slipping behind. We are going backwards when they are going forwards. One of the things that they have done in many of those countries - and we name some of them: the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland, Finland and Sweden and others in Europeis that they have actually begun, after periods of cuts, to reinvest public funds into the universities because they see them as core and central to the development of knowledge economies. All of those countries once cut and they have reversed the trend and there is substantial reinvestment.

Secondly, we [speaking for the A V-VC] believe that the time for action is now or we will simply never catch up. We can get too big a gap between what we do and what is being done elsewhere. We acknowledge that the government in recent times in Backing Australia's Ability, both in terms of investment in research and development and extra student places, and the extra student places allocated in the federal budget recently, begin to at least slow down our rate of departure from OECD averages. We still think that there is much more that needs to be done.

We do that because we assert, and I think with some considerable reason for doing so, that Australia, being a small economy where we are and not a major part of significant trading blocs and all the rest of it, has to do better than average - there is no point in us being average. People have to seek out what we produce, what we do and what we are able to do because we are particularly good at it. We would argue that you do that, in part, through having a first-class competitive education system with a lot of public investment in it at university level as per the other countries that I mentioned earlier.

We also argue, along with most of those countries, that that knowledge base should be broad. There is a tendency in public debate to mention most frequently, if not focus exclusively on, science and technology. It is our line that an educated community, a knowledge community or whatever we want to call it, actually has that broad education base so that some people invent things, some people produce things, and other people ask whether or not that is a good. It is important that we have that breadth of capacity in our society to actually do things and to question things and to ensure that what we do do is, in fact, a good. [p984-85]


Senator Tierney
    If I could delve a little deeper into the question: not only do the GO8
have the strength to attract further funding disproportionately to the others but the latest changes
in Backing Australia's Ability did things like double the ARC grants, which will naturally give
some advantage to the GO8 universities. In terms of the next move in public policy, wouldn't
there perhaps be an argument for a balancing to try and strengthen where the strengths are in the
non-GO8 universities?

Prof. Chubb
    I think my comment still applies. I think that Backing Australia's Ability gets
us part way along the track, not all the way. If it got us all the way, then there would be more
force in your argument. But it is not. It is getting us part way along. I would argue that we still
cannot afford, in the national interest, to weaken the relatively strong bits in order to make
adjustments for the others. We have to find a better way than that. [p1002]
 

Professor Gavin Brown, Chair, Group of Eight; and Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of Sydney
    Our submission [from the Group of Eight] outlines the basis on which a new policy and funding environment should be developed and I would like to isolate two of these principles.

   The first principle identifies the growing importance of universities to the future of the nation in the global knowledge economy. Senators have already received evidence and submissions from most of the GO8 universities and are aware of the struggle to maintain our international research standing in the face of diminished funding and the constraints of the regulatory environment. The coalition, through its Backing Australia's Ability initiative announced earlier this year, has responded to these difficulties with a range of programs which we welcome. But, as we stated at the time, this can only be seen as a first step in the huge task that faces us to catch up with our colleagues overseas. The GO8 has published a chart that identifies the gap between R&D investment in Australia and the OECD average. If we overlay the expected outcomes from Backing Australia's Ability, we find that much remains to be done.

The ALP's Knowledge Nation announcements have yet to be translated into policy initiatives and we await further details over the next few months, but we are pleased with these initiatives. In a positive sense, we are pleased that this issue is at the top of the policy agenda for all political parties. If our leading public research institutions are to underpin Australia's performance in the global knowledge economy, we fall well short of efforts being made elsewhere.

The second principle that I wish to promote relates to access. Ability to succeed and not ability to pay should remain the central criterion for access to all universities regardless of their mission or their standing. In this regard, the GO8 universities have recently introduced 128 equity scholarships that underpin this commitment. [1022]
 

July 19th Newcastle

Senator TIERNEY (to Professor Sidney Bourke, Deputy Director, Centre for the Study of Research Training and Impact)
    In terms of the government's recent announcement in Backing Australia's Ability and the $1.9 billion for what some people, I suppose, would call a Knowledge Nation, there will be a doubling of ARC grants phasing in over the next few years. I did not notice any discussion of that in what you said.


Prof. Bourke
    No. That is a positive, but if the staff do not have time to do the research, it is not going to help a lot and, with the ARC of course, it is very difficult to buy staff time. It is not part of the way that they fund. [p1154]
 

Professor Leith Morton (Private capacity)
    I guess the problem, as I am sure you have heard, is that the overall quality of applications for ARC grants is very, very high and most of them do not get funded. This is, I think, the big problem.

Senator Tierney
    But you would be pleased that, under Backing Australia's Ability, we are doubling ARC funding?

Prof. Morton
    Yes, indeed. We are all very pleased with that.

Senator Tierney
    That may mean success rates: it is double the money, and goes from 17 per cent up to over 30. Our earlier committee actually established that that was probably a good point for them to be at.

Prof. Morton
    That was welcomed by everybody. We need more of that.

Senator Tierney
    Thank you. [p1206]