Macquarie has launched a partnership with neighbouring high schools in northern Sydney that aims to tell teenagers about the value of science as a field of study and career.

The university will tutor students to inspire their younger counterparts; it will design professional development courses for science teachers; and it will award a $20,000 PhD scholarship for a student to examine the best ways to teach science.

University and school staff will also develop research projects for school students, who will earn extra UAI points for top performances.

• Sort out the shemozzle of fees, HECS and loans, on a stable long-term basis.

• Re-establish a proper platform for basic research funding so Australia can be internationally competitive in that area.

• Reframe government-institution relations to provide for accountability and university autonomy, and co-ordination and specialist missions.

• Stabilise standards, particularly in the international market.

If Howard and other political leaders are triumphs of the ordinary, lacking policy vision and imagination, it’s because we have wanted them to be so.

 

A squeeze on our universities, the ideas factories generating much of our research and intellectual capital, is also contributing to the malaise. While the Federal Government received plaudits for its new approach to university funding and a $5 billion higher education endowment in the latest budget, there is a large degree of catch-up after public funding for universities was run down over the past decade.

Professor Glyn Davis, the chairman of the Group of Eight elite research universities, identified the underlying political basis of this squeeze. ‘‘There is little evidence that more spending on universities is a high priority for the electorate,’’ he said. ‘‘Voters like improved health and school services. But they like direct payments to themselves even more. In the stampede of self-interest that is our electoral system, universities remain a distant priority. Governments know they can ignore the university sector without electoral consequence. And they do.’’

Under pressure from vested interests in the mining and energy sector, the Government stalled on a move to carbon trading for a decade and has only moved in recent months after a huge shift in public opinion and acceptance of the inevitable by business.

Even now, the debate is still largely about the pain, the cost to the economy, business and consumers, rather than the opportunities it opens. Meanwhile, other countries have had almost a decade’s head start.