Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Technology, Sydney. (October 8, 2007)

"Australia is the second-lowest taxed country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the second-worst off in total government investment in human capital," according to Ross Milbourne, vice-chancellor and president of the University of Technology, Sydney, and a former professor of economics.

Writing in today's Sydney Morning Herald, Professor Milbourne says that: "...a key component of living standards is investment (both public and private) in infrastructure and skills formation... [and] student-staff ratios in Australian universities are more than 20:1. Compare this to 10:1 in China, 12:1 in Japan and 5-10:1 in the US."

And while he lauds the introduction of HECS which to some extent has alleviated the massive reduction in governmental funding he points out that Australian university students "are struggling: caught between restricted earning capacity while studying and the massively increasing rents in most major cities."

Professor Milbourne lists two priorities of paramount importance: "[A] financial support scheme aimed at low socio-economic students. This is better than a reduction in HECS because students can use it to lower HECS debt or to relieve immediate poverty," which in turn will induce more secondary students to undertake tertiary studies, and "When the next politician promises further cuts in taxes, replace "taxes" with "educational outcomes, infrastructure and productive capacity" and see if the argument is still appealing."

Taking the vice-chancellor's argument a step further, how does a government that squanders its budget surpluses justify its overweening pride when the nation's balance of payments and therefore its foreign debt keeps mounting ever higher, resulting in increasing interest payments.

Something to do with a skills shortage running through the whole of the nation's economic well being perhaps?