Shallow Thinking or Building a Sydney Opera House: Kevin and the Universities. (November 15, 2007)

When would-be prime minister Kevin Rudd officially launched the Labor Party's election campaign yesterday and got to spruiking the party's education revolution as it affected universities he had a good deal to say about increasing its clients:

Labor's Future Fellowships

A Rudd Labor Government will invest in new Future Fellowships to keep Australia¹s best and brightest mid-career researchers in Australia. The Future Fellowships program will offer four year Fellowships valued at $140,000 a year to 1,000 of Australia's top researchers in the middle of their career.
    In addition, each researcher's institution would receive a $50,000 grant to support the purchase of related infrastructure and equipment for their research project.

Future Fellowships will be targeted at researchers working in areas of national priority - such as renewable energy, manufacturing technologies, the sciences, medical research, and education. Importantly, preference will be given to those researchers who can demonstrate a capacity to build collaboration across industry, research institutions, and with other disciplines.

At least 10 per cent of Federal Labor's Future Fellowships will be targeted to encourage outstanding Australian researchers currently based overseas to come home to Australia.

Over four years from the start of the 2009 university year, Federal Labor's Scholarships for a Competitive Future will:

Double from 44,000 to 88,000 the number of undergraduate students receiving a Commonwealth Learning Scholarship, including accommodation bursaries (The number of commencing scholarships each year will steadily increase from 12,000 in 2008 to 29,000 in 2012. This includes the number of commencing Accommodation Scholarships increasing from around 3,500 currently to around 10,000 in 2012); and

Double from 4,800 to 9,600 the number of postgraduate students receiving an Australian Postgraduate Award for their PhD or Masters by Research (commencing Australian Postgraduate Awards allocated each year will steadily increase from 1,580 in 2008 to 3,500 in 2012) but probably no increase in the actual value of the stipend.

Scholarships for a Competitive Future will also create two new categories of Commonwealth Scholarships open to Australian undergraduate students:

 National Priority Scholarships ­ valued at $2,120 per year for up to four years for students in priority areas such as nursing, teaching, medicine, dentistry, allied health, maths, science, and engineering.

National Accommodation Scholarships -valued at $4,240 per year for up to four years for students relocating interstate to study a specialist course not available near their home.

1957 -- An ambitious New South Wales' Premier, Joe Cahill, a visiting American architect, Eero Saarinen, and a young Dane's sketches, Joern Utzon, were the key factors which generated one of the world’s most important modern buildings.

Cahill and his government publicly grossly under estimated the cost of building the Sydney Opera House believing (with undoubted justification) that to admit to the probable cost would have killed the project out of hand.

Making available tens of thousands more scholarships and fellowships to help students to attend degenerating universities under resourced in staff and infrastructure makes no sense, but maybe, just maybe, Mr Rudd should he achieve government, will implement a viable plan to rebuild the universities' "physical, human and intellectual infrastructure at a rate adequate to maintain their future productive capacity" as the executive director of the Group of Eight, Michael Gallagher, recently phrased it.