Pressure Mounts for Rudd to Clarify Higher Education Policy. (December 5, 2007)

    Although the Labor Government led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was sworn in barely two days ago, there are increasing calls for the Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, to clarify just what the new government intends to do for and with higher education.

Justine Ferrari and Lauren Wilson reporting in The Australian wrote: "Describing herself as an 'educational traditionalist', Ms Gillard referred to a story in The Weekend Australian that revealed maths skills among Year 7 students last year fell to their lowest level in the five years of testing. 'We can't let that happen. They're never going to cope with wider curricula if they don't have those enabling skills of reading, writing and doing numbers.'"

Concurrently, Peter Hall, President of the Australian Mathematics Society wrote: "...with regard to school mathematics education, the quality and quantity of the mathematics skills we can deliver are limited by the number, and level of training, of school mathematics teachers. As a nation we have the capacity to achieve great heights in the mathematical sciences, if only we can get the school education part right. The main difficulty we are experiencing is a debilitating shortage of adequately trained school mathematics teachers."

It is unmistakeable that Ms Gillard has been careful to avoid any significant statements with regard to Labor's support for the tertiary education sector other than its concern for making it more accessible for those who wish to be its clients/customers.

As to the quality of the product there is a blatant hole in Labor's policy statements.

And while Labor has also moved science from the education, science and training portfolio into a new Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research with Kim Carr as minister, Senator Carr has gone to ground in so far as setting out the specifics of Labor's science policy in basic and strategic research. The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research's fellow senator -- at least until the 30^th of June -- Australian Democrats' spokeswomen for higher education Natasha Stott Despoja has given a not to gentle serve to Labor:

During the election campaign the Democrats released a higher education policy statement aimed at dramatically reducing the cost of university study and boosting university base funding,

There is much to do. We must help to address skills shortages across the economy by attracting and retaining good teachers. Labor is going the wrong way with their plans to reduce funding for the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching.

We need to make university study more affordable, particularly for disadvantaged students. Instead there are reports that philanthropic support for scholarships is in jeopardy due to perverse tax rules. 

The Democrats have long called for tax on all scholarships to be abolished. We need to know where Labor stands on this issue.

Universities are crying out for more funding but we do not know what the Rudd Government intends to do on the issue of indexation or additional funding for university infrastructure.

If the Rudd Government is serious about an 'education revolution', they must act comprehensively and immediately to redress 11 years of Coalition neglect of the higher education sector.

Now Catherine Armitage writes in The Australian's Higher Education Section that there is increasing anxiety that "universities have slipped in Labor's priorities, and that the new Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Education and Social Inclusion, Julia Gillard, will not have time for them, there are mounting calls for urgent reforms and a new junior portfolio or another parliamentary secretary to look after their interests."

Alan Robson, Chairman of the Group of Eight told Ms Armitage: "We can't leave universities to go for another three years without really addressing [the required urgent reforms], while Universities Australia's incoming chairman Monash University's Vice-Chancellor  Richard Larkins said universities were crucial to meeting skills shortages and improve productivity, but "we have not got a general awareness of that, and unless we do fairly major things in terms of the sector, we will just drop further behind the rest of the world".

Speaking for Universities Australia, Professor Larkins said the Higher Education Endowment Fund set up in the May budget by the outgoing government needed to be doubled from the $10 billion topping out figure stipulated by the Howard government to $20 billion by 2013 in order to obtain an annual dividend of about $1.2 billion, to fund essential university capital projects.

Ms Armitage also reports: "The three major sector bodies -- Universities Australia, the Go8 and the Australian Technology Network -- have each called for the money in disparate pools of funds for which they must compete, such as the Learning and Teaching Performance Fund, the Structural Reform Fund, the Workplace Productivity Program and the Capital Development Pool, to be rolled into their base funding allocation to reduce the time and resources they have to spend in bidding for the funds."

Margaret Gardner, Vice-Chancellor of RMIT and Chairwoman of the Australian Technology Network cautioned that it was important to see how the Government's agenda developed before making judgments about its commitment to higher education.

It would seem ill advised for the tertiary education sector to assume that a Rudd government will assume the mantle which cloaked the newly anointed leader and deputy leader of the now opposition Liberal Party when they were directed by John Howard to put those academics in their place.