TOPICS: Australian Universities Accord final report, international students, student safety

E&OE

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: This weekend in higher education in Australia, 17 years after the Bradley report, we now have the publication of the O’Kane Accord report. There’s much to welcome in that. It recommends 25 years of generational change for higher education, which when we’re finished, will produce a more competitive Australia.

LUKE SHEEHY: Hello, everyone. Luke Sheehy, Chief Executive Officer of Universities Australia. This report is the end of a journey of more than 16 months of hard work of both the panel and our universities and our friends across the tertiary education sector. More than 800 submissions over three processes and what we’ve got is an amazing multi-generational blueprint that puts Australian universities at the centre of Australia’s economic future. It is really amazing work, but it is significant work, and we are looking through all the detail now and we really are encouraging the government to get cracking – to get moving on implementing this significant reform agenda starting with the implementation advisory group and working through that. We look forward to seeing what the government comes up with in the budget process. There are many, many things in this report that are good for Australians and are good for our sector and good for the future of our economic and social needs in this country.

JOURNALIST: What’s the top of the list? What do you want to get enacted first beyond the committee?

LUKE SHEEHY: We have to design things as a sector and hopefully we’re involved in the co-design of that process. In many respects, a lot of the report’s recommendations hang off the establishment of a tertiary education commission. We have to design the commission first. That’s important. There are things the government can do and that is the government’s choice and the government’s decision and they will have more to say about that in the coming weeks, I’m sure. But the important thing is ensuring that we get moving quickly. There are things that will take many, many years to implement in this report and the sooner we start, the better.

JOURNALIST: We’ve seen the government crackdown on the number of international students. Now we’ve got this proposal of this so-called wealth tax for the more longstanding universities. Do you see any great difficulties for the sector in juggling those two given essentially the revenue of international students is being dramatically reduced really across the sector and now many universities have been asked to basically defer a lot of that revenue to other institutions?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: I think it’s important to recognise that international enrolments right now are at the same levels as they were pre-covid, so there hasn’t been a diminution, and the vast majority of international students return to their home countries, probably 75 per cent go back. What we’re trying to get here is a balance so that students who come to Australia for their education also take their skills into the education economy beyond the institutions, but also that the gearing of delivery of infrastructure, which is the second part of your question as it relates to the delivery of a fund, that’s not positioned as a tax, it’s positioned as a co-contribution fund for the future.

JOURNALIST: One of the criticisms that the Greens have is that it doesn’t do enough to address the job issues within the university sector. We’ve seen massive bleed in terms of casuals, in terms of pay. Is that something that I guess you recognise as a criticism? Is that something you’d want to go further in a different report? 

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: The report does talk about the requirement to address casualisation and I guess the precarious nature of some elements of supports in institutions, predominantly in the research side as well which is where most temporary, I guess, contract workers are in the universities. We can see a strengthening of the research sector proposed in the report and that’ll go some way to addressing those concerns.

JOURNALIST: With the student ombudsman, correct me if I’m wrong but the draft proposal had some provisions that would’ve allowed the ombudsman to come in and resolve some student fee issues and potential tinkering with, I guess you could call it repercussions. You guys were against that at that point. That’s been now stripped out from the final draft – do I have that understanding correct?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: I haven’t seen an interim draft. I can tell you that the prosecution of the shape of the ombudsman was done in consultation with institutions and outside. The centring of it around a process piece is something that the universities welcome.

JOURNALIST: We’ve heard critics say that we need the ombudsman to have teeth. Obviously so far, it’s still in the drafting process. Legislation needs to be drafted, but it just says it’ll be able to recommend universities take steps to resolve complaints and offer a restorative engagement process. What do you guys want to see to ensure that there is adequate scrutiny and that action can be taken should your members fail to adequately hold sexual assault to account?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: The ombudsman is not just about student safety, it’s a student ombudsman. In nesting it within the Australian ombudsman office, it has all the powers that any other ombudsman would have to reach in and engage with anybody who hasn’t followed the processes that are in place.

JOURNALIST: And what could that mean for your members?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: I think if a member hasn’t followed the process, then the consequence will be rectification.

JOURNALIST: Should that rectification include financial penalties for universities? How else do we bring them to the table to make sure they take this seriously? And why should students be paying the full amount of, say, HECS or for their courses if they’re then shortchanged when it comes to student safety on campus?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: HECS is a contribution students make towards the attainment of their education. A student safety issue is, in the broader sense, about the obligations universities have to provide safe environments. The two things are not directly linked.

JOURNALIST: So, you’re saying there should be no financial penalties for universities given that there is a contract between universities and students, and should you fail to provide safety, like through any other contracts or any other workplaces that universities should, then that stays the same? There are no issues when it comes to payments?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: No – it’s quite clear that the ombudsman will have the powers that are gifted to legislation and that may include penalties in terms of financial or otherwise. They’ll be appropriate for whatever misdemeanours have been carried out by whoever hasn’t met their procedural requirements.

JOURNALIST: And what penalties would you be happy with?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: That won’t be a matter for the institutions to determine.

LUKE SHEEHY: I think it’s important to remember that it’s every jurisdiction in the country. State ministers have agreed to refer this power to the Commonwealth ombudsman. We’re working closely to see how that happens in an expedited fashion and ensure that there’s the same system across the nation so that we’re still going through a process. This was only agreed to by education ministers on Friday, but we really have deeply appreciated the opportunity to work with the government on developing this so far.

JOURNALIST: Who should foot the bill for job placements for students? This has obviously come up. It’s something that everyone agrees needs to be fixed in order to actually boost participation in all these degrees. Who’s going to foot the bill for that? Who should?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: The report makes a recommendation that not only state governments, but also employers would engage in making contributions. Currently, universities underpin an awful lot of placements for work-integrated learning and for practice directly themselves. So, it’s a combination.

JOURNALIST: The student survey you’re doing this year on student wellbeing, does the release of the Accord or the plan for the ombudsman change how that’s going to be conducted or change any plans around that?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: It’s still in the design process, so we’re some way away from delivery. I think the inputs from the Accord and the fact that the body’s there will have an influence on it too.

JOURNALIST: And what’s the timeline on that?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: It’s to be delivered before the end of the year.

JOURNALIST: There are a lot of regulations being proposed coming into force at the same time. We’ve obviously got the Accord, a lot of proposals that could stagger out over many years. However, at the same time you’ve got legislation in the works for other regulations. Is there too much red tape imposed on the sector at the moment?

LUKE SHEEHY: I think it’s fair to say that we want a risk-based and proportionate approach to regulation and the Accord report and the interim report went into some detail around the regulatory impost on universities. We have a significant amount of work to do in our daily operations, let alone the uplift of activity that is outlined in this report. If that’s to be implemented, we want to make sure that the regulatory system is not overly burdensome to our members and we’re getting the balance right because it is a challenge to operate our universities efficiently within a regulatory system and we want to make sure that happens. There’s significant focus on the way regulation would happen through the tertiary education commission and we’ll be part of that co-design process.

JOURNALIST: I just want to take it back to the question about international students. They are clearly a major revenue source for well-established universities. This co-payment being proposed, it’s been proposed that the wealthy universities are going to be expected to actually pitch in quite a bit more. At a time when the government is clearly trying to dramatically, and perhaps we haven’t seen the numbers now, but we will dramatically reduce the number of international students here, isn’t that going to create quite a difficult revenue issue for universities?

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: I take that in two parts. Number one is there’s a clear recognition in the report that higher education and education is the fourth largest export industry in the country. It’s the number one export industry in Australia outside of anything we dig out of the ground. It has a massive importance not just to the operation of universities, but to the economy in terms of a contributor to GDP. The gearing of migration activities around ensuring that we have the right size population and that we have the right passage and protections in place for Australians is a different matter.

JOURNALIST: With respect, I don’t think it is. I think they’re part and parcel of the same issue here. Given this is the lever that they’re trying to use to reduce migration.

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: Migration implies that people are going to stay in the country and less than a quarter of students stay in the country after education. There are two different gears in that.

JOURNALIST: Net overseas migration is temporary though. That’s the lever they’re trying to pull.

PROFESSOR DAVID LLOYD: If there’s to be a rightsizing of the migration criteria, which has been telegraphed quite clearly, institutions will be able to access the populations of students that they will. A quarter of students are educated by Australian institutions offshore. So, there’s still that flow of revenue. Going back to the notion of that being used to drive a fund, I think every single one of the universities would be welcoming the fund. I think there’d be great debate about how it should be funded.

JOURNALIST: Thank you.

ENDS