E&OE
JULIE HARE: Thank you, Luke. I have so many questions. But I’ll start with a hard one. I have a sense of déja vu that I’ve heard this speech on this stage many times before, that universities get up and they say how important they are to the economy because they produce the schools of the future and the research of the future. But they’re misunderstood by governments, and governments just don’t like them anymore. And then the final thing is you say, ‘give us more money’. So, what’s not working for universities? If this message has been sent many times in the past?
LUKE SHEEHY: Thanks, Julie. It would be strange for the CEO of Universities Australia not to come on stage and ask for more support for this sector that is so wonderful. But I think the important thing to remember is we’re being told we need to grow. So, my message is that we need to be match fit. And we’ve had successive governments rely on our capacity to get revenues from other sources for a long time. So, the structural underfunding of our sector is now getting to the point, it’s almost critical. And I know other people have made this case for years, but usually we’re allowed to get other revenue from other sources. We’re championed on to do so by both sides of politics. Last year taught me a lot, particularly with the debate around international students. The fundamental architecture of our funding system is really in need of renovation. So that’s my message today. And, you know, I’d love to be sitting here saying, we’ve got lots of money and we can do lots of things for the nation. We want to do those things for the nation. We’re public institutions. We’re non-for profit. We’re here for the nation’s benefit. And that’s my message to the policymakers.
JOHN ROSS: Thanks for the speech, Luke. I’m actually going to ask you about something else. One of the speakers at your conference yesterday was Kathleen Folbigg, who spent 20 years in jail for supposedly smothering her four little children, and she was finally released and acquitted after an inquiry, which was prompted by an open letter signed by about 90 prominent Australians, including some very senior academics. It said that there was new genetic evidence which raised serious questions over her conviction and suggested a terrible injustice had been done to her. My question is, do academics and even universities themselves have a responsibility to speak out publicly when they become aware of terrible harm being done? Or does the principle of institutional autonomy, the idea that universities don’t take sides on things, does that sort of preclude that sort of action?
LUKE SHEEHY: I’m sure you met Kathleen’s wonderful, young lawyer educated at the University of Newcastle. What an intelligent and eloquent young woman who fought very, very hard to get the freedom for Kathleen that she deserved. I think there’s a couple of things in that, John. One is science matters and science is important. And we need to trust scientists. And apparently, we do in Australia. We need policy makers and the structural systems around the legal system and others to trust scientists as much as Australians do. It’s important that we foster that in our universities with good, strong funding for research and teaching so we can support the next generation of scientists. I thought it was really telling that Kathleen chose a university summit for one of her first public appearances because she values how much science and knowledge helped get her freedom. I, for my sins, studied law, and I know there were many innocence projects around Australia and internationally. Bright young people working on freeing people who are incarcerated for the wrong reasons are at our universities right now. So, I’m really proud of that.
JOHN ROSS: So, should universities speak up on those sorts of things?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, I mean, if this is a question of academic freedom, within the rules of academic freedom, certainly. But of course, people have passions, and they manifest on university campuses through the research and the work they do through things like innocence projects. And that’s a good thing.
JOHN ROSS: So just on that, what is the line in the sand between academic freedom and freedom of speech?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, we had a speech this morning from the Shadow Minister, Sarah Henderson, who quoted Marcia Langton on this very issue. And I think you should refer to her comments on it. I thought that were very beautiful, that, you know, that academics have an obligation to exercise academic freedom within their areas of expertise and research.
ANDREW BROWN: Thanks so much for your speech this afternoon Luke. No-one would dispute that running a university is a hard job. Many Australian Vice-Chancellors earn salaries of well over $1 million. So, for comparison that’s double the pay of the Prime Minister. And more than counterparts in leading universities such as Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and Stanford. How can the sector justify such exorbitant salaries that are well above some of the leading institutions in the world that consistently outrank Australian universities in terms of their output? Is it the case, as stated by UC Vice-Chancellor Bill Shorten, that defending vice-chancellor pay is a lost cause?
LUKE SHEEY: Thanks for that question. I’m absolutely delighted that I don’t set vice-chancellors salaries, and I think mine looks very small in comparison, but nonetheless that is a matter for our university governing councils and chancellors who set university vice-chancellors salaries. But I will say this: Australian universities are incredibly large compared to other global systems. And if you think about some of the medium sized universities that I used to represent in my old job, they have more employees than some government departments, and they have private income that they get from international students. That is not Commonwealth funding directly. So, this is a matter for appointed councils under the government governance structures. It is being examined in both the Senate right now and as well as the expert counsel on governance matters. So, I think it’s appropriate for that work to go ahead. And I would say any further questions about VC salaries should really be a matter for the government, for the chancellors and the governing bodies.
ANDREW BROWN: Would those governing bodies be out of touch for many Australians?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, I’ll say this. Universities in Australia are very, very well governed and we did a very good job despite the deliberate policy neglect during COVID. So, a lot of that is to do with good governance and management.
JOANNA PANAGOPOULOS: Firstly, given the bipartisan push to cut immigration, what is the overall number of international students that the university sector needs to stay viable? And secondly, you spoke a lot about the funding slide and Commonwealth funding gaps in your speech. How much additional public funding do universities need overall?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, I’ll come at your question from the second part first, because if we fundamentally get the right amount of funding to deliver our core mission of education and research for Australians, then we can have a discussion about how much we can top up with international students. But the threshold question to both sides of politics in an election year is will you fund education and research fully and properly so we can get on our core mission to deliver for Australians? Then we can have a discussion around the size of the international education sector.
JOANNA PANAGOPOULOS: But do you have a number? How much do we need?
LUKE SHEEHY: I certainly don’t. There are 39 individual institutions that make up our member universities in Australia, and they all have different operating models and visions and connections with the world. It would be churlish of me to come up with a number on the fly here.
JOANNA PANAGOPOULOS: You must have crunched some numbers on the international students. There’s no sort of figure that you can provide?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, I’ll tell you this much. Don’t take a sledgehammer to international students. While we’ve got structural underfunding in our teaching and learning and research activities, like we saw last year, which saw at least 70,000 fewer student visas in the system, which caused $4.3 billion of economic harm to the country, that cost the country $19 million a day and brought some of our regional universities and universities in outer growth suburban areas to their knees.
TIM WINKLER: The Job Ready Graduates scheme failed not just because it was inequitable but because it failed to understand how to shift student demand. And what were the drivers of student demand? How do we avoid the same issues with the Accord, when we’re talking about getting a million more students into the system, who are not really related to the sector at the moment, who are not engaged with the sector? How do we understand what they want?
LUKE SHEEHY: That’s a great question. I’ve been around this sector for such a long time, and I’ve seen the kind of boom-and-bust approach to price signalling for students. I think it’s really important we come back to some basics here, that university, because it’s so important to the future of Australia, remains a viable option to Australians, irrespective of their background. And that means the more that students have to pay, even though it’s deferred through HECS, the more it becomes a consideration and that takes poorer kids out of the equation quicker than it does richer kids. And that’s a tragedy. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is we’ve got Jobs and Skills Australia now. We fought very hard as universities to make sure that we’re included in Jobs and Skills Australia. So, the setting of skills priorities for the nation is really important and it should be done. And Barney and his team should do that work. And then finally we need to work with business on incentives. Building aspiration to do a university degree is about the job that you’ll get. So, we need industry to come and make those really clear signals that the jobs are available at the end of the rainbow.
TIM WINKLER: But at a time when there’s a lot of discussion about the social licence of universities and a dislocation of universities and their mission and what’s happening around the kitchen table, how do we presume to know what those million students want?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, you know, what I can tell you is that the Australian public, when they go down the street and they go do their daily shopping and they get, you know, some drugs from the drug store or from the chemist, or they drop off their kids at school, or they see a road being built or a bridge being built – all of those interactions have to do with skilled professionals, skilled workers that come both out of our fantastic TAFEs who have apprenticeships and come through our universities. So, it’s a community effort. It’s a team Australia effort to build aspiration for not only the skills you need, but the job you can get. And I think it’s an important thing. It’s not just on universities, it’s on families, it’s on school systems, it’s on the industry, it’s on business, it’s on government. We need to build excitement and aspiration for what the end goal is, which is a rewarding and successful career through skills you get at university.
JULIE HARE: So just on that, in your speech you made a very passionate argument against Job Ready Graduates and why we need to get rid of it. But, you know, I would make the point that universities and their vice-chancellors were around when that policy was made, and they probably did not advocate strongly enough at the time against that policy and took the rationale that perhaps it was politically savvy not to. I mean, you know, where do we stand in the advocacy and the political game when students are really the ones who are suffering as a result of that decision?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, that was 2017, and I had a lot more hair then. It was a nice time. But a couple of things: one is, ATN and I actually stood in the Senate and said we should amend it before we pass it. That’s the first thing. But the really important thing to remember is there was a sledgehammer approach taken to us then by Simon Birmingham, who said, you’re just I’m just going to freeze the numbers, that’s all you get. No more indexation. This provided some level of hope for certainty and stability in our sector at the time, and we asked the Government and the Parliament to amend it before they passed it, which they didn’t. We also were engaged in a process where we would look at the structural underfunding of research at the same time, and that never materialised either. So, we got a pretty we got a dud deal and we’re accepting that now, but we certainly were given some bigger promises that weren’t delivered.
JULIE HARE: So, you don’t accept any responsibility for that? I mean, I’ll just take you back another few years. And that was when the Coalition government tried to deregulate university fees, and vice-chancellors unanimously supported that. And now we know that policy would have been devastating to young people in Australia. So, you know, how do we kind of balance that out?
LUKE SHEEHY: That was even more hair time ago. That was 2014, Julie. There was one vice-chancellor who quite famously didn’t like it, who will remain nameless. But look you know, it’s boom and bust. At the time, we were told by a Coalition government that you can put as much as you like on HECS because you can deregulate your fees. And we were told by the same government three of four years later that we had to curtail the size of the debt and repay it quicker. So, you know, it’s about rational good policy to get us match fit for now in 2025 and beyond. You know, you and I could talk on this all day but over several champagnes. But you know, we want good policy. We’ve spent years on the Accord. Now let’s commit to the architecture that we need to get this system right.
ERIN MORLEY: This morning, the Coalition education spokeswoman said her government would reinstate the 50 per cent pass rule. What impact would that have on the sector that’s trying to boost equity student enrolments and graduation rates?
LUKE SHEEHY: It would be devastating. And I think our universities were very displeased and upset with the 50 per cent rule when it came in because it undermines the autonomy of our world class teachers and educators at our universities to support students in their own universities. It’s such a blunt rule. And we will be asking again for Sarah and the Coalition to reconsider that. There are wonderful, passionate people that teach in our universities, and I’ve never seen them more annoyed by a rule like the 50 per cent pass rule. You know, we take students from a wide range of backgrounds in our universities. We’re getting close to half of non-school leavers coming into universities. People come with different backgrounds and perspectives, and we need to be able to support them at university, not through arbitrary rules set by the Commonwealth. It’s the same thing with the fee setting. We need, you know, we need to put these things in context, but a lot of these rules are put in place by the Commonwealth to us, not with us.
ERIN MORLEY: The Senate is trying to increase the quality of graduates. What is the strategy? First of all do you think that is something that should be focused on? And if it is, what are the strategies that need to be in place then?
LUKE SHEEHY: Is this for equity students, do you mean?
ERIN MORLEY: Yes. And all students.
LUKE SHEEHY: Look, I think universities are as self-accrediting and autonomous institutions who know their core business of education do a fantastic job of supporting their cohorts and their students and their cohort of students. And I just I always worry about mandated policies from the, you know, from one central point in Canberra or, you know, without proper consultation. I always saw some of these policies, like the 50 per cent rule as a savings measure, because it does have a savings outcome in the budget papers when it was introduced. So, is it a real policy to drive change in the sector or was it a savings measure? And that’s a question we should probably give to the coalition, I think, and the government who took a while to change their mind for that matter.
JULIE HARE: But isn’t the problem with the 50 per cent rule that it’s about young people acquiring debt for no qualifications, people who are probably possibly ill placed to be at university, who are struggling to finish, and that it’s trying to save them from extra debt.
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, my love of champagne was found in my first year of university, Julie, and if I had a 50 per cent pass rule, I probably wouldn’t be standing here today. So, let’s be real. Young people get to university and you know, they might come from some all-boys school in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and go, what is this, right? So, I think we have to remember that people are becoming citizens. And the university should be entitled to support them in the first instance.
JULIE HARE: Okay. The next question is from Caitlin Cassidy, who’s the education reporter at The Guardian. And I’m going to ask the question for her. She says, you mentioned safe and respectful campuses in your speech in 2023, Universities Australia’s then chief or CEO committed to holding another national survey of sexual assault, and harassment on campuses following a backlash over its response to gender-based harm. That’s a very long sentence. Two years later, when will the survey be released? And what has changed on campuses to address those concerns?
LUKE SHEEHY: Thanks, Caitlin. I did make the joke that Caitlin didn’t exist and was only a bot, so that’s kind of very funny that she’s come in virtually today, but I know, who you are, Caitlin. But importantly, we are absolutely committed to deliver the next iteration of the National Student Safety Survey. And it was a top priority of mine coming into this job in February, I and the team calculated I’ve spent more than 100 hours talking to student groups, advocates, victims, survivors, practitioners, and people that can help us inform how the next survey should look and what it looks like. And we’re very close to delivering that, and we will in 2025.
JULIE HARE: Do you know when in 2025?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, we’ll do it at a time that suits students because if we have to work out where’s the best time to get the best amount of students engaged in the process? And that looks more like the second half of this year.
JULIE HARE: Okay. Thank you. Our next question, Melissa Cote from the Mandarin. Hello, Melissa
MELISSA COADE: One of the sort of overarching themes that you identified as affecting the sector was politics looming larger than rational policy. This is a common complaint that may sectors have. And perhaps an enduring one. I’d like to draw on some of the themes that your summit addressed. This idea of social cohesion and anti-elitism. You talk about the long tail of COVID-19 that hasn’t just affected sectors, it’s affected public sentiment. Do you think the anti-woke sentiment poses a risk to how the sector advocates for itself, and politicians reckon with the challenges?
LUKE SHEEHY: Look, it’s a good question, and obviously there’s a major disruption that’s happened in America with Trump 2.0 and we think it was fantastic to have that as a main session at yesterday’s summit. What I think is really important to remember is the utility of universities delivering its core mission, and what that means to everyday Australians. In the last year, we’ve been running a campaign, which you’d expect the national peak body to do, to build better support in the wider community. One of the things we learnt about was, positive sentiment, once articulated in a certain way, skyrockets for universities. Because if you put a simple proposition: that we have 4,000 fewer teachers than we need today and universities are the only way to get those skilled workers into the Australian community and to the workforce to support young people; 132,000 more nurses, the same proposition for skilled professionals, skilled workers, essential workers for our economy. Then remove yourself from what happens on the front pages of newspapers and what occupies political pundits and let’s think about what the real Australian people need and want from the university sector. And I think that’s a really important to think thing to think about. But I also reflect on the fact that, as I said in my speech, for a healthy democracy we ought to have a healthy university sector. And part of that is having debate and knowledge and understanding shades of grey and being on campus. But campuses should foster that debate. But they should be places that are relatively peaceful and safe for students and staff alike. And, you know, we’ve worked very hard as a sector to address these emerging issues over the last 12 months.
MELISSSA COADE: Just to follow that idea through, I love the notion of an optimistic narrative that can sort of sit alongside that which politicians sell. But you spoke of gaps becoming chasms and crises. So how do we balance the urgency of what you want addressed? And then the optimistic, aspirational thing that we’re moving towards?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, you know, my hope is that, you know, the more we talk about the important role of universities and our core mission in education and research, the more Australians, irrespective of whether or not they went to university or not, they see the value for us as part of our future. And that’s the whole part of my speech today. And they recognise that when you take a sledgehammer to international students, the impact that will have is detrimental to something that’s really important to them.
JULIE HARE: Thanks. Just on that, Bill Shorten is here today, he spoke at a pre-conference event and during that speech said that a lot of Australians don’t really understand what Australian universities do, why they’re there, why they exist. And for a whole lot of those people, they don’t see that those universities are accessible to them. And that kind of contradicts what you just said then, especially around international students. So how do you kind of balance that up?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, it’s true. I mean, we’ve got more work to do. We always have more work to do. And in an era where there is declining trust in institutions, I think it’s really important that universities invest in themselves in terms of how they engage with their communities. But then I think about wonderful examples. I think Adam Schumacher’s got a tax clinic at VU in Melbourne that helps people who’ve for some reason, fallen out of the tax system and need help. You know, there are things that we do that are practical help, like the innocence projects that we have right across the world to help people like Kathleen Folbigg. So, I am going to be the chief evangelist for great things that our universities do for the rest of the time that I’m in this job. And if it breaks down the perceptions in the community, that’s a good thing.
NATASHA BITA: l do not understand how the sector still cannot tell us how much funding it needs to operate at the required level for research and teaching. Because every other sector will be able to quantify – the mining industry, roads, public schools. You draw a comparison with public schools. They said we need a five per cent increase in funding. They lobbied. They’re getting it. But it’s tied to demonstrable targets and outcomes. So would universities be prepared to get some accounting or data analysts or, you know, economists out of the universities to work out how much you need overall to function and then tie it to some performance measures, for example, completion rates, first year completion rates, student satisfaction, outcomes of research, commercialisation, all those sorts of things as would happen in the private enterprise.
LUKE SHEEHY: Let’s start with the school system. And I know you and I have talked about this a lot. So, the school system had a fundamental review headed by David Gonski that created this idea of a schooling resource standard. This is how much we need to educate a primary school student. This is how much we need to educate a secondary school student. And these are the other things we need, both the institutional loadings and the student profile loadings. There is some work being done towards that, obviously in response to the Universities Accord. And I thank Mary O’Kane for advocating for a needs-based funding for the Australian higher education system, but more work needs to be done on it. That’s the first thing. So, we don’t have an SRS that I can say we need five per cent more. There has been costing exercises undertaken by Deloitte and others in the past, and they were completely not fit for purpose. So, if we want to do a costing and activity-based costing system approach for our university sector, we should do it immediately. We should do it while we’re fixing JG. That’s the first thing. Second thing is how long is a piece of string? How much research does the country want us to do? How much research does business want to do with universities? I can’t quantify that until we’ve got answers from other people that can answer those questions.
NATASHA BITA: But for the general public, they want to see results. So, you might say we have a shortage of 120,000 nurses. We need X amount of money to educate those nurses or, you know, we could cure cancer with $1 billion. And these different researchers all working together, it appears that everyone’s rowing their own boat and there’s no coherent narrative. You talk about, demountable buildings in Brisbane. Griffith University has just spent, I think, $65 million on what I can only call a trophy building, the Treasury Building, so they can have an office in the city. Now, Joe Blow, who is struggling to pay the mortgage, is finding it hard to hear. We want more money without any targets, any monetary value.
LUKE SHEEHY: I’ll try and answer it this way. I look forward to Barney Glover’s next speech at the Press Club or elsewhere, where he advocates equally for university participation as he does for VET and TAFE – that would be a good thing. But the second part to your question is there is real pain in the university sector right now, particularly in regional communities, particularly in regional Queensland. So, you know, it’s not all the same across the university sector. I accept that. But why is it not the same? Predominantly because some of our universities are better able to attract international students, both in terms of their proximity, their location, what they offer. Also thanks to that horror, which was 107. So, I’m glad that’s over as a first thing. Second thing is, that’s only a point in time. One building, right? It’s what goes on in there and what the outcome is. And that’s what we’re asking for today. You know, the core mission of teaching and research is structurally underfunded. We used to top it up with international students. Now we’re being told we can’t have as many as we need in the system. So, we need to come back to basics and work out how we pay for those fundamental parts of what we do first.
NATASHA BITA: But do you understand that Governments can’t set that immigration level unless they know what the funding implications are for you, and everyone’s operating in the dark as to how much money you need, and therefore then working it out backwards from international student revenue.
LUKE SHEEHY: Yes, and as I’ve said about creating a demand team Australia moment. We need politics, the political class, industry, universities, community school system all working together.
NICK STEWART: Thanks. You say that universities know their students. You say they’re doing a fantastic job if they know their students. There are a lot of students with disability who’ve begun doing courses and not completed them. Surely universities would be prepared to accept that part of the bargain if they take somebody on and they can’t actually do the job, that they should not have to pay for the course that they’ve done. At the moment you’re asking for more money. How about you give something back and say, right, look, we won’t charge people with disability if they don’t complete the course, or we won’t charge other students if they don’t complete the course. It seems fair.
LUKE SHEEHY: I have been in this sector a long time and watched particularly over the last couple of years, and especially when we had a funding cliff. So, we got funded for a certain amount of students. How many of our universities, because of their commitment to equity and participation, enrol students above what they were funded for. So that’s the first thing. Our universities will do the right thing because it’s in our nature.
NICK STEWART: Is that the right thing or the wrong thing to take in someone who can’t necessarily complete the course?
LUKE SHEEHY: I think that’s the right thing. I think, you know, where there’s a demand for education, but on disability, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. And I’ll come back to my point that I made about the Gonski reforms in schools. The last piece of that work was disability and loadings associated with disability. We’ve also been doing some excellent work with the Department of Education and others on how we incorporate disability loadings into a needs-based funding model for the Australian higher education system. It’s complicated work, but it’s important work to include more people, a million more by 2050. We need to make sure we include as many people irrespective of their circumstances in life.
JOHN ROSS: Hello again. Just on Job Ready Graduates, has Universities Australia sort of done the thinking about what it wants in place of Job Ready Graduates? Would you like to roll back to the system that was in place, you know, in 2020 or something completely new? Do you have an idea what you want?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, we want it to be fairer and send that signal to Australians from all walks of life. That university is a good bet and it’s affordable and the right thing for them and the thing that they should take on. Some universities and university groupings, like the individual research universities, have done excellent work on proposing alternatives to Job Ready Graduates. But I come back to my point, John. University fees are a matter for Commonwealth legislation, and we need to work with the Commonwealth on what they’re willing to pay university students on average, pay 48 per cent of the cost of their degree, according to Job Ready Graduates. 52 per cent is a direct grant from the Commonwealth. So that’s a question of how much does the Government want to pay for teaching and learning. And we’re saying it’s underfunded. So, we need more in that category. And we probably need to work out what is the appropriate amount that the student should pay commensurate with their private benefit they get later in life.
JULIE HARE: Thank you. Luke Sheehy. Thank you very much.
