E&OE 

JOURNALIST: I ask you to reflect on a young Carolyn Evans and the choices she would’ve made given not only Job-ready Graduates (JRG), but high staff-student ratios, high levels of casualisation and the like. And you made the point in your speech that university is, or should be, more about full education into the understanding of human knowledge, knowledge systems and human condition, not just a narrow vocational job. I just want to bring out some stats here that Andrew Norton from Monash University has told us about that includes that there has been a 40 per cent drop in enrolments in language and literature in 2010 and in 2023, a 33 per cent fall in studies of human society, a 30 per cent drop in philosophy in religious studies and a 23 per cent decline in political science and policy. Obviously, that’s not all, but would the young Carolyn Evans have followed her passions and ended up studying at Oxford given the complexities of the university system today? 

PROFESSOR EVANS: I hope so. I’m not sure that I would have. It is a lot harder for people who come with the sort of background that I came from to look at taking on the level of debt that students in those disciplines are asked to take on today. Now, one of the reasons I can always remember when the HECS payments started was because it my first year of university. I did have to pay a debt for my university education. My first protest march, “Hey ho, hey no, fees for unis have to go”, which perhaps suggested we all needed to study a bit more poetry. But in all honesty, even 18-year-old Carolyn thought it wasn’t that unreasonable what was being asked. I was sure I was going to benefit from my university education. I was excited about it, but I also recognised that it was reasonable for me to pay some of that if I didn’t have to pay it up front. I was terrified. I remember at that time during my degree that there was some talk from conservative government at that stage about upfront fees for university and that would’ve absolutely knocked me out. I remember deep distress at thinking about that, but the reason that I went on my little protest march was because I was worried about what the future was once we started to say students had to, public universities had to pay more and more for their degrees, where would it end? And I was worried about the place that we’ve ended up to date. Look, it’s hard to put yourself back in the position that you were in, but what I know is that a lot of people with backgrounds like mine are making the decision not to take up study like I did. And I think that’s a crying shame for the country. 

JOURNALIST: You’ve laid out some stark figures and even just said you might not have gone down the path you did with the JRG fees if you like. Given right now the two magic words to get the attention of Jim Chalmers are “budget neutral”. What about a push to return things, if not to the same, but adjusting how much a government pays for each degree so it’s not so slammed as you laid out before? Would that be an easier way to get the government to agree and more effective to get people enrolling again? 

PROFESSOR EVANS: There are cost neutral ways of reforming the JRG that make them more equal amongst different students. They require though the political courage to say that nurses and teachers and people working in agriculture have to actually pay quite a bit more. I suspect that there isn’t an appetite for that and there probably shouldn’t be. People in professions which are critically needed and often don’t pay hugely well over lifetime, should actually not have to pay that much for university education. I would put it a little bit simply, let’s have a look at how much governments invest in the education for students in private schools as compared to public universities. And if you want to think about cost neutrality, think about cost neutrality across those systems. 

JOURNALIST: So still political bravery of a different type. 

PROFESSOR EVANS: Politically suicidal, I’m sure. When we say there isn’t the money, choices have been made over the last decade, even in the education sector about where that money was going to be spent. Public university students pay 93 per cent of the cost of their university education. There isn’t an independent or Catholic school in the country that would have that level of funding from government for their students. 

JOURNALIST: Thanks for your speech. I did some research before I came today, dug around in the Griffith website and found your CV and I discovered that your most recent book is the Legal Protection of Religious Freedom in Australia. 

PROFESSOR EVANS: Not my most recent book… 

JOURNALIST: Besides that, you’ve also produced titles like Religious Freedom Under the European Court of Human Rights, co-editor of Religion and International Law and Law and Religion in Theoretical and Historical Perspectives. So, I’m not going to ask you about universities. I’m going to ask you about the vexed issue of hiring and firing of staff by faith-based schools. Mobs like Equality Australia say that faith-based schools can currently discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual orientation, their gender identity and their religious orientation, whereas faith-based schools, Christian schools, they assert a positive right to hire and fire as they see fit. And I figure Muslim-based schools will be the same. So, you reckon is there a way for this impasse to be reconciled or are politicians best advised to kick the can down the road? 

PROFESSOR EVANS: Well, that’s not really the topic we here to discuss. Let me give you a very brief answer. 

JOURNALIST: That’s fine. 

PROFESSOR EVANS: One of my other publications in fact deals with this in detail, I can send it to if you would like. One of the most difficult things we deal within society, and we’ve seen it in our universities too, is what happens when two good values, things that we think are valuable human rights even, come into conflict with one another. You’ve talked about religious freedom, which is an important right, and equality, which is an important right. And we’ve seen it in our universities play out in particular contexts. In fact, even sometimes, those two specific things… there is no mutual way to deal with this. Society has to look at which of those two values is determined to be the preference in a particular situation. Reasonable minds can differ about what those are, but certainly some of the work that my colleagues and I did in an article we presented showed that the reality on the ground was a lot more complex and that often people in religious hierarchies believed that certain orthodoxy was being preserved and school principals looking for a Year 11 math teacher were a lot more flexible about what they thought those orthodoxies were. 

JOURNALIST: Thank you so much for being here today, Carolyn. I found the speech very insightful. So, six months in, the Student Ombudsman says she’s considering launching a systemic review of how universities handle gender-based violence. Are universities still failing to tackle the issue? And why do you think the Ombudsman isn’t satisfied with the sector’s response? 

PROFESSOR EVANS: Gender-based violence has been a serious issue for our universities. I did raise it as one of the issues where I thought we needed to show that we stepped up and changed things for our students and for some of our staff. I’ve been personally involved, as have a number of people in the room, in working with the government on the gender-based violence legislation that recently passed Parliament. We want our universities to be much safer places than the rest of Australian society is for young women and for others who experience gender-based violence. And we also know that a lot of the people who experience gender-based violence at the time they were at university experience that offsite and not connected with universities. But we need to make sure all universities are good places for them where they get the right response and care, and we welcome therefore the gender-based violence legislation that’s passed in Parliament. I welcomed the role of having a National Student Ombudsman here. Now the National Student Ombudsman has acknowledged, it’s a very tiny fraction of cases, but they’re very distressing cases when they come out. One of the things that was missing from our system is there was no real place for individuals who were not satisfied with what their university did to complain outside. I think TEQSA came in for some really unfair criticism. It didn’t have the power that people wanted to have or thought that it would have. So, it’s good we’ve got the National Student Ombudsman now dealing with individuals. TEQSA, I think is probably a bit better placed to deal with systemic complaints. The National Student Ombudsman is of course entirely entitled to take the action she’s taking. I suppose my only consideration would be is we’re about to have a new legislative regime come into place. It’s detailed, it’s complex, it will be expensive to implement and maybe we need universities to have some time to do that and see the results of doing that before looking at what’s going on. 

JOURNALIST: Carolyn, thank you for your speech. I also found it to be very insightful. The ANU has been in the spotlight recently about its finances and governance. How important is it to our broader tertiary education sector that it performs to the highest standard and what might be some of your own concerns about the university? 

PROFESSOR EVANS: Of course, I’m not going to make any particular comment on a member university. That would be inappropriate. But let me answer the more general question. Universities are public institutions and we’re publicly funded institutions. We’d like to be more publicly funded institutions, but we certainly have substantial amounts of taxpayers’ money. We, therefore, would have the highest possible governance standards. I think the government has taken a very sensible step in setting up the Expert Council on University Governance. Political forums are not necessarily the best place to have a serious, thoughtful and expert discussion about what is required for good governance. The expert council has heard from a lot of people and a lot of people are aggrieved. I don’t doubt that it’s going to have some critical things to say about universities. We will probably share some of those concerns. We might disagree with some of those concerns, but where I think we’re all better focused is on what do we do going forward and I’m really looking forward to the outcomes of that expert council because I think it will set up a more independent, transparent way of moving forward so that the people of Australia can feel comfortable and confident that governance at our universities is of a very high quality. I have to say, I think it is at most of our universities most of the time. But there have definitely been some ways, as I said in the presentation, we let ourselves down and we need to have some things in place so that doesn’t happen as much in the future. 

JOURNALIST: Course cuts by cash-strapped universities have moved beyond the usual target areas of languages and creative arts to fields like education, international relations, geography and archeology. One university plans to drop expectations of fluency from its foreign language program, another plans to drop the composition and performance from its elite music program. Maths and physics majors are being dropped from a science degree. Is it incumbent on universities to maintain their offerings in a fundamental areas like this, irrespective of the cost pressures, or have we reached the point where universities simply don’t have the resources to actually do that anymore? 

PROFESSOR EVANS:  Thank you, Maurice. Thank you, John. A really important question. There are two things happening at the same time here. One is that student interests have shifted. Student interests do shift over time. There was a time when a well-read university person would have to speak Latin fluently. We don’t consider that a critical skill anymore. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Interests shift over time. Interest in the humanities, in particular, have been shifting not just in Australia, but around the world. Starting with always the proposition, what can we do better? We actually need to think about those offerings better. We need to think about what makes them relevant, how they might work alongside other sorts of degrees and ideas to really help create the type of opportunity that students want to embrace because I’m a great believer in the humanities, but it can’t just be whatever our staff in humanities happen to want to teach and whatever subjects, whatever time. You actually do have to be a little bit responsive to what students want to learn. They’re not chess pieces that we can move around. But the second thing that’s happening is more structural and systemic than that and this is relevant to Australia. Universities get picked off one by one. Oh, it’s outrageous that this university is closing this subject, this university is closing that subject, this university is closing the other subject. There are many degrees that we teach and many universities that teach in a way that’s really stretched where effectively you’re asking students in other disciplines to cross-subsidise those students. That’s a little bit of unfairness that people who always argue you have to keep teaching my subject regardless of how few people are in it. Forget their colleague down the corridor who’s teaching an overcrowded classroom because of the resources. I think all of our universities are teaching many, many subjects that are not economically viable, but we can’t teach an infinite number of them. You talked about music. To have a conservatorium style teaching program is completely financially unviable under the current structure, the current system. It just doesn’t work. Many of us still commit to doing it through gritted teeth, but we know the pressure that puts on other parts of the university. So, you might be able to do it here, but you can’t do it here and you can’t do it in the next place. We can join up better and one of the things when we were discussing with ATEC yesterday what their role might be is could ATEC have a role but avoid some of the implications of the ACCC that doesn’t like rivals getting together and sharing out different sorts of teaching between them. Could the ATEC have a role in helping to say it’s really critical in southeast Queensland that these subjects are taught but it’s not critical that they’re taught by everybody. That’s one thing that we could do, but another is sooner or later government’s going to have to say, we value doing this, it is important to us and we will pay for it or we don’t value it, it’s not important for us, we won’t pay for it and it’s not individual university A, B or C’s fault, this is a policy decision by the government. At the moment, I think we’ve been left in a horrible halfway house. Kind of, sort of not quite enough. And then all of the implications that come of that as university after university really just has to make some very tough decisions financially. 

JOURNALIST: Thank you for your address. The Universities Accord final report advised last February that the JRG package needed urgent remediation, but more than a year later it looks like it’ll be left for the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Is this change happening fast enough and in response to this delay and declining enrolments, are universities doing enough to support students from low SES backgrounds? 

PROFESSOR EVANS: There’s two elements to this. The JRG has two different issues that we need to look at. One is how much does it cost to teach degrees and that was in part my response to John’s question. At the moment, the cost of some of the degrees is just not right in the current system. ATEC is going to look at that. I think it’s a good body to look at that. It’s a deep piece of work and it’s probably worth taking the time to do it. The other question is how much does the government pay and how much does the student pay? That is not a technical question in the same sense. That is a political, social and economic question and that could be dealt with quite a bit earlier and quite a bit quicker. Universities are doing extraordinary work to try and support students in these tough financial times. We’re all spending money we don’t have on scholarships, our staff donate to scholarships, we donate to scholarships, we are running food banks, we are running clothing libraries, we are keeping our libraries open at night so that students who don’t have housing have somewhere it’s safe to be. We are really doing our best, but we are not the social security system. We are not funded to make up for all of the economic disadvantage in people’s lives. We are doing our best, but we need more help. 

JOURNALIST: The amalgamation between Adelaide and University of South Australia is reportedly going very well. Which other universities would you like to see merge, particularly here in Canberra, a city of 250,000, basically quarter of a million people. We have five universities. We’re blessed with that. Would you like to see greater specialisation that you were just talking about and say get other universities like to take an example, Griffith and UQ, to work together to actually have specialist courses which are the best in the world, not merely in the country. 

PROFESSOR EVANS: You will be unsurprised to hear that I’m not going to stand here and call for our members to be merged with one another. I think the University of South Australia and University of Adelaide have undertaken a bold and ambitious task together and I really congratulate my colleagues, David Lloyd and Peter Hoj for doing this. It has been an expensive, time-consuming and difficult task with the leadership from both universities who are very committed to doing it. So, let’s wait and see a little bit how that goes. But before we start talking about mergers, what is the point? What are we trying to do when we merge institutions? 

JOURNALIST:  Could you then have one university doing, for example, music courses and someone else not worrying about music at all and instead specialising in say, international law? 

PROFESSOR EVANS: We already do. To some extent the notion that all our universities teaching the same thing in the same way is not true. But I think that could be done in a more systematic way, particularly for very high-cost subjects with very low interest in enrolment. As I said earlier, I think the ATEC could have a really useful national role there and particularly in ensuring that some national skills that we need. My good friend Debbie Terry and I have worked together on many things, research, teaching and otherwise across our universities, and I’m sure we would welcome, and be delighted at the chance to work more closely. That is not the same as being merged. 

JOURNALIST: Thank you very much for your address. I had a question about some of your comments about the industry and research collaboration where we are getting that pull through of new to the world ideas based on world leading research. It’s been a tough nut to crack over a very long period of time. The R&D tax incentive is of course one of the levers to help do this, but it’s not working as we would like to see it work. Are there other levers we should be looking at and are there other models that we should be introducing into Australia or being influenced by like say perhaps the Fraunhofer model for example?  

PROFESSOR EVANS: Thank you. I’ll draw on a few of the ideas I spoke about in my presentation here. We do have to get the R&D tax incentive working better and a small element of that would be the 20 per cent collaboration premium because we know that is better at creating new intellectual property. There are various ways of doing this in various other countries but really starting to invest in those innovation precincts. Physical connectivity even in this digital world actually still matters. Having people work in areas close to one another still matters. And we’re starting to see some very exciting developments come out of many of the existing precincts, some of which really just sprung up in quite an organic way, others of which have been far more created. But we don’t have a national strategy around precincts, and I think national strategy would make a huge difference. And we don’t really have a national strategy around our research and development. We’ve got lots of different agencies and organisations and government departments which all had their own and that’s only at the federal level, let alone state level. I think there’s some low hanging fruit, but as you say, this is not a new problem. It’s been with us for a long time. We’ll need political will and a bit of willingness from universities, industry and government to all not get everything we want but start working together. 

JOURNALIST: Hello, Professor Evans. I’m also from Australian Industry Group so thank you for referencing our report. I was quite surprised myself that 22 per cent of jobs will fundamentally change in the next five years. You talked to me about the government vocational university amalgamation and better coordination into the future. I’m wondering if you can tell me where you think the government’s focused, if they’re focused evenly on both sectors and if not, whether you’ve got any evidence to support it.  

PROFESSOR EVANS: I think the government values both sectors and wants to see both sectors really contributing to the nation in the best possible way. I think it’s not as joined up as it could be. Minister Clare and Minister Giles absolutely work together, but you have skills and innovation over here and you have education over there. We have whole discussions about skills that don’t include universities. We have discussions about education that don’t include TAFE. What the government’s calling for, it’s not just me, I have to say this, the government recognises that this is a problem, is to start thinking about practical ways we join these up. This is not a new story. We need to bite off the elephant, start for example with better models of recognition of prior learning between VET and the university sector, but also sometimes the other way there can be real benefits sometimes in university students topping up with a VET course or doing that as part of their university study. We have students in my university who do that to great effect. I think it shouldn’t be an either/or. I think we need to try and think about it in a more joined up, more systematic way because even if you think about funding at the moment, you’ve got free TAFE for some things and then upfront fees for some things and we’ve got CSPs and we’ve got some postgraduate fee payments, some are upfront, some of them with HELP. How are they speaking to each other? If you want to improve the nursing workforce, look at all of the people who do nursing. Don’t just say, let’s have some fee-free places in nursing. Look at the whole landscape. I think if you do that, we’re going to get much better outcomes. 

ENDS