E&OE
GARY ADSHEAD: We have Luke Sheehy joining us from Universities Australia. Thanks for coming in, Luke.
LUKE SHEEHY: Thanks for having me, Gary.
GARY ADSHEAD: You know what I was thinking, how do I start this discussion about universities across the country and where we’re at? Maybe just asking you – we went through COVID and that would have been an extraordinarily challenging time. We’re now sort of well and truly out of it. What sort of challenges are you facing right now?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, universities have a big and important role to play in building Australia’s future. We need more skilled workers coming out of universities, and we need more research and development so we can have a more diversified economy in an increasingly competitive global economy. So, we need more of what universities do to help Australia succeed. In order to get more of what universities do, we need to make sure that we get certainty and stability, both in terms of funding and regulation from the Commonwealth.
GARY ADSHEAD: How are you going with that? Clearly, we went through a federal election campaign, so you were probably watching with great interest as to which side won. We can fairly say that the caps that the Coalition were going to implement, they’re gone, they’re on the back burner. But what sort of issues do you face when you talk about student numbers and funding and so on? Because it’s interesting, a lot of people, you get commentary around how we can’t have too many students because we don’t have enough houses that you must get tired of hearing. But it’s a reality for people that they’re wondering why they can’t get into a rental or why they can’t get into a property, and they put that into the equation or are there too many students? What do you say to it?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, look, we’ve had a pretty substantial and robust debate with both sides of politics, not just in the last election period, but over the last 12 and a bit months. I’ve said, and I’ll say it again, blaming international students for a housing construction problem is a furphy. We’ve got a construction problem, we don’t need to blow up a sector as successful as international education. International students make up only six per cent of the private rental market in Australia and in metropolitan areas where there are university campuses, vacancy rates are actually higher than they are in other parts of the country. So, we’ve made the case right throughout the last 12 months and into the election that blaming international education and international students on a housing construction crisis is a furphy and we will continue to do so.
GARY ADSHEAD: Could unis do more though in terms of providing accommodation? I know that there’s a new one being planned on Sterling Highway, for example, not that far from University of Western Australia. Could they be doing more in that space?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, universities do a lot to invest in their campuses and obviously in the great cities and regions that they operate in. I was delighted to see the progress here in the northern part of the CBD on the Edith Cowan University campus. We do a lot with a lot less, and over the last number of years we’ve had billions of dollars ripped out of higher education funding. Both sides of politics teamed up in 2019 to rip away the education investment fund, a $4 billion fund to support infrastructure at both universities and our TAFEs that no longer exists. So, universities have to find money for their capital investment elsewhere. Traditionally, that’s been through international student revenues, and both sides of politics, particularly the Labor government over the last 12 months, has said you can have fewer international students. We’ve got a bit of a challenge on our hands to get the capital we need to make the investments in not just housing for students, but the research and teaching and learning facilities that benefit not just international students, Gary, but of course the nearly one million Australians that go to our universities.
GARY ADSHEAD: Just on that, and I don’t know whether the force of it being felt widely. I’ve certainly seen some evidence of it, but you talked about funding being ripped out. Has the Trump factor played across universities in Australia much? The taking away of funding might be money that’s going into a certain area of a university to provide research and so on?
LUKE SHEEHY: I think what we’re seeing from the United States is deeply, deeply worrying. To see the President of the United States go after individual universities in what we would often describe as a free and open country like the United States, is really troubling. Universities are part of a healthy democracy. We need healthy universities so we can have people learning, becoming stronger citizens and getting the skills and ideas they need to make our society flourish more. And over the last couple of months, we’ve seen the US government under Donald Trump attempt to rip away funding from our universities here in Australia and that’s really worrying.
GARY ADSHEAD: Have you been able to resist? We all know that the President’s want is to make big, big statements about what he’s going to do and so on and then wind them back. Tariffs is an example.
LUKE SHEEHY: I think the important thing to remember is the US government funds nearly half a billion dollars of research in Australia and through Australian universities. They’re not coming here because it’s a charitable act, Gary. Coming to our universities to get knowledge from our world-class researchers, particularly in areas of defense, agriculture and medical research, they’re going to still need that knowledge. I’m quite confident we can work through that in the first instance. But it is a really worrying trend that Australia’s number one ally is now becoming an unreliable partner in how we fund international collaborative research. That’s why we’ve called on the government to change its mind about going into Horizon Europe. This is a multi-billion-dollar funding source for countries to collaborate with European researchers. The New Zealanders are doing it, the Canadians are doing it and we’re missing out. I’m going to say to the new Science Minister and the reappointed Education Minister, let’s get fair dinkum and if America’s becoming hard to do business with, let’s talk to the Europeans again.
GARY ADSHEAD: Are they saying that they’re not committing to that in the way that you would like because of the whole future Australia policy that we’re seeing billions being thrown into homegrown research development and so on?
LUKE SHEEHY: You can’t do research in isolation. If we want a Future Made in Australia and we want to roll out some of the priorities that are outlined in that policy, we’re going to need to draw on Australian expertise and of course global expertise. We need to make sure that Australia’s research effort continues to be global. We cut about above our average, so to speak. When it comes to research in Australia, we’re a tiny percentage of the global population, but we do triple the amount of research that a country of a comparable size does. But research is really important and really successful when it remains global and we do collaboration with other countries. The Australian government has said it doesn’t want to participate in Horizon Europe. Billions of euros that our Kiwi friends are accessing, that our Canadian friends are accessing, even the Brits are still participating. We should rethink that. I’m going to the UK next week and I’m going to be talking about this both in London and at meetings I’ll have at EU Central in Brussels.
GARY ADSHEAD: I’m talking to Luke Sheehy, the Universities Australia, CEO, who’s with me in the studio here. You said the word democracy, did you at the time you were watching it and in discussions that you had with university, were you concerned about some of the protests that not that long after what happened on October 7, 2023, university protests were aimed towards the Palestinian side of the argument? Did it concern you, some of the scenes?
LUKE SHEEHY: I said at the time that it’s important that we have the opportunity for young people to demonstrate their political positioning through peaceful protest in and around university campuses and right throughout our community for that matter. But it’s really important that that doesn’t turn into hate speech. I think universities have worked very hard with their communities and their students and staff to make sure we’ve got the balance right. What we haven’t seen in Australia is the level of civil unrest at university campuses that we’re seeing, particularly in North America. That’s a good thing. Students are rightly energised by what they’re seeing and they have a right to make that point clear throughout their studies in their university campuses. But we also have an obligation to make sure that doesn’t turn into hate speech. And I’ve said to the Senate and I’ve said to other media outlets I want students to be curious about what they say and the context with which they say it and thinking about what words mean to other people. And it is a travesty to see the rise in anti-semitism across Australia. That’s obviously manifested on university campuses but so have incidences of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment and hostility towards Muslim Australians. We need to make sure we can operate in shades of grey, and universities are important ways to navigate the complexity that we see in the world. Peaceful protest is part of that, not hate speech.
GARY ADSHEAD: Can I throw another one at you which is emerging like that word emerging AI. It’s a challenge, isn’t it in terms of students and the reliance on AI. I mean there’s now examples of where people don’t even realise that what they’ve got in front of them is AI generated. How are universities collectively dealing with this? I’ll call it a threat because it’s a threat to our own ability to do what’s required in a university setting in order to get through and go on to a career if it’s made a lot easier by this technology.
LUKE SHEEHY: I’m going to age myself a little because when I went to university in the late 1990s, everyone was a little bit worried about the rise of the internet. That was, oh we can’t use the internet, you can’t Google things or look them up in a search engine. I don’t even think we had Google then. And it is now a fundamental tool in us accessing information. We all have smartphones, we all can search for information…
GARY ADSHEAD: …ad nauseum…
LUKE SHEEHY: …ad nauseum, often too late at night while we should be sleeping. But I think what we have to remember is that AI is a tool. It is here to stay and we as universities can embrace that tool and teach our students, particularly our young people when they’re becoming masters of their individual areas and professions, how to use AI effectively. We can’t put our head in the sand and pretend it’s going to go away. Universities have a role in navigating new trends, new technologies and new societal changes and AI is one of them. It is phenomenal and it is changing the way we live and work, as did the internet before and as did the phone before that. We’re obviously in a period of huge rapid technological change. Universities have a role in navigating that on behalf of our community.
GARY ADSHEAD: I’ve just seen the latest Mission Impossible movie. I knew that we were in trouble as soon as I saw that once they had to put the entity in or a glass tube and take it away. That horrendous thing, AI. So maybe that’s what we’ll have to do at some point, but we’ll wait and see. Just in terms of ranking systems, how much time do universities have to spend being concerned about where they sit worldwide in terms of the ranking systems? Because I know 2024 was a challenge, 17 showed that they declined here in Australia out of 38 universities. Is it a big deal on campuses amongst the administration?
LUKE SHEEHY: University rankings are one tool that students, particularly international students, use to assess universities. The methodology for them changes from year to year, and so different ranking systems come in and out of favor. What I would say is that Australian universities are world-class and they have been world-class because we’ve been allowed to be global, we’ve been allowed to be entrepreneurial and we’ve been funded properly. Let’s make sure that continues so Australia is seen as a global destination for world-class university education and research. If we let that go, then we’re letting go some of our future opportunities as Australians.
GARY ADSHEAD: Just finally, or perhaps we see at a state level where a government might be going into an election mode so they’ll talk about incentives for nurses to get nurses into the system because it’s always about whether or not there’s enough people inside hospitals manning beds, etc. And I’m giving you an example because I’m going to lead to this – police, they’ll offer incentives, nurses, they’ll offer incentives and construction workers to come over from the east, they’ll offer incentives, $10,000, here you go. Here’s $10,000 cash, thanks for coming. Now get on and build some houses for us. Do we do enough of that in terms of incentives to get people to university level, to get there and stay there and come out at the other end as that doctor that we so crucially need in our wards, etc, and our hospitals? Do we do enough of that – governments?
LUKE SHEEHY: I think there’s programs that work and sometimes programs that don’t work. One of the things I’m a big supporter of is the current Minister for Education Jason Claire rolled out an incentive to pay young people while they studied teaching. My dad couldn’t get a spot at university to do teaching because he didn’t have the marks back in the late 1960s. It was seen as a premium thing to do, and it was a profession that set you up for life. I think incentives like that are really, really important. It’s important to remember that the fees that student pay in Australia often are deferred, so they don’t pay anything upfront and it’s often other impediments that stop students going to university. It’s cost of living, it’s housing, it’s energy costs, it’s the time out of the workforce. Increasingly Gary, more and more students are coming back to university throughout their working life. Nearly half of the students we enrol are not school leavers, so we need to make sure the incentives for those people are right. Do they have adequate time off that they can take from their work? The other really important measure that I think the government should be proud of and universities are strongly supportive of is Commonwealth Prac Payments. This is $320 a week for teachers, nurses and midwives and social workers students to get paid while they’re doing those compulsory practical placements, often they have to move to regional areas or outside of their home environment to do those and additional support for that is most welcome and I’m delighted that that program will get up and running soon.
GARY ADSHEAD: Luke, thanks very much for going through all that with us. I really appreciate it.
LUKE SHEEHY: Thanks.
ENDS
