Opinion & Commentary
Loss for education before polls closed
Even before the polling booths closed on 10 November, the higher education interest groups had lost the election.
Despite an unusually high profile year for higher education, with the Government’s research-oriented Backing Australia’s Ability policy, Labor campaigning on the Knowledge Nation theme, and the Senate inquiry into higher education providing numerous publicity opportunities, neither of the major parties promised anywhere near what the various lobby groups wanted.
All these groups – the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC), the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), the Group of Eight and the National Union of Students (NUS) – wanted an increase of about $1 billion in annual university operating grants. They found various ways of expressing this – a flat sum, a 20% increase, a return to 1983 per student funding levels – but the bottom line for the taxpayer would have been much the same.
To this, they added various demands more specific to their membership. The Group of Eight, representing research-focused universities, wanted billions more over five years for R&D. The NTEU, representing staff, wanted a specific fund for staff development. The NUS, speaking for the students who vote in student elections, wanted student welfare increased. Not every request is costed, but none of it would be cheap.
How does this compare with what the parties actually offered?
In the first full financial year the ALP was offering a mere $92.3 million over what the universities now expect to receive. That’s not even a 1% increase on total anticipated university revenues, and is less than 10% of the base interest groups claim. To add to its inadequacy, nearly half of it was for new places or programmes, and so would not ease existing financial strain.
The Coalition promised even less, reiterating past promises and not offering to increase operating grants beyond the normal indexation. At least they did not, as the ALP did, promise to abolish the fee-paying undergraduate places, a policy which would have reduced the income of several universities, and reduced the total number of on-campus student places.
Some interest groups tried to achieve their least-worst outcome of an ALP victory. The NUS plastered university campuses with posters and advertised on youth-oriented radio stations, all with anti-Coalition messages. But the polls suggested that the ALP was only fractionally in front among young voters. The NTEU ran a marginal seats campaign, also oriented against the Government. Yet there was a swing to the Government in nine of the thirteen seats they targeted.
And, as we all now know, the final result was their worst-case scenario, the return of the Coalition. The current very poor relations the NTEU and the NUS have with the Coalition will only be made worse, further reducing their ability to achieve anything for their members through the political process.
The interest groups sometimes assess the political parties on their education policies. Last election, the AVCC awarded marks out of ten. This election, the NUS gave out university grades to the parties. Now how should the members of all these groups rate these organisations? The only possible results are fails for the AVCC and the Group of Eight, and dismal fails for the NTEU and the NUS.
The odd thing about these educated people is that they are extraordinarily slow learners. As long ago as 1952 the AVCC issued a statement saying universities were in crisis, making many of the same arguments they make today—that we spend less on higher education than other countries, that academic salaries are falling behind those of the rest of the community, and so on. While there have been some good years for them during the subsequent half century, the long-term downward trend has continued since many of today’s students were toddlers.
So far as I can tell, the interest groups have never seriously thought about why this is so. It tends to be written off as the short-sightedness of politicians, or the result of ‘neoliberal’ ideology.
Neither of these explanations are really plausible. The real reasons are that the demands for government expenditure have risen much faster than the willingness to pay taxes, and democratic governments focus on services that affect the lives of the largest number of voters. Schools, social security and health will always have much more spent on them than universities.
Unlike short-sightedness or ideology, these factors cannot be affected by the kinds of campaigns run by the higher education interest groups.
I’m not saying that the interest groups should never ask for public money. Occasionally they will get something, as they would have if the ALP had won. But this success is more like that of the gambler who stays in the casino so long he finally wins something, than any kind of long-term strategy for financial security.
The public money Plan A is hopelessly unreliable. The universities desperately need a Plan B.
A little over a year ago one of them, the Group of Eight, did have an alternative, though unfortunately it had vanished by the time their election statement was released this year. It was at a rudimentary state of development, but the idea was a variation on what is variously called top-up fees, super HECS, or premium HECS. Under such schemes the taxpayer still provides a subsidy, but the university can charge more. If necessary, the students can borrow that sum from the Government, and pay it back via the tax system, as they do now. Hence the names ‘superHECS’ or ‘premium HECS’.
The interest groups reject the idea of students paying more. But they overlook that students are already paying for the current policy—in poor student-staff ratios, overcrowded classrooms and libraries, and all the other problems of the contemporary university. Surely it would be much better to give them the choice of something better they pay for later on, rather than enduring a second-rate education experience now.
This proposal, it is true, has political difficulties of its own. Neither major party is yet supporting fee flexibility for HECS students. Yet just this year both of them supported a more radical version of the same idea for postgraduates, the postgraduate loans scheme called PELS that comes into operation in 2002. It is more radical because there are no subsidies for tuition costs in PELS. It is not that large a step to extend a subsidised version of the same scheme to undergraduates.
Unlike the public funding Plan A, the superHECS plan B does not force governments into lifting taxes or sacrificing other spending programmes. Eventually, nearly all the money would be recovered, so in accrual accounting terms it is a low cost programme. So, despite the initial political hurdles in its implementation, it is free of the long-term political complications of the Plan A strategy.
It is not likely to happen, however, without the backing of some interest groups. Whether this support will occur among higher education interest groups remains to be seen. What’s clear now, though, is that their political strategy is badly failing their constituencies.
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About the Author:
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and a former adviser to Dr David Kemp.
