Opinion & Commentary
Leave uni governance in hands of the states
With universities, the Commonwealth Government has itself an exceptional pay less, get more deal. While its share of university revenues heads steadily down, the weight of rules and requirements heads steadily up.
The Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee counts a dozen new bureaucratic burdens over the past year alone. But the Commonwealth Government wants still more power, and is issuing a series of discussion papers setting out its case.
Under present constitutional arrangements, responsibility for universities is shared by state and federal governments. The states' primary responsibility is accrediting universities and setting up governance structures. The Federal Government's main role is funding.
The Commonwealth's basic problem is that money is very influential, but it does not provide unqualified power. Money only controls if it is offered and accepted.
The immunity from Commonwealth regulation enjoyed by self-financing private higher education institutions worries the Federal Government. And the Commonwealth is concerned that the states pursue "inconsistent" policies.
Consistency itself, however, is not always a good thing. Legislation could be identical for all states but still hopelessly flawed, turning consistency into a curse. An advantage of a federal, potentially inconsistent, system is that not every jurisdiction needs to be dysfunctional at the same time. Bad policy is quarantined, protecting the jurisdictions where it does not apply.
Rationalising Responsibility, the first of the discussion papers, tactfully does not name NSW, where some universities have experienced long-running problems with their governing senates. (No wonder the NSW Government seems keener than any other to hand its universities over to the Commonwealth). What if Australia had consistently followed what looks to be bad NSW practice? Everyone else would have been worse off than if they had enacted "inconsistent" good legislation. Federalism reduces policy risk.
Another important advantage of "inconsistent" federal policymaking is that it allows for experimentation and policy learning. Individual jurisdictions can try new policies, and if successful they become models for others to follow. We are seeing an example of this now, in contrasting policies for university governance adopted for the Australian National and Victorian universities.
The ANU's governing council has been cut to 15 members, well below other major universities. Just under half of the ANU appointments are made by the Federal Government, in this case acting with wider powers for the ACT. Elsewhere, two-thirds non-government appointees are the norm. Close to a working majority on the ANU council owe their appointments to the minister. However a university-based nominations committee limits the Minister's choices.
At Victoria , by contrast, the Education Minister appoints a smaller share of the total council membership but has no restraints on who she can appoint. Advertisements have appeared in newspapers to widen the selection pool for council members; a marked contrast to the club-like nominations committee at the ANU.
Observation over time will help us decide whether one of these systems is better, or whether it makes no substantial difference. But if we did not have this variety, we would never know. Policy experiments could only be sequential, not simultaneous.
The Commonwealth is unlikely to be responsive to particular university concerns, particularly those like Newcastle without much political clout. No state has more than 10 universities to watch, while the Commonwealth has 39. There are just not the same opportunities for feedback to the overstretched federal minister as there are at a state level.
If the Commonwealth took over universities, it would struggle to find a place on the busy federal parliamentary schedule. In recent years the Commonwealth has averaged 157 acts a year, more than twice as many as some states. Time-consuming local nuances may be dumped in favour of standard legislation for every university.
We should not pretend that everything is perfect in the way states have regulated their universities. It isn't. But clearly there have been many problems with Commonwealth Government regulation as well, from an inadequate funding system to overly detailed control of universities' activities.
The key question is which system is best overall. It is the federal system that allows for policy experimentation and learning. It is the states that are most likely to receive feedback, and have the time and inclination to act on it. If they had more taxing power, it would be better if the states funded universities, as they do in the USA .
But though states cannot afford to pay for universities, we should keep what advantages of federalism that we can, and leave accreditation and governance in state hands.
Andrew Norton is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This is an abridged version of Universities in a State: The Federal Case Against Commonwealth Control of Universities, available from the CIS at www.cis.org.au.
