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<br><P><EM><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 18pt; COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana">Professions </SPAN></EM><EM><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 18pt; COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana">Australia</SPAN></EM><EM><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 18pt; COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"> Alert No. 142: Financial Review op ed piece from Professions </SPAN></EM><EM><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 18pt; COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana">Australia</SPAN></EM><BR>(Professions Australia is a national organisation of professional associations)</P>
<P>Today’s Financial Review includes a piece from PA President, Barry Grear, on higher education. The text is below.</P>
<P>PA appeared before the Senate Committee on Friday last and we will put some documentation on the website soon.</P>
<P><STRONG><SPAN style="COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana">Nelson has a lot to learn about community (AFR, </SPAN></STRONG><STRONG><SPAN style="COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana">13 October 2003</SPAN></STRONG><STRONG><SPAN style="COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana">)</SPAN></STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG><SPAN style="COLOR: #1c247c; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana">Barry Grear</SPAN></STRONG></P>
<P>Education Minister Brendan Nelson clearly feels higher education is too important to be left to the universities alone. He wants the government to be more involved in deciding which courses universities offer.</P>
<P>Australia’s professionals, on the other hand, feel higher education is too important to be left to the government and universities together. They want to ensure that our communities have a say as well.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>In a press conference on September 17, Nelson referred to “those that fully understand higher education and that’s the vice-chancellors”. This is true only in the narrowest sense.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>Vice-chancellors may know about the financing and the programming of higher education, but they are definitely not the best people to consult about the effects on, say, a rural community whose only dentist and only pharmacist have retired and not been replaced.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>Nor are vice-chancellors experts on the potential effects on our economy of a lack of veterinary science graduates going into farm animal practice where they will become familiar with the early detection of exotic diseases.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>The community faces shortages of computer professionals, dentists, engineers, physiotherapists, podiatrists, veterinarians and other professionals. These shortages need to be addressed in higher education decision-making to ensure there is an equitable supply of professional graduates to serve community needs across the nation.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>Professions Australia is not confident that this point is understood by those who have designed the higher education package. We look to the Senate inquiry to draw it out.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>We propose that university-community consultative councils be established nationally and at the level of individual universities to make sure information about needs is fed into key decisions. Effective community consultation should be made a condition of funding under the commonwealth grants scheme.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>Diversity of university mission (a key aim of the package) does not guarantee good outcomes. Those flow from catering for the differing needs of individual communities and the developing needs of the nation. That is effective diversity.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>There are many good things in the Nelson package: the additional funds and places, the teaching and learning initiatives, the access and equity arrangements, the support for collaboration between and productivity within institutions.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>But other agendas have cut across the path. Canberra has proposed corporate governance arrangements that may ensure money is spent more efficiently but which threaten to remove some of the representative elements of university councils. The workplace relations ideologues have raised a secondary agenda to a central position.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P>Australians should not object to linkages and accountability in university funding. But let’s make the right linkages – to the effectiveness with which universities discharge their primary objective of meeting the community’s needs.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></P>
<P><EM>Barry Grear is president of Professions Australia, a national organisation of professional associations.<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></SPAN></EM></P>
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