Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is often said that good legislation, like sausages, should never be seen being made. The TEQSA Bill 2011 was never seen being made, but it is about as healthy for higher education as a plate of week-old snags. I commend the government and specifically the Minister for Education for bringing forward this TEQSA Amendment Bill with such deliberate haste. The Minister for Education knows only too well that the strength of our higher education and research sector is critical—critical to our high standard of living, critical to our competitiveness and critical to the sustainability of job creation and growth. However, after six years of Labor's myopic and misguided misrule, the higher education sector is in critical condition. This amendment bill is the first step in putting our country back on track. There is no reason why Australia cannot be the best country in the world for research and learning. I will speak to the specifics of the bill and later offer some of my own prescriptions for energising the research industry in Australia. I speak with the authority of being the only research scientist in this place and the authority of someone who has been involved in competitive research. Einstein once said, 'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it'—hence why I am here.

Firstly, the TEQSA Amendment Bill is designed to improve efficiency. The coalition committed at the election to cut red tape, and this bill is proof of that promise in action.

The bill will limit the TEQSA authority to its core activities—that is, it will focus on provider registration and course accreditation. It is about time too, as I was stunned to read that currently there is no internal review of decisions. There is no right to appeal a TEQSA ruling to TEQSA. Instead, any review and any appeal is directed to the hugely expensive Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This is indicative of a lack of trust by the former government in the people they hired to head up their ideas. Not only did the former government not trust the people they picked to head up the institutions they set up; they did not trust their own ministers. If they did, why did the minister of the day not have the ability to give direction to TEQSA regarding its performance? Why did the minister not have the ability to query the fees TEQSA charge or even have a say? Labor have trust issues. The Labor Party never trusted the institutions they set up, they never trusted the people they appointed to them and they never trusted themselves. I am only too glad that the good people of Australia broke up with that Labor government.

This bill and this Liberal government are restoring hope, reward, opportunity and, most importantly, competition. TEQSA needs to justify its fees and be open to market forces. I support the move to give the Minister for Education oversight of the fees that may be charged. The Labor Party never got the big picture, and this TEQSA bill is indicative of that. The bill details specific numbers of commissioners and specific full-time and part-time commissioners. Where is the justification for these restrictions and requirements? Perhaps it was just another case of answering the union's call and giving jobs for the boys at the expense of the Australian education sector.

As someone who is passionate about education I cannot stand idly by while there are ways of doing things better in our universities. While this bill is a good start, it is but a start. I want more because the people of Australia want and deserve more. The world demands more from our educational institutions, specifically of our scientific and research capacity. I have, through some toil, refined some recommendations I wish to share. They are in the spirit of this bill.

Our government must revise the funding regulation of universities, such that the material rewards for imposing higher standards on graduate learning outcomes are stronger than the material rewards for racing to the bottom. It is vital that the quality of graduates is more important than the number of graduates. I urge the minister to legislate against the use, in any form, of student feedback as a method or a metric of quality in teaching. The practice of using student satisfaction approval, instead of learning outcomes, as a measure of quality is demonstrably fraudulent and should be treated as such by law. It is essential that this is done in a fashion which cannot be circumvented by educational bureaucracies which originated and imposed this damaging practice. There needs to be a shift from central Commonwealth funded regulatory regimes to a simpler self-regulatory model. Current regulatory bureaucracies are expensive and have produced no useful outcomes in the last decade, only numerous detrimental outcomes. This will be a saving to the Commonwealth.

There is so much flotsam and jetsam left by Labor that just one repeal day is not enough. The Abbott axe is the tonic the ignored research sector needs. The industry wants to axe the ERA. The Excellence in Research in Australia policy has failed. The three most accurate ways to measure short- and medium-term research performance are: traditional expert peer review and research appraisals, professional society standing assessments or grades performed by internationally recognised subject matter experts, and the number of patents and disclosures that are produced. These should be the only methods of research performance measurement accepted in Australia.

Australia should return to a much more limited regulatory regime, akin to that predating the Dawkins era, and rely primarily on self-regulation of research by universities, which have a vested interest in maximising the quality, integrity and standing of their research. This bill demonstrates that there is the political will and ability to do such, and again I applaud the minister for such. It is a fact that research collaborations between science based industries, universities, CSIRO and DSTO have frequently suffered as a result of not only bureaucratic regulation but also bureaucratic interference typically motivated by the belief the industry collaborator should be exploited as a source of funding, free IP and free consultancy advice.

I further recommend that, in order to protect our vital national interest in defence and technology, the following be adopted as a matter of national priority. In relation to the Australian Research Council, the distribution of research funding must be biased more on high-risk and high-pay-off research than backfill research that does not yield a high pay-off in research outcomes. There must be the maintenance of a sufficient diversity in Australian research to ensure that there is sufficient breadth in Australia's research portfolio to support national policy development, national industry and national tertiary teaching demands. To achieve this I suggest allowing researchers to suggest three people with requisite backgrounds who agree to act as referees to determine the worthiness of proposals where Australia has inadequate depth to allow people within Australia to evaluate research. There must be fostered cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary research. This offers potentially very high payoff in research outcomes but it has suffered from the current policy of rewarding research stove-piping. A suitable model would be an expanded ARC Centres of Excellence program.

Funded ARC projects must be funded fully. This may mean that fewer projects are funded, but it does mean that the researcher or research group will be fully accountable for achieving outcomes without the fallback of inadequate funding. Fund ARC bureaucracy to about five per cent instead of the current level of less than two per cent. This will remove the wasteful bureaucratic processes that researchers need to undertake with their research proposals. Allow initial research proposals from experienced researchers to be much abbreviated, removing bureaucratic burden. Effectively, this could be a plan on a page. If rejected, that would be the extent of it. If the ARC otherwise has the view that the idea is potentially worth funding, then it could ask for more detail. Remove any research priority on issues, such as climate change, that are politically hot. I know of researchers who are sceptical about the consensus position on climate change but still use key phrases to enhance the probability of winning a research grant.

The National Science Foundation in the US contracts with universities to apply a contingency allowance of around 50 per cent for grants, which allows for indirect costs associated with the project. The ARC should adopt a similar measure for funded projects. There is a need to have more than one round of ARC linkage grants per year and to create a grant for multidisciplinary research that can be funded by the ARC. We need to increase the proportion of fellowships granted compared with project grants. It is necessary to specify a minimum percentage of linkage grants that have to be new industry linkages as opposed to extant linkages. Finally, I believe my colleagues on both sides would do well to heed the advice from American zoologist Marston Bates, who said, 'Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.

I believe it to be imperative that our Liberal government remove the 30 per cent outside-funding requirement for CSIRO, using graduated steps. This requirement distorts the research undertaken. I know of research undertaken that is known to be 'BS', but the research is done simply in order to gain the funding. Make this a gradual process so that natural attrition will cover any potential loss of funding.

These recommendations are clear and consistent. Additionally, they are cheap to implement. The effects will be colossal should they be implemented quickly and fully. This TEQSA amendment bill points the way as to what is possible. What is important about this bill is not the size of the change but that there is change. It is not the speed of the movement but that there is movement, if only an inch.

As I said earlier, Einstein once said, 'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it;' hence why I am here. It should not and does not have to be this way. Einstein also said, 'Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.' Let us do the right thing and let us do it now.

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