Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to speak to the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007. The Labor Party do not oppose this bill. We are, however, very critical of aspects of it and highly sceptical about others. The measures which directly affect the establishment of the so-called research quality framework were not addressed in the budget last night. These measures in this bill relate to revising the maximum funding amounts provided by the Higher Education Support Act 2003 for the funding of the so-called research quality framework. This bill also seeks to amend the Higher Education Support Act to reflect changes to the national protocols for higher education approval processes. The national protocols regulate the recognition of new universities, the operation of overseas universities in Australia and the accreditation courses offered by higher education institutions. The bill also seeks to introduce a number of measures relating to the administration of the Higher Education Loan Program and arrangements for the Commonwealth to support its students.

Last night’s budget went particularly to the issue of the national protocols, and we will have more to say about that later on. It did not do so openly; it did so by stealth. These provisions provide for a fundamental change in the way universities are run in this country, and they will have very serious implications for our regional universities and for universities outside the Group of Eight. The RQF, however, is the most contentious component of this legislation. This legislation amends the Higher Education Support Act to ensure universities can gain access to funding for the government’s so-called research quality framework.

As the shadow minister responsible for this area, the more I understand this issue the deeper are my reservations about the research quality framework. I believe it to be fundamentally flawed in its approach to the measuring and assessing of research quality for our universities. While I am firmly of the view that we need a quality assurance mechanism within our research programs in our universities, there are clearly fundamental problems with the measure the government is proceeding with.

Those problems go to the fact that this measure will be extraordinarily expensive to administer, that it sets the bar too low on quality measures, that it emphasises a poorly defined impact measure and that it has at its core an adoption of an RQF which will mean that university ratings will be based more on where an academic is now working than on what groundbreaking research the academic has undertaken. This is a recipe for the poaching of staff and for the cooking of the books within our national research programs.

It is not just the Labor Party that has profound reservations about this measure; these are questions that are being drawn to our attention by the Group of Eight universities, which have expressed considerable concern about the legislation. While they support the original intentions of the legislation, they dispute the claims that have been made by the government—namely, that the ‘higher education sector has consistently indicated that the approach used in the RQF provides the best approach to conducting a quality based assessment process’ and that ‘the sector has continued to indicate a broad level of support’. These are claims that the government has made about what universities think is good for them. These claims are just not true. The government has tried to mislead the parliament and it has certainly tried to mislead the Australian public with regard to what universities themselves say about these measures.

The National Tertiary Education Union, which represents the staff at universities, has also argued that it does not support this legislation. It says that the critical details from the final model are simply not known. It says that there is a ‘lack of adequate funding to compensate universities for the real costs associated with the introduction of the RQF’ and that, from the program, there are—and this is quite an important observation—‘risks to the international reputation of Australian universities and the professional and industrial rights of their staff’.

I go to other organisations—ones which have shown themselves to be quite friendly towards the government in recent times, such as the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies. Even though they support the intent of the RQF as an approach, they remain concerned about it in a number of areas. I argue that what we have now is a situation whereby a wide cross-section of the Australian university community is now saying to the government, ‘This program should not proceed.’

It is not just in universities that this case is being put; other things are being said to us. Even the nest of advisers within DEST surely should have heard this advice. What the high priests of the market-driven approach to universities, such as the Productivity Commission, are saying is particularly ironic. What are they saying? In their final report Public support for science and innovation, which was released in March, they say, ‘The costs of implementing the research quality framework may well exceed the benefits,’ and ‘while the RQF may bring some benefits, the UK and NZ experiences suggest that these would have to be substantial to offset the significant administrative and compliance costs’. What you have is not just the universities but major advice to government from normally highly friendly sources saying that this program is fundamentally at odds with the best interests of the Australian universities.

The government’s current plan is to conduct a review of research performance under the research quality framework model every six years. The Productivity Commission argues that if the RQF model is to continue beyond 2008—and I can indicate that if there is a change of government at the next election we will not be proceeding with these arrangements as they are—then one or two things should occur. The Productivity Commission say that, if the government were to be re-elected, the government should provide an early basis for assessing the effects of the RQF by bringing forward the 2014 round or by conducting a partial round in the intervening period. You do not need to be a code breaker to understand that the Productivity Commission is politely but firmly telling this government that the RQF is no good and should be scrapped.

Concerns have also been expressed by the higher education sector with regard to what they argue are the linkages with industry and the negative effects that will come about as a result of the implementation of the RQF. What others within the higher education sector say is that this program will in fact weaken the collegiate efforts among researchers and academics from different universities—and that will undermine collaboration across the sector—and that there will be problematic impacts on the assessment of quality and that the measurements of the so-called impact provision are too difficult to define. In the course of the review that was undertaken last year, the Productivity Commission received submissions outlining the acute deficiencies in the RQF from organisations and agencies right across the higher education sector and the research community, as well as from private industry.

So we have a situation where the government has been essentially heavily criticised for this program right across the board. The government is in the thrall of a small group of public servants within the department of education who have misled this minister about the impact of these arrangements and the quite damaging effect that they will have on our research capacity. The collective concern is: ‘There is a prospect that an RQF could become a burden to researchers, be expensive to administer and deliver very little reward to support and simulate the best quality research.’ I suggest that, despite all of these concerns on the effect that the RQF will have on research in our universities, the government has essentially sought a whitewash. In the Senate inquiry’s majority report—on which I understand additional remarks will be made by Senator Marshall later in this discussion—the government say, ‘It is highly likely that criticisms made of the legislation—bearing mostly on detail—will be addressed as implementation proceeds at least to the extent that the current concerns of stakeholders require alteration.’

This is not about mere detail of implementation; these are fundamental concerns about the design and construct of these arrangements. While we have very grave concerns about the RQF, I would like to emphasise just how important it is to ensure that there is a policy of quality assurance within our research communities. We will be pursuing approaches that will demand the highest quality of research in our universities. As that forms the bedrock of our scientific discovery, critical thinking and learning within universities, it is essential that the public have confidence that public moneys are spent wisely and that value for money arises whereby our researches are able to enjoy considerable increases in the level of public support.

We argue that any quality assurance framework must be robust, rigorous and support an open and transparent process of peer review. Labor want a research quality assurance scheme that is of international standing, and we believe that the government’s approach on these fronts is fundamentally flawed. We believe there are far better ways to achieve these outcomes. We will be arguing that an alternative model be established that is rigorous, transparent, fair, equitable and efficient and that must be recognised, accepted—