Throughout this election campaign Australia's fourth largest export, higher education, has barely rated a mention. Despite its indisputable status as an economic powerhouse, a source of jobs for more than 200,000 Australians, a driver of research and innovation and a place of learning for more than a million students - it has largely been abandoned.
But even a brief glance at our universities reveals a proverbial dumpster fire. Higher education needs attention now.
The COVID pandemic and subsequent government inaction has decimated higher education. Last year, we saw the sector's worst job losses in history. During the 12 months to May 2021, tertiary education employment fell by almost 40,000 positions with 35,000 of those jobs at public universities.
The staff who are left are often kept on casual or short-term contracts. And now we are moving to a new phase of the pandemic, those who lost their full-time jobs are being re-hired on casual or short-term contracts. Those casual staff often have their pay pinched by a ruthless and unforgiving university business model built on wage theft and insecure work. They are collapsing under the immense weight of increasingly unmanageable workloads.
While the pandemic ignited the fire, the federal government made it an inferno, adding fuel by arbitrarily excluding universities from JobKeeper and hiking student fees. However, the logs and kindling were carefully arranged over decades by successive governments who have starved universities of public funding.
Funding cuts and deregulation have both eroded public funding of universities and increased student debt over time and the last decade has been particularly brutal. In the most recent budget, the federal government twisted the knife, further slashing real university funding per student by 6.5 per cent this year and by another 9 per cent over the coming four years. At the same time, students on average continue to pay more in tuition fees, thanks to the government's unfair HECS-HELP increases in 2020.
On top of this, the Coalition has cut research funding by $1.6 billion over the past decade and undermined the independence of the Australian Research Council by vetoing research applications. It has shifted the council's governance model to align with the government's "research commercialisation agenda".
Promising young researchers are leaving the industry, along with teaching and professional staff, in droves. Vital Australian research and quality education is suffering as a result.
However, we have an opportunity now to change the fate of the sector and save Australian higher education. There is a reasonable solution to all of this and the benefits far outweigh the cost to taxpayers.
New economic modelling from The Australia Institute shows if we lift our higher education spending in line with the rest of the OECD, like New Zealand for example, we could not only secure the future of Australian universities but even provide free undergraduate education for all Australians.
For around one per cent of our GDP, the next Australian government could remove the financial barrier to higher education, employ more than 26,000 staff in secure full-time jobs, reduce the over-reliance on casual staff and establish a new higher education agency to improve governance. This would include ending wage theft and capping the exorbitant salaries of vice-chancellors across the country.
This would not just pay massive dividends in economic outcomes for the entire country, particularly for regional universities and the communities that rely on them. It would protect universities as places of knowledge creation, education and participation.
Shortly before he was elected prime minister, Gough Whitlam said "a student's merit, rather than a parent's wealth, should decide who should benefit from the community's vast financial commitment to tertiary education." Five decades on, this is truer than ever.
Whitlam's reforms were life-changing for generations of Australians. Those who had not even considered university within the realm of possibility were suddenly able to imagine and fulfil entirely new careers, often with better pay. This was transformative.
We have the means and the ability to make this a reality for all Australians now. Especially for current and future students who face the prospect of more expensive degrees, mounting student debt and even the threat of being kicked off HECS if they don't pass their courses.
If the next government has the chutzpah to introduce the big reforms alluded to in the leaders campaign debate last week, we could see a better, more democratic future for higher education.
But if we stick to business-as-usual, we can expect to see more cost-cutting under the domination of corporate priorities. University qualifications will become expensive traded commodities, inaccessible for too many Australians.
Without urgent measures to limit casual hiring and protect permanent employment, the scourge of casualisation in Australian universities will only get worse.
University jobs will only become more impossible to manage and increasingly precarious. Quality research and teaching won't survive. Nor will the dream of an affordable education for all.
- Dr Alison Barnes is NTEU national president
