‘Hand of government’ hamstringing universities: Leeser

Australian universities have lost the vibrant competition that flourished under the demand-driven funding system before the coalition government scrapped it in 2017, according to the coalition’s education spokesman.

Shadow education minister Julian Leeser said the Labor government’s “managed growth” funding bill was the latest manifestation of an anti-competitive drive that was weakening the sector.

“This bill reduces competition and increases regulation,” Leeser told a Universities Australia webinar. “We’ve gone from this idea where competition was good, where deregulation was good.

“[Now it is] batten down the hatches, competition’s bad, spare us from this, let’s have the hand of government playing more of a role. I don’t think…that’s in the long-term best interests of the sector.”

Leeser said the lead-up to the coalition government’s 2013 election, the year after Labor launched the demand-driven system, had been a “time of optimism” in universities. “[It was] a time of competition, a time of growth.

“I know some people in the sector don’t like the idea of competition, but we can’t have everybody doing exactly the same thing. We’ve got to get people to play to their strengths. That is effectively what was starting to happen with the demand-driven system. People were seeing, as students voted with their feet, where their strengths were and where they were less strong.”

Despite the coalition’s reservations about the funding legislation, Leeser expected negotiations with the government to produce an amended bill “that the coalition ultimately will be able to support”. He said the amendments would ease ministerial control over domestic student places, water down restrictions on over-enrolment and tighten eligibility around top-up funding for courses in regional areas.

The government was unlikely to accept coalition amendments to embellish the legislated “National Tertiary Education Objective”, to which the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec) must have reference when exercising its powers, or to force universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, Leeser said.

Tthe “policy pillars” being developed by the coalition included protecting the integrity of degrees and pruning the “thicket” of regulation, he said. “What we need is a smaller, simpler bureaucracy,” he told the webinar.“You do not need 15 regulators overseeing your sector. Vice-chancellors say…they spend less time thinking about innovation and have to hire more administrators just to deal with the ever-growing regulatory state.”

While he stopped short of a commitment to abolish Atec if the coalition regained power, Leeser reiterated his doubts about the agency. “We voted against it and I’ve been highly critical of it. We’re in a trillion dollars’ worth of debt. Your sector is massively overregulated. I don’t see the benefit of an Atec.”

He also condemned the government’s “savage” cuts to research in this year’s budget, highlighting the midstream cancellation of Australia’s Economic Accelerator research commercialisation programme: “Vice-chancellors have told me they…had ideas that were on the cusp of commercialisation. Those things have just been dumped. That’s not helpful to our productivity as a country.”

Leeser committed to a clear articulation of the coalition’s higher education policies ahead of the next federal election, which will take place between August 2027 and May 2028. “I want people to go to the election understanding very, very firmly what a coalition government would do,” he said.

“Too often we’ve had a process where…at the very end of the term, in the six weeks of the election campaign – maybe even the night before – the policy gets uploaded. We’ve learned that lesson. That’s not going to happen.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com