Australian regional higher education strategy in limbo

Legislation to help strengthen Australia’s regional universities looks increasingly likely to succeed, despite the latest threat to the conservative government’s tenuous grip on power – but the push could be undermined by the country’s Labor opposition.

A private member’s bill, tabled in June by independent MP Cathy McGowan, would oblige the government to implement a regional higher education strategy championed by a regional, rural and remote education commissioner.

Ms McGowan told the Regional Universities Network conference on 19 October that her bill was now before education minister, Dan Tehan, and that negotiations to secure his support were “going really, really well”.

They could go even better if the government does not win the 20 October by-election for ousted prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Wentworth seat. If the Liberal Party loses, it will surrender its one-seat majority and strengthen the hand of Ms McGowan and other crossbench MPs.

“Should it happen that I’m in a meeting with the prime minister sometime next week, I will have [a copy of the bill] with me,” Ms McGowan told the conference.

However, shadow assistant universities minister Louise Pratt told the conference that the opposition did not support the bill. She said that a Labor government would address “exactly the same issues” through its proposed post-secondary education review, but that educational considerations would not be “differentiated geographically”.

“We are taking a more holistic approach, which we think is our responsibility in government,” Ms Pratt said.

It is unclear what the Labor party’s position means for Ms McGowan’s proposal. Australia is expected to go to the polls by the middle of next year and Labor is generally expected to win, in the wake of the Liberal party infighting that triggered Mr Turnbull’s removal.

Ms McGowan scoffed at suggestions that geography could be overlooked in educational debates. She said that just 14 per cent of adults in her electorate of Indi, in Victoria’s north-east, had higher education degrees. The national average is 22 per cent and 46 per cent in metropolitan areas.

She explained that she had been “galvanised into action” by former education minister Christopher Pyne’s 2014 attempt to deregulate university fees. “It shocked me that there would be a policy that would try to do that without regard to the implications for our regions,” she said.

Ms McGowan added that government strategies to boost regional services tended to encourage “pork barrelling” and accomplished little. “We have a lot of grants programmes that are competitively based, that have rarely got anything to do with the national good – they’ve got to do with who does a really good submission,” she said.

RUN vice-chancellors told the conference that they supported Ms McGowan’s bill. “We need an advocate for the regions because Australia is a very peculiar country geographically,” said Charles Sturt University vice-chancellor and president Andrew Vann.

“It’s very sparsely populated and very urbanised. There aren’t many countries like us,” he added.

Southern Cross University vice-chancellor Adam Shoemaker said a strategy and a commissioner could give regional education a “sustained focus which is not entirely apolitical, but which crosses party lines”.

He cited a historical example of an influential commissioner, saying the National Capital Development Commissioner had helped transform post-war Canberra from little more than a sheep farm. “That city is now one of the most successful in the world.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com