'Who's running these unis anyhow?' State/Commonwealth confusion to be examined

CAPA welcomes the tenth recommendation of the Senate Committee report, Universities in Crisis, that the current balance between state and federal responsibilities for universities should be reviewed.

"A significant disjunction between the locus of statutory authority over universities and the source of their public funding has grown over the past few decades," said CAPA President John Byron today.

Universities' public funding comes predominantly from the Commonwealth. However, universities exist by virtue of acts of State and Territory Parliaments, and consequently it is this level of government that bears most of the responsibility for oversight of the affairs of institutions.

"The difficulty in gaining adequate scrutiny of university financial activities, for example, has been a function of this baroque structure," continued Mr Byron.

"Unfortunately, as a consequence of the Coalition's reckless abandonment of the principles of responsible management of the higher education sector, cash-strapped universities have had to pursue some desperate avenues to seek alternative funding," he explained.

"Some decisions have been quite unwise, and a great deal of taxpayers' money has been squandered.

"The mismatch between regulatory authority and funding responsibility has made it exceedingly difficult to prevent inappropriate uses of funds, or even to discover precisely what has happened once the dust settles," he argued.

The Committee proposes that the review be conducted by the Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, which is comprised of the ministers responsible for these portfolios from the States and Territories as well as from the Commonwealth.

"By nominating MCEETYA as the appropriate body to conduct the review, the Committee clearly signals that this is not an aggressive take-over bid," observed Mr Byron.

"The Committee is manifestly interested in ensuring that the Commonwealth Minister works constructively with the rest of MCEETYA - something that Dr Kemp abjectly failed to achieve during his years in the job - to ensure that complex and important inter-governmental matters can be discussed in a productive and rational way."

One possible outcome that the Committee contemplated was the eventual transfer of statutory powers for universities to the Commonwealth, "an idea worth running up the flagpole," according to Mr Byron.

"The one exception to the bizarre current arrangement is the Australian National University, which is a Commonwealth creation," he pointed out. "The ANU seems to manage quite effectively with a consistency between the powers of funding and regulation."

He concluded, "It does no harm to take a look at how we do things, and at least to ask ourselves why we should retain our structures, especially those that are seemingly anachronistic and obfuscatory."