RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Person #1:

“..Everyone, the attorney will make a statement…”

RUBY:

After days of intense public speculation over the identity of a cabinet minister who had been the subject of a detailed allegation of rape, the federal attorney general Christian Porter held a press conference yesterday afternoon identifying himself as the minister.

Archival tape -- Christian Porter:

“I was aware over the last few months of a whispering campaign. Had the accusation ever been put to me before they were printed, I would have at least been able to say the only thing that I can say and likely the only thing that I'm ever going to be able to say, and it's the truth, and that is that nothing in the allegations that have been printed ever happened.”

RUBY:

Porter has strongly denied the accusations levelled against him.

Archival tape -- Christian Porter:

“It was a long time ago. But I can just say to you that the things that are written and said to have happened, wherever they have said to have happened, that's the first time they have been put, that it happened in someone’s room, they just didn’t happen.”

RUBY:

He also said that he would be taking medical leave, but will not be resigning from his role.

Archival tape -- Christian Porter:

“If I stand down from my position as Attorney-General because of an allegation about something that simply did not happen, then any person in Australia can lose their career, their job, their life’s work based on nothing more than an accusation that appears in print. If that happens, anyone in public life is able to be removed simply by the printing of an allegation.”

RUBY:

We’ll have more analysis of this story on tomorrow’s show, where I’ll be speaking to The Saturday Paper’s political columnist, Paul Bongiorno.

But for now, here’s today’s episode.

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RUBY:

Australia’s University sector is in crisis.

Last year more, than 17,000 jobs were lost at campuses around the country.

Border closures have cut off international students, a key revenue source for most universities.

But the current turmoil afflicting the sector is the result of changes that go back much earlier than the pandemic.

Over decades successive governments have cut funding to higher education, and forced universities to compete in a ruthless market.

Today, emeritus professor at La Trobe University Judith Brett on the relentless cost-cutting that’s transformed Australia’s universities.

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RUBY:

Judith, Australia’s higher education system has been pretty radically transformed on numerous occasions, often depending on who the government of the day and the Prime Minister was, and what kind of ideology they subscribed to. Can you help me understand some of those changes and how they have led us to the current situation universities, and staff and students there find themselves in?

JUDITH:

So when I went to university in the 60s, I started at Melbourne University in 1967. That was a period when the university sector was expanding.

Menzies had had a commission of enquiry during the 1950s because there was at that stage just one university in each state, and they were the old colonial universities that started in the 19th century. And there was a recommendation that there be an expansion.

And so, Universities like Monash and University of New South Wales and things were established and then there was some more like Latrobe and Macquarie and Griffith, so there was a big expansion of the number of institutions coming into the 1970s.

Archival tape -- Gough Whitlam:

“ … this must be done not just because the basic resource of this nation is the skills of it’s people but because education is the key to equality of opportunity.”

JUDITH:

And so in 1972, Whitlam abolished fees.

Archival tape -- Gough Whitlam:

“We will abolish fees at universities and colleges of advanced education.”

JUDITH:

It had a big impact on older people, particularly older women, who could now go to universities, mature age, part time students without having to pay fees.

Archival tape -- Gough Whitlam:

“It’s time to strike a blow for the ideal that education should be free. Under the Liberals this basic principle has been massively eroded.”

JUDITH:

And so there's a big expansion of opportunity both for academic employment and also for student learning through the 70s and into the 80s.

Archival tape -- Gough Whitlam:

“We will re-assert that principle at the commanding heights of education, at the level of the university itself.”

JUDITH:

At the end of the 80s, HECs was introduced, which was a contribution that students paid once they started working.

Archival tape -- News Reporter #1:

“Student anger at the $250 a year fee the government calls an administrative charge spilled over on the Griffith University campus in Brisbane today...”

JUDITH:

The argument was that it was somehow unfair, you know, that people who went to university were being supported by taxpayers who didn't themselves have the opportunity to go to university.

Archival tape -- News Reporter #2:

“Senator Ryan says the government has sympathy for the students but…”

Archival tape -- Senator Ryan:

They should have sympathy with many sectors of the community who are worse off than them…”

JUDITH:

The rationale was that they could then make a contribution to that once they got that higher income and that's been gradually being ratcheted up.

RUBY:

Right, so instead of funding the continued expansion of higher education through the public money, which is what happened under Whitlam in the 70’s, we started to see that financial burden shift on to students. So what happened next, how did universities respond to that shift?

JUDITH:

Um, probably then then the next big thing that starts to happen, you start to see universities marketing international education for an income stream...

Archival tape -- Pyne:

“Unless we give universities and higher education colleges more freedom, we are asking them to operate in the modern economy with one hand tied behind their back.”

JUDITH:

...and and they were very successful in this in that, pre-Covid higher education was our fourth largest earner of foreign currency.

Archival tape -- Pyne:

“Importantly International education is a valuable export, we earn around $15 billion a year by providing education to international students.”

JUDITH:

So that was, I guess, then another big shift. And once that happened, the universities compete in an international arena.

RUBY:

And so, Judith, what kind of impact have these policy changes, the lack of funding, and the response that we saw from universities to sort of market themselves in a pretty aggressive way internationally, what impact has that had? What does all of this mean for a student studying at a university today, in comparison to someone who enrolled back when you did?

JUDITH:

Well, for a start, they'll be much less likely to get taught by a permanent member of staff. They'll be being taught by casuals who are underpaid.

They'll have fewer subject choices than they once did. I mean, and I think this varies a bit across institutions, like it's quite hard to find what subjects are actually being offered on university websites. Some you can find but on others what you can get is a course, which will be like a Bachelor of Creative Arts or something, but it won't actually tell you in detail what the subjects are that you're going to be doing.

The thing that strikes me most when I look at, you know young undergraduates, young 18 year olds, starting now is just how much less they get offered. You know, I ended up doing about twenty four contact hours a week. There'd be nowhere where you did that much now and where that much teaching was offered. So it's the sort of intensity, I think, of what gets offered now at university is just so much less.

And as I said, they're being taught by people who are one on the whole, not permanent members of staff, so that means they won't be available for consultation. It has to be said, I think, that a lot of those casual employees have a sort of professionalism and commitment, which means that actually they do a hell of a lot more work than they're ever paid for, and so the quality of the teaching is not as bad as one would one would expect if they actually just, you know, work the hours that they were expected.

But, you know, if you're paid three hours to write a lecture. Now, that's actually not possible, but you can't sort of front up and be standing in front of them and halfway through say: ‘Well, look, I was only paid for three hours to write this, and I've actually used my three hours now so you can all, next half hour, you can all just go to the cafe or look at your Facebook or whatever’, I mean, you can't do that, so people actually have to put in the extra work.

RUBY:

Mm and it does seem the system you're describing, it does seem deeply unfair to those casual workers.

JUDITH:

It's deeply unfair. It’s I mean, it's just mind bogglingly exploitative and everybody knows that, and it's very hard. Like the people who when you're running a department, you're given a budget and you actually don't have the capacity to get, you don't get given any more money. And so you find as a manager, you're in a position of being an exploiter, even if you think it's terrible because that's the budget that higher up has given, because they've decided that there's other priorities that the institution’s got.

And since students have been paying HECs, actually what they've been getting has been getting worse and worse.

You know, the HECs fees have been being diverted to fund research and to fund management salaries and to fund marketing, because once the universities started having to compete with each other for students, well, then they had to market themselves, and so that takes money. And also the rankings of universities depended on their research achievements, not really on their teaching.

And so money was, if you like, kept being diverted out of teaching into other things, so that the permanent staff are in this position, I think, on the whole are feeling, I mean, you feel guilty about it, but you also feel pretty helpless.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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Archival tape -- News Reporter #1:

“Australian universities have risen in the eyes of international academics and employers. The QS world university ranking is a measure of universities international reputations.”

Archival tape -- News Reporter #2:

“Seven Australian universities have made the top 100, up from 6 last year.”

Archival tape -- News Reporter #3:

“The latest academic ranking of world universities has been published with the University of Melbourne topping to Australian table in 35th place.”

RUBY:

Judith, the university system that you’re describing is one that seems fairly brutal for staff and also pretty disappointing for students, especially compared to what has existed in the past. But when you look at official rankings, Australia’s universities, they all actually do seem to do quite well, so how do you explain that inconsistency?

JUDITH:

Yes, I find this quite puzzling.

I took as a case study, English departments. And I looked at the Melbourne University English Department, which is ranked number 17 in the world, and I had a look at the staff pages. When you look at Melbourne University’s staff page for English, firstly it’s English and Theatre, there's about 17 people mentioned. There's like 40 or 50 at the institutions that are on either side of the University of Melbourne, so I don't understand where these rankings come from. And they certainly don't reflect the quality of the disciplinary education that's being offered to the undergraduates.

So in terms of the range of subjects that can be offered, the coverage of the discipline, humanities departments in Australia just are not in the same league. And I don't think Australians realise this. And I don't know even whether the people in the departments themselves realise it. I mean, it's been, I think, a bit like the frog in boiling water on this, because these changes have been incremental. And people keep trying, you know, the permanent staff that survive each round of voluntary redundancy keep trying to do their best. And it's hard to I think for them, you know, they've got to turn up to work each day to realise how degraded the departments they’re in have become.

RUBY:

And to what extent do you think that it is political, that it's the result of deliberate policy decisions and settings?

JUDITH:

Yes, I think that since Tony Abbott and I mean even in ways, since Howard I mean, the Liberal Party has become very philistine. The Liberal Party, say if we go back to Menzies, Menzies would say, you know, the middle class is the, they're the people who keep the flames of higher learning alight. They're the people who support high culture, who buy the paintings, who buy the theatre tickets. Well, that's sort of true.

But the problem for the Liberal Party is that many of the more educated middle class now vote Labour. So the Liberal Party sees, you know, I mean, the propensity to vote Labour goes up with education. So it's actually not in the interests of the Liberal Party at a crass political level.

I think it sees the universities as part of Labor's tribe in some ways, and so I do see it as being crassly political A, and then secondly, they just think they're not interested in, you know, so there's money will flow for sport and it will be seen as a crisis if there's fewer young people playing footy or cricket or whatever, but not if there's less money available for youth theatre, for example.

I mean, obviously, the universities are now in a terrible position because of the loss of the international student income. And it's not clear that that's going to come back even with vaccinations, because the government basically threw international students under a bus when the pandemic came so that did a lot of damage to our reputation as a provider. So it's not clear to me exactly what the way forward is, but I do think we need to face it for what it is.

RUBY:

Mmm and all of these systemic problems, the lack of adequate funding, the pressure to compete against each other for international students, the casualisation of the workforce, when you put them all together how compromised do you think it’s left the higher education sector?

JUDITH:

I think it's very compromised and I think it's sort of morally compromised because it's depending on basically wage theft I think, you know, it's not paying people for the work that they do and the work they have to do to do their job.

You know, the work is there and it has to be paid for. You know, the work is being done and universities have to start paying for it. And if they had to start paying for that for the teaching, they would be forced to have to think a little harder about their priorities.

And I think that the very high pay that the management gets is a real problem. I mean, I think one of the problems, because I've been thinking, how has this happened? It's like the universities are both public and private institutions and they’re a hybrid. And it's a hybridity that is not generative.

It's a hybridity that just leads to contradictions. So when they want to be a private institution, they defend that. And the vice chancellors say, ‘Look, we're managing a X billion dollar corporation. And that's what, you know, if we were in the private sector, that's what we get’.

But actually, they're also getting taxpayer money and they've got an important public role to play. They're not just a shoe manufacturer. You know, they've got a sort of quasi monopoly position on the educating of each generation of students. And that's a public role.

RUBY:

Judith, thank you so much for your time today.

JUDITH:

Thank you for having me.

RUBY:

You can read Judith Brett’s essay on the crisis in universities in the latest issue of The Monthly, which is out now. Head to themonthly.com.au.

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RUBY:

Also in the news, just hours before Christian Porter held a press conference to deny the allegations made against him, the Australian of the Year and sexual assault survivor Grace Tame delivered a passionate and blistering speech at the National Press Club.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Announcer #1:

“Please welcome Grace Tame.”

RUBY:

In her speech, Tame called for structural change across society to combat sexual violence.

Archival tape -- Grace Tame:

“To our government, our decision makers and our policy makers, we need reform on a national scale, both in policy and education to address these heinous crimes so that they are no longer enabled to be perpetrated.”

RUBY:

She also addressed the allegations of sexual assault that have dominated headlines over the past few weeks.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Interviewer:

“Do you believe that these allegations point to a bigger sort of public reckoning for people in powerful or public positions?”

Archival tape -- Grace Tame:

“Oh, it's not surprising to me at all. Um, cover up culture, the abuse of power is not unique to Parliament.”

RUBY:

And she took aim at the rhetoric used by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Archival tape --

“When the prime minister responded to these first set of allegations, he used the phrase: ‘as a father’, and he said, you have to have a chat with his wife, Jenny, before he was able to, you know, front the media and speak. What do you make of that and what do you make of the rhetoric in the way he's handled those allegations?

Archival tape -- Grace Tame:

It shouldn't take having children to have a conscience. And actually, on top of that, having children doesn't guarantee a conscience.”

RUBY:

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

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