BY VIV MILEY
John Howard upped the election stakes on January 29 when he unveiled his $2.9 billion innovation action plan, Backing Australia's Ability. The plan was applauded by business circles, university administrators and research bodies, but is unlikely to end the severe crisis in the country's universities and research units caused by years of government cost-cutting and restructuring.
Launched as part of the prime minister's centenary of federation address, the plan is more than just an education platform. It is touted to be a strategy to get Australia's research and development back on track.
The plan extends HECS-type loans to some postgraduate students, funds an additional 21,000 undergraduate places and provides a $246 million to improve university infrastructure.
It will also put more money into primary and secondary schools to enhance science, maths and information technology subjects and allocate $34 million for schools to start developing online curricula.
Research has also been given a financial boost, with an injection of $700 million in additional funds doubling the Australian Research Council's funding.
Top scientists and academics have welcomed the additional funding, claiming that it will go a long way to stop the country's "brain drain". University administrators are also happy about the proposed additional funding.
But will the initiatives set out in Backing Australia's Ability be enough to reverse the damage done by five years of deep cuts to research and education? A closer examination reveals the answer: no, it won't.
Firstly, Backing Australia's Ability is a five year plan — the $2.9 billion allocated means less than $600 million a year will go to higher education. Further, not all of the $2.9 billion is going into public education and research — the innovation plan proposes a myriad of incentives and tax breaks for research companies as well as additional funding for start-up ventures for business.
When broken down, the numbers look considerably less impressive. The proposed $34 million over five years for developing online curricula only works out to around $2.10 per student per year, for example.
Second, the plan is the first funding increase to higher education and research since the election of the Howard government in 1996. It is hardly surprising then that both scientists and academics have welcomed it; it's partial relief after years of belt-tightening.
But the additional funding allocated does not even start to put back into education what the federal government has taken out since 1996. According to a December higher education audit conducted by the National Tertiary Education Union, federal government funding has fallen from 1.6% of gross domestic product to a low of 0.8% in 1998-99, a reduction in real terms of 23.1% for operating grants between 1995 and 2001. Research has suffered similarly.
The additional undergraduate places likewise: the 21,000 places over five years will restore most, but certainly not all, of the 25,000 publicly-funded places the government has cut since 1996. Unless restrictions are put in place, the financial pressure on universities to impose additional fees on undergraduates to fund additional places will continue.
Thirdly, while universities will finally get some additional cash heading their way under the "innovation" plan, it will not be broad funding increases for all departments and all students.
The measures in Backing Australia's Ability are focused directly on the areas of science, mathematics and information and communication technology. The 21,000 new places will all be focused in those areas. The same goes for the boost in infrastructure funding.
The badly-hit humanities faculties will get little or nothing.
Similarly, while postgraduate loans will help some students overcome the high up-front fees charged, they will not make postgraduate study any more accessable. There are no additional funds going into postgraduate study and the loans only apply to non-research based postgraduate study, and will cover such courses as Master of Business Administration.
Fourthly, the plan itself is not about "fixing" education or even research. It is about nurturing "innovation", the new election buzzword for the millenium.
"Innovation", Howard said in his address, "is not the preserve of just a small group of Australians, but the means by which all of us, in small business, as employees in larger companies, as primary producers, as parents wanting better opportunities for our children, will succeed."
Clearly Backing Australia's Ability is a pitch by the prime minister to attract the votes of disenfranchised voters wanting something better. What Howard is obviously unwilling to spell out, especially in an election year, is that the plan has nothing to do with providing Australians with more chances to be "innovative" and everything to do with backing a small group of Australians' ability to make more money.
A substantial amount of money is being directed into programs to help business turn research into development. This includes $40 million for Commercialising Emerging Technologies (COMET), $534 million for the R&D Start program and $79 million for a pre-seed fund designed to get universities and public research bodies to commercialise research.
The ideas behind Backing Australia's Ability are not just the Howard government's. They were part of a report from a working group at the Australian Innovation Summit, held in Melbourne last year and hosted by the Business Council of Australia.
A working group's report, titled Innovation: Unlocking the Future, outlined a number of different proposals that were needed to get Australia's "innovation" on track, many of which reappear in Howard's plan. These not surprisingly include a rise in the the tax concession rate for business and other "incentives" for business to undertake research and development.
Rather than rectifying the government-caused crisis, John Howard's innovation plan appears to be part of an ideological shift in the way both higher education and research is structured and conducted.
In a radio interview with Alan Jones on 2UE on January 30, Howard put forward his solution to the "brain drain" of talented academics and researchers to other countries: "I mean it's just a question of in the end that universities have got to do something about deregulating their salary structures and we have in fact offered the universities more money if they restructure their industrial relations arrangements. Some of the universities are taking that up, others are not."
The deregulation Howard is talking about includes the introduction of individual contracts, which have been offered to academics but which most have rejected.
Similarly, Howard shows no sign of abandoning government attempts to put more and more responsibility for funding education onto students. "We tried free university places under the Whitlam period and it didn't work", Howard told Jones, adding that students should pay fees because "They get a great reward long term, most of them do out of it".
The National Tertiary Education Union's Audit of Higher Education found differently, however: "The social returns are estimated at 16.5% for three year degrees and 14.5% for four year degrees — both higher than the respective private returns".
The union report then argued "the only solution, which is both realistic and socially and economically responsible, is to significantly increase funding from public sources".
Backing Australia's Ability is not going to save Australia's higher education system — far from it. It will rather further shift universities towards becoming exclusively the training grounds for big business and tailor their operations to the whims of the market.