Page 1431 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
To quote an entry on 31 December on Mr Barr’s website:
The University of Canberra received a $26 million Commonwealth grant for structural adjustment. First project: create the University of Canberra Institute of Technology.
It would seem that while Minister Barr has moved from the education portfolio he is still calling the shots but just forgot to tell his replacement.
Our objections to this process have all along been about accountability and transparency. We asked in August last year for the minister to inform the Assembly what was going on. Minister Barr said then:
Education and government experts have looked and continue to look at proposals in detail. They will report back to the government soon and the group’s findings will be made public by the government.
I guess if writing a commentary in an end-of-year media release is technically making it public then Mr Barr has made it public. Mr Barr also told the Assembly:
The government has always been happy to release the final modelling done by the working group when it is completed. This will include a detailed financial analysis of all of Professor Bradley’s recommendations.
Seven months later and we are still waiting.
As legislators in this place, we should all be worried by this process of events. If we review the recent history of this issue, there are a number of interesting and perhaps disturbing elements. In February 2010, the Hawke review of the ACT public service suggested there should be a formal merger between the University of Canberra and the Canberra Institute of Technology. Minister Barr agreed.
In June last year, University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Stephen Parker set out a list of 15 principles under which such a merger should proceed, including CIT becoming a division of the university and subject to the university’s enlarged academic board. He said that under such an arrangement, the CIT chief executive would report to Professor Parker. Not surprisingly, CIT had somewhat differing views.
In August, we had Professor Bradley bringing down her report that offered three recommendations, one of which was that the two institutions should merge. She said, inter alia: “You can’t justify two large tertiary institutions in a place like Canberra. It just does not have the economies of scale.” In August, the minister for education said a steering group would look at the report and all the options, that they would consult and that all details would be made public. The same month, University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Stephen Parker was quoted as saying he wanted to pursue plans to create a teaching-only polytechnic as part of his strategy to make University of Canberra into an omniversity. He said:
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video