Australia in the Global Education Environment

Such flagship universities of the Australian system will only emerge if there is also a major shift in Commonwealth policy towards the recognition of both a pluralist set of universities and special provision to encourage the development of world-class research intensive universities.

Higher education clearly needs to be there for all who can benefit from its learning environment at different stages of their lives. Yet the universities require a differentiated policy framework which matches resources to missions.

Beyond a substantial enhancement of national funding investment in education and research, Commonwealth policy needs to go through a transformation which facilitates the world-class aspirations of our world-class universities by deregulation and incentive.

In summary, we have to confront the question: why does all this matter, why should we make the effort? It matters because of the fundamentals of our age:

• Higher education and research will be the driving force for the prosperity and the capacity of a knowledge-based society;
• The new jobs of the future will increasingly be in new industries and we need to produce graduates who can both engage in those industries, and develop them for us as a nation of innovation;
• Intellectual property will be the key to prosperity and stability through innovation;
• Flexible and transferable skills (which can cross international boundaries) will be the great human resource in our society;
• Australia’s flagship universities will ensure that ‘Big Science’ can still happen here and connect us to the major research institutions and cultures of the developed world;
• Capacities for ‘lifelong learning’ will alone ensure that Australia has the kind of workforce and citizenry which can triumph in an era of globalisation and continuing social transformation.

In the words of a paper from the Business Higher Education Round Table on The Case for Additional Investment in Basic Research in Australia, and under the heading of ‘What the rest of the world is doing’ . . .

" . . . there is a paradigm shift taking place in many OECD and leading Asian countries at the highest levels of government. It is the realisation that knowledge and its application is now the major driving force of economic performance and that there is an important facilitation role for government consistent with the diverse and dispersed benefits of public investment in the generation and diffusion of knowledge."

Australian history has advanced by natural good fortune of farming and commodity staples, plus pioneering determination. As we run out of the good fortune of those old staples, so the innovation of new knowledge needs to become our new staple resource.