Missing Pieces Of Accord Puzzle

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This is the text of Emeritus Professor Mary O'Kane's 2025 Bradley Oration, as recorded using live captioning by AI-Media.

As several of you will remember, Bruce particularly, Denise and I were definitely competitive for our universities. A bit competitive on other things, goodness knows what else. At heart, we shared many things including a passion for higher education and a belief in its transformative power, especially for the underprivileged.

We also shared a background of attending Catholic schools. I wonder what Denise would have made of John Henry Newman, famous for his book The Idea of a University recently being declared a saint and a doctor of the church. I think I can imagine a sharp comment, but in a public oration with children present, we won't go there.

As David has mentioned, Jason Clare announced the Accord Review at the first Bradley Oration. Tonight, now the review is finished much is implemented, I provide a reflection on the accord, what isn't in it and what we need to do next. The genesis for this topic is twofold.

An eminent political friend he tonight commented to me after the review was published and said something like "good review, right on topic, a typical O'Kane review that addresses the terms of reference". I know it was meant to be a compliment but I wasn't sure if I should be flattered or offended. By knew what he was getting at, there were some things that could have been usefully addressed but when engine and other things that could have been explored in greater depth. I am using this to address tonight, some other things.

The other comes from the fact that I do a lot of reviews and floods, fires, industry research centres, the CRC, the bureau of meteorology, koalas, coal seam gas, agricultural R&D, a few others. Viewing is often a very intense process and that you are trying to gather as much evidence and expert opinion as possible, and weave it into hypotheses that can be tested against the available data. All within very tight time constraints.

There is enormous satisfaction when you feel you got to the bottom of whatever caused the review to be called. This is like solving a tricky problem and sobbing against the clock. For example, in the bushfire enquiry, Professor Jason Sharples from UNSW ADFA who is the world expert in bushfires, he was able to explain that the extreme fire effects we saw, he was able to demonstrate that the 2019-20 bushfires were probably the worst forest fires in the world.

On the back of that we were able to explain with particular confidence for the men for the future, and it is particularly troubling.

In reviews of organisations and programs there is really such a neat underpinning explanation, but a structural way forward can generally be developed. In the emergency management side of the bush for enquiry, we look for finding that sort of structural arrangements but ended up with a very large number of recommendations, tiptoeing around issues to do with the Rural Fire Service and interactions with other bodies. It is quite hard and organisational reviews to get to a good output.

In the case of the Accord Review, I had a nagging wish for a unifying theory of higher education in Australia theory of education in Australia. About somewhat interlocking issues that affected our universities and made the Australian educational system suboptimal. Behind this was the hope that such a framework would help lead us to a sector that is less trouble than our sect is at present which is more appreciated by the community at large.

Let's have a quick look at the sector and what it delivers. If you read the press, and with due respect to media present, Australian universities are in trouble. They are poorly governed, run by under supervised overpaid vice chancellors with large numbers of staff. The teaching is poor and many academics don't care about teaching anyway, they just want to do research on useless, esoteric topics.

Actually, in many ways, the story is pretty good. Consider facts like the following. 33% of Australians have a university degree, and for younger cohorts, for example, 25-34 age group, it is 45%. It advantages them significantly in the job market.

University education is a relatively low burden on the taxpayer in Australia, to the high private contribution which is made bearable for students and parents by the very innovative HECS scheme, a scheme invented by Bruce Chapman and widely copied around the world.

Universities rank highly in international rankings. Bruce already talked about rankings, and I agree, you shrug about them but they still tell us something. On the various tables, typically, six universities rank in the top 100 worldwide, and then Canada, which is a much bigger population than us. It only has three or four. Typically, 20 to 25 are in the top 300 worldwide.

Next point, our universities are a major contributor to our fifth biggest export, international education, with investors collecting 35 and 36 billion to 2024. 3.4% of the world's published research in 2022 came from Australia. The great majority of it coming from Australian universities. And of course, we have 0.33% of the world's population. So over the odds by a factor of 10.

Our universities account for one third of our R&D expenditure, above Canada and way above the OECD. Our university research is highly cited, 84% of it is rated above world standard. In 2022, 60% of research publications with an Australian author had an author from another country as well. In other words, Australian universities produce a lot of high-quality research, it is referred to by a lot of others, so we can assume it is useful, and it is sort out for research partners. And it is good value, with just over half of it funded by the universities themselves, mainly from the revenue they earn from international students.

In the last dot point in this quick overview, our universities have been very successful at collective commercial ventures - think AARNet, a successful telco, which was a major part of bringing the Internet to Australia. Thinking UniSuper, Unimutual and IDP.

It's a great base to build on and we can adjust various things that are out of whack. The accord was not primarily about what has worked and what hasn't, but rather how the higher and tertiary education systems should evolve to address future national skills and knowledge needs. So let's have a quick look at what happened in the report.

There were several areas in the terms of reference, the first was about skills, meeting Australia's knowledge and skills needs now and in the future. Recognising that more than nine in 10 new jobs will require our qualification. The second was an access and equity, the third on affordability, the fourth was on government accountability and community, the fifth was the connection between that higher education systems, the six was policy and sustainability particularly in the post COVID world, and the seventh was delivering new knowledge and innovation capability, the research term of reference.

For those familiar with the Bradley review, it looks a bit similar. Of course COVID was in there, and there hadn't been as many jobs for graduates but it was something similar. But I would like to pay my respects to the panel, addressing all terms of reference, making 47 recommendations plus 5 priority recommendations.

Given the national importance of higher education, we started with a positioning objective, a touchstone for all proposed future changes to the higher education system to make sure it stays on track for the future. Just as we have the National Energy Objectives, which is a policy angle as we work through the clean energy transition, the NTEO, the tertiary education one and to be that the tertiary education but doing and not through an energy transition but through big changes coming that I will talk about.

And that objective was worded as follows, the objective of the National tertiary education system is to underpin a strong, equitable and resilient democracy, and drive national economic and social development and environmental sustainability. A little secret, the wedding was done (inaudible) last year. The next set of recommendations were about skills, the need for expansion, the size of the sector, where 80% of the working age population had a Tertiary qualification by 2050, and the need above all emphasised by employers, for high performance on the generic skills and high responsiveness on respond to urgent new skills needs.

Recognising the massive size increase needed, we noted that there is no significant student demand in the system at the moment. And therefore we had to turn to groups currently underrepresented in the system, First Nations groups, and (inaudible) groups, hence what became the tagline of the review. Skills through equity. Thus recommendations on three of the terms of reference came together in a package, skills, access and equity, and (inaudible).

You can't address the skills need without massively increasing the number of equity students in the system, and they cannot be successful unless you make it easier for them to come to the system through multiple routes, through the VET system and other training packages. The emphasis on the tertiary harmonisation was particularly focused on smoothing the path of those who want to enter higher education via VET, and are particularly looked at mechanisms which are actually quite old, many of you will remember them a long way back, but have not worked as well as we hoped. So credit for prior work and recognition for prior learning, flexible and responsive ways to provide skills training, using things like the National skills passport, micro credentials, work integrated learning, multiple exit points with qualification.

And the third one in the set was providing scaffolding support for university students from equity backgrounds as they come on to do a university degree.

On funding and contribution arrangements, we found that jobs graduates program need to be fixed, and we recommended changes to HECS-HELP, a great scheme where some egregious problems had crept in.

And we needed something called managed growth, that will replace the demand driven feature which has been such a successful recommendation of the Bradley review but one that is so successful it is now beyond its use by date.

The funding system also include features, FEE-FREE Uni Ready, need space funding and Paid Prac. And it will also get rid of this significant amount of marginal funding in the system there at present. And replace them with fully funded (inaudible).

The review was fully focused on the needs of students, so as well as the change funding arrangements, there were recommendations on professionalising territory teaching, on student support, racism study, student safety and regional universities. First Nations issues were a major feature, supporting access for Indigenous students including to courses leading to professional qualifications. And the First Nations review to interpret the accord in the context of Indigenous issues was also suggested, reflecting the rent review that followed the Bradley review.

We recommended very controversially a funding infrastructure out of a higher education future fund taxing international students revenue, another secret, it was the Vice Chancellor who suggested it, we won't say which one. There was a major set of recommendations on research and research training, including a practical way to address the lack of full funding for research and ways to encourage the take-up of research by end users, governments and industry.

The proposed Australian strategic challenges fund recommendation addressed how to co-opt the power of university research to solve the nation's leading problems, and there was a lot of emphasis on research training, particularly on the industrial PhD. There were also recommendations on data measurement and reporting, on the need for good governance including for universities to be exemplary employers and are planning to education systems of the future.

Because the Accord recommendations together amounted to such a massive body of work, requiring considerable expertise to implement, we recommended the recreation of the Australian tertiary education commission, now referred to as ATEC, to refer the government to the sector and the sector to the government. We also make recommendations about the transition and both were implemented, and to promote deeper study of these seizures, we advocated for ascent of higher excellence.

The government has accepted 36 recommendations, 31 from the report, and five from (inaudible). The minister often says that implementing the court is a multi-year venture and I think that is sensible. At the moment, only one recommendation has been completely knocked out, and that is the infrastructure one. Let me now turn to the main aspect of the speech. I want to talk about what we did not do. And the matters that I discussed and they do reflect my interpretation, Barney will come into the room and disagree with me probably, reflect the topics we worked on to varying degrees in the accord but they became more urgent since the accord and the accord did not go far enough. Or they won't directly in the terms of reference and we did not have the resources or time to address them adequately. We sensed the pushback was too strong. The first one, strangely enough, that I will list is technology changes.

Artificial intelligence and online provision. This is a very big issue. How will these two technology changes affect the system? Artificial intelligence will likely change the way we work with knowledge in various disciplines, that is pretty obvious, but this could change the way we define certain disciplines and therefore lead to significant changes in curriculum, learning, assessment and teaching of core skills including generic skills, and it will lead to disruptive changes to research, both to methods and administrative processes.

And if any of you saw the the article the other day, it had the headline, "education administration is over", but have we (inaudible) its sufficiently, is a causing cost to go up or down, will the concept of the community of scholars continue to be meaningful?

The next topic I want to turn to, and of course all of these are just touching on complex issues, the workforce, in the Accord review we did cover that, and I'd like to acknowledge the person who really got me going on that issue, we also talked about increased professionalism of tertiary teaching. But we did not adequately address size, shape and dynamics of the higher education workforce in the light of the skills through equity massive sector growth and the technology changes, especially the AI related changes, to educational research. So the sort of questions left on the table to be addressed are how we deal with these challenges in the upcoming enterprise bargaining arrangements, will be more specialist roles? Will it still exist? How will we attract enough scholars to be academics and universities and we are not attracting sufficient quantity or quality of domestic students to do a PhD? How will we make working universities attractive? How do we make adequate provision for extra staff to come on?

How will we also provide support and training for academics and professional staff over this time of great change? And how do we make that change look like an opportunity? The next obvious cross subsidies and incentives. The funding of Australian higher education comes from any sources , public and private, and the related rules are complex. Very few can monitor how they interact with each other. Universities often need to cross subsidise various functions in ways that can lead to perverse outcomes. It is multiple lectures in itself, but let me illustrate the issue with the best-known subsidy arrangements including research and international students. Through the prestigious Commonwealth competitive grant schemes, universities receive grants with fierce competition from the top researchers, but under the ground rules, only part of the cost of what has to be done is covered by the award provided.

So the university or the researcher or both knees to find the difference. So the university enrols evermore high margin international students to fund the difference, because it needs to retain and attract the top researchers to secure a place in the world rankings, which in turn allows them to attract more international students, and the researcher works seven days a week. This becomes a treadmill. The university can't reduce its growth and reliance on international students, the researcher can't maintain the pressure.

There are many treadmills and tangles and these need to be understood, teased out and decisions made about whether they are sustainable and healthy at the institutional level and the level of the institutional academic.

The next topic is costing and pricing. This is possibly the most important matter we wanted to get to and didn't. There have been over the years many attempts to address it. In the Dawkins Reforms back in 1998, the relative funding model was very successful and rebasing the amounts and levelling playing fields across universities. Lomax-Smith Review in 2011 shone a great light into the costing and pricing issues but the report was more or less period. In the more recent Deloitte work which has useful data but is widely seen as incomplete.

Why is this seen as is important? Without knowing the cost of courses and other activities, we can't determine what is optimal support for them. We can't provide a place with any confidence and we can't disentangle those cross subsidies are referred to, let alone tackle the complex JR G scheme. We can't test wider costing hypotheses, for example, the hypothesis that the university's determination to grow in size is due to the central rising cost that can only be managed by increasing scale.

I am pleased to report, however, that even though we can get to it in the Accord that we are taking it with a working party of ATEC, chaired by Stephen Duckett, the great expert on hospital costing and pricing, and working with many experts from across the sector and doing a wonderful job.

The next topic is infrastructure. I mention the controversial future fund recommendation. We also praised this answer should be funded further. What we didn't do is deliver a satisfactory solution to estimating the minimal total system infrastructure that is needed in the growth phase coming. Both bricks and mortar kind and the more ephemeral data, journals, software, et cetera, now it should be funded. This is definitely on the to-do list and again, with the another lecture always.

The next topic, and this is one, this is the pushback topic, that is the Australian regional University. Following extensive consultation in the review and with help from the Honourable Fiona Nash, we propose the creation of an Australian regional University as being a confederation of Australia's regional universities in such a way that universities retain their name and distinctive local presence at and branding, but offer many courses collectively, leverage the collective scale to do high impact rule and regional research, and use common back-office functions. Something like University of California but in the regions.

To us, it seemed like a winner but it was strongly opposed by original universities and in the end, was dropped. The great lesson you learn as a reviewer is that opposition to one single recommendation and review can lead to the whole review being buried. As I said, we backed off. It is still a good one to visit at an appropriate time.

That brings me to a collection of topics really cover a lot but there is a lot more to do, and that her size, place and diversity. As I said, there are some good section the Accord on this. In particular, we did get as far on the University size issue as we want to do. This is something Glyn Davis writes on and is highlighted very well, the factors I mention, universities are so large in international terms. It raises questions of why do they keep growing, what is the ideal size, is it big enough to provide economies of scale but not so big as to become impersonal? This is something again that needs a lot of work.

There is also a range of related questions. Should we stay with universities we have got and just have them get bigger and bigger, really? Should we allow those super big universities to exist but require them to have substructures that address the social aspects of education? Should we be encouraging a mix of specialist small universities and very large universities, and everything in between? Should we be thinking of core functions offered in common across university groups with strong networks across the nation and overseas groups? And noting that some universities have limited growth, like Charles Darwin, James Cooke, UTAS, should we encourage mergers again?

Big topic. On location, there is the question of where the next university should be built. Even my time in the planning world another long-term planning is needed when you look at metropolitan locations. We need to start on this fairly soon.

Then there is the question of what type of university should be built. Should we build teaching only universities and encourage the centralisation of research facilities? In the Accord, we raised the possibility of building another sandstone university and putting it in an equity area, hopefully creating or leading to the creation of a group of nine.

Maybe we should consider building university towns since we are so keen on housing development at the moment. Maybe we should have university towns like college towns in the US or university towns in Germany, they could be a mixture of study, living and maybe employment as well.

On diversity, quite a lot to say, and again we partly covered and is a lot we didn't do. Arguably there was more diversity in the system than there is in the present. Think about the old days with his universities with this discipline clusters reflecting national needs, that is largely gone. Think about the multidisciplinary universities, Flinders, Griffith, Murdoch, all now less distinctive but early on very much promoting multidisciplinary studies and research.

There is been some good examples of diversity from the private sphere. Bond University with its emphasis on teaching. Companies like Navistas, which is highly effective delivery agency. Then there are other study hubs, and very recently, there is Bill Shorten trade University at the University of Canberra. As somebody who was at the University of Canberra in the 1980s, sometimes good ideas come back.

This is a big market. Why don't we have more innovation in it? Why don't we for example, use more global classrooms, where students work virtually study groups around the world? Why don't we push for that? And what about specialist labour hire firms? Clusters of academics coming together to teach things like foreign or ancient languages and offer them to many university simultaneously.

The next topic I want to cover is acting like a system, while respecting institutional autonomy. Universities often demonstrate this competitiveness. Some of it is healthy, think about sporting competition, some of it is amazingly troublesome. For example, when a high university like University of Sydney is seen as dropping its entry scores, even very slightly, this will be seen often as stealing student load from other universities who have trouble filling their load quotas.

This is exacerbated at the moment by the relatively low student demand and university determination to grow in size. It is one of the reasons for introducing the new managed growth funding system.

But it raises the more general question - there are times when it is better to encourage competition and times when universities are better off acting as a system. How do we determine which is which and when and where do we do it? There is one thing we are put in a plea. It would be great if the system acted like a system in talking itself up.

University of Adelaide produces 70% of Australian winemakers. The wine industry fought incredibly among the companies. They were quite vicious. But when you talk about the wine industry, they are united. It would be great if we could do that in higher education.

A particular aspect about acting like a system is what field should universities cover and what should they do in education and research? How do we get this to happen? One of the aspects of institutional autonomy is that universities determine what courses they offer and what areas of research they will cover. But what happens when we have a national or regional need for skills in new fields? Or research topics need to be investigated?

Again, the Accord addressed this partially with this proposed mission base compacts and statements of strategic properties that will guide those. It is a big issue, and as the president of the Academy the humanities pointed out to us at ATEC, where situations where it is not only what we are not offering but where things have become so fragmented that they almost got there. Example, the teaching of foreign languages.

There are two other major topics that we felt we didn't reach adequately. They were vexed questions. They were regulation, or if you like red tape, and social licence. The sector seems to be unusually troubled compared to other sectors. Is that unusual about the sector or something we should be doing differently?

This is something of an open question about whether it is winning or losing the battle for social licence. My sense of the moment, on balance, it is it is losing.

The last topic I want to touch on is the one we more or less ducked, and it is an odd one. What is university, what is higher education? We ducked it completely and set it in support the object of the higher education act. Which is a nice characteristic of what you want and higher education system, refers to what universities and their distinctive purposes, it is not bad, it two slightly ducks and we learned that it is not uncommon.

As a matter of fact, it is worth talking about the definition of university, but the definition is deftly very when you look them up. Most definitions talk about education as opposed to secondary level. Some refer to research, some big further questions, as the Wikipedia definition does versus University as an institution of tertiary education and research, which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Explain that to a Martian.

More recently, there has been a special focus on skills and advanced training needs.

In research, an increasing emphasis on university research being useful.

If one moves from the definition to the history, what seems to be a great strength of universities through the centuries they've been able to evolve and adapt while still staying as the group of entities were referred to as universities. Which possibly explains why the definition is hard to put down but more importantly, gives hope for the future of higher education in this country.

In conclusion, I will let you in on another secret. There is a third part to the genesis of this talk. Soon I will head up to the Chief Commissioner of the permanent ATEC. The documents I will hand over to her or him will be the Accord. But also, this talk. The handover, I will be saying that at its core, the higher education system here is about advanced educational research, associated with it is a set of quite challenging issues.

Think of it not so much as a jigsaw puzzle with the Accord covering a great swathe of the picture in a neat interlocked way, and a box of missing bits that I have discussed tonight, but rather, think of it as core activities with an associated agenda of challenges. Some well articulated with reasonably develop solutions from the Accord, and others needing further work. Indeed, I think some of them will need permanent work because I think they are perennial. Things like red tape and social licence.

To allow the core of higher education, if you like, transmitting knowledge and creating new knowledge, to evolve successfully and flourish, that agenda of challenges needs ongoing work on all of those component challenges, and needs to be done simultaneously by ATEC and the sector more broadly.

Hopefully, ATEC will tick off a lot of things from the challenge list but sometimes extra heft might be needed and there will be a need for another review. A review like the Accord Review or better still, one of the quality of the one chaired by Denise Bradley. Thank you.

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So who am I in this context? As you have heard, I'm the girl next door. The next higher education system reviewer in the sequence. It is an open question as to whether Denise I were the third female Vice Chancellor in this country. She was appointed ahead of me but then took leave and by the time she came to take up the role, I have been appointed Vice Chancellor of Adelaide next door and been in the role for some weeks. So she is the fourth.

On the back of that we were able to explain with particular confidence for the men for the future, and it is particularly troubling.

And the third one in the set was providing scaffolding support for university students from equity backgrounds as they come on to do a university degree.

On funding and contribution arrangements, we found that jobs graduates program need to be fixed, and we recommended changes to HECS-HELP, a great scheme where some egregious problems had crept in.

This is exacerbated at the moment by the relatively low student demand and university determination to grow in size. It is one of the reasons for introducing the new managed growth funding system.

This is something of an open question about whether it is winning or losing the battle for social licence. My sense of the moment, on balance, it is it is losing.

More recently, there has been a special focus on skills and advanced training needs.

In research, an increasing emphasis on university research being useful.

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