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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-02-04 Daily Xml
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UNIVERSITIES

Mr O'BRIEN (Napier) (15:48): I am sure no-one disagrees with the proposition of transforming Adelaide into Australia's premier university city which, in the process, will enable the state to play to its strengths in high-end technologies of defence and advanced manufacturing. After all, that is how most successful regional economies have thrived—by driving key industry sectors that do not need big city, big region infrastructure to succeed. Look at Boston. It is not a big city by US standards but it is pre-eminent in the fields of education, medical research and advanced manufacturing, sufficiently so to attract and hold people from across the United States. It is not a bad vision for Adelaide and South Australia—a Boston-style city in the nation's premier wine and food region. Underpin that with a revenue stream flowing from the resources sector, and we have the opportunity to position ourselves as a vibrant, creative and job-rich regional economy attracting people from around Australia.

What is holding us back? We have attracted Carnegie Mellon University from the US with its expertise in public administration and information technology. Cranfield University from the UK has also set up in Adelaide with its pre-eminence in defence technology. The UK-based Royal Institution will be opening an offshoot soon in the old Stock Exchange building to foster science education. The thing that is now holding us back is the apparent lack of desire by our own home-grown universities to work collectively to this end. Our separate stand-alone entities, our three universities—Adelaide, Flinders and UniSA—are minuscule by international standards and small by national standards. A remarkably high rate of degree duplication exists, with law and engineering offered in each of the three universities, medicine in two and most of the generalist qualifications available in all three. All three universities have business schools offering MBAs.

The depth of teaching and research available in larger institutions elsewhere is not available to our students. Without singling out any particular South Australian university, we no longer have a university in the top eight Australian universities. A body of research tends to indicate that university size and consequent resourcing is the key determinant in defining teaching and research outcomes. Put simply, larger universities generally have better outcomes. That is because they have larger departments in areas such as law, medicine, engineering, business, science and the liberal arts. Larger departments can muster greater research efforts and allow greater teaching specialisation.

The obvious solution if Adelaide is to position itself successfully as Australia's university city is for our three home-grown universities to combine in some sense to gain the critical mass necessary to excel on the national and international stage. A formal merger should not be ruled out, but as the recent attempt in Western Australia showed, obstacles real and imaginary can be considerable. The more profitable route is probably that suggested by the Economic Development Board, the so-called systems model, where each of the universities keeps its separate identity under a unifying central administration and governance structure.

With visionary leadership, the necessary unity of purpose would emerge to propel the new South Australian schools in medicine, law, engineering, business and the like to the top of the national merit tree. That model is used in the US in the state public university sector. The University of California, with its 12 campuses, is an exemplary example.

South Australia is faring exceptionally well in attracting foreign students and especially so in the current economic climate in maintaining its foreign student numbers. Education is this state's fourth largest export earner. The result is testament to the ability of our three universities to conjoin their marketing activities through Education Adelaide. However, massive educational changes are afoot in the home countries of many of our visiting students, particularly China and India, and also interstate, particularly with the University of Melbourne. Now is no time for contentment with the status quo, particularly if we wish to move this status to that of Australia's premier university city.

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