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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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TORRENS UNIVERSITY AUSTRALIA BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 4 July 2013.)

Mr PISONI (Unley) (12:11): I indicate that I will be the lead speaker. The opposition is pleased to support the Torrens University and the establishment of the Laureate International Universities network into Australia. It is our sincere hope that Torrens will flourish in South Australia as it has done around the world, and we feel that it will add to our tertiary education diversity as an attraction for domestic and overseas students, unlike some of the projects that this government has attempted to bring in to South Australia in the past. We remember Cranfield University, which had an answering machine that was managed by the Department of the Premier and Cabinet because it had no students. We also remember Carnegie Mellon, which has taken around $40 million of taxpayers' money.

The Liberal Party is grateful to Laureate for keeping it fully briefed on its plans and progress in establishing in South Australia from the beginning of their negotiations. Laureate Education Asia Ltd is part of the Laureate Education Incorporated global higher education group and received conditional approval from the government of South Australia to establish a university on 17 October 2007, now to be known as the Torrens University Australia.

The transfer of responsibility for universities from state governments to the commonwealth in January 2012 immediately created some key problems for the Torrens University Australia, in the sense that the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency did not recognise greenfield universities. As a consequence of this, registration of the new university by TEQSA was delayed until July 2012. The previous commonwealth government had agreed to amend the act to remove this oversight, but unfortunately was not able to do that before the election. I am sure that it will be an early task of the new government.

Despite this setback, an approval process commenced in 2009. Laureate had persisted with its objectives of establishing a new national university with its head office and some of its educational facilities here in Adelaide. Laureate is the largest global network of universities and institutions of higher education in the world. Currently, it has some 70 institutions, with a total of around 780,000 students in 30 or so countries, over 150 campuses and a global workforce approaching 70,000. It continues to grow rapidly, with particular emphasis on expanding higher education access in Asia and Latin America, and more recently in Africa.

Each university has its own name and individual characteristics. The chairman and CEO of Laureate Education Incorporated is Mr Douglas Becker, and its head office is in Baltimore in the United States. President Clinton is the Honorary Chancellor of Laureate International Universities, and in his role provides advice in areas such as social responsibility, youth leadership and increasing the access to higher education. In President Clinton's own words:

I have had the opportunity to visit several Laureate universities and to speak to students, faculty and communities that they serve. These private universities exemplify the same principles of innovation and social responsibility in education that we worked to advance during my Presidency and now through my Foundation, and I am pleased to support their mission to expand access to higher education, particularly in the developing world.

Of course, we all know that Mr Clinton was a very modest man. Torrens has appointed a well-known Adelaide-based academic, Professor Fred McDougall, as the Vice-Chancellor and is currently recruiting academic and administrative staff. I am informed that a number of members in both houses of the parliament were former students of Professor McDougall. Besides Torrens University Australia, the Blue Mountain International Hotel Management School, ranked as the top hospitality school in the Asia-Pacific region, is also part of the Laureate global network in Australia. Laureate has a 20 per cent interest in THINK Group, the largest private provider of vocational education training and higher education in Australia.

Torrens University began operations in leased facilities in the Torrens building in Victoria Square in January. Its Chancellor is Mr Michael Mann AO, a former distinguished Australian diplomat and President of RMIT University in Vietnam. Two distinguished members of the governing council board include the Hon. Greg Crafter AO and Emeritus Professor Dennis Gibson AO, former Vice-Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology and Chancellor of RMIT University.

Torrens University Australia has also formed the Community Advisory Board. A number of distinguished leaders in this state have joined this board. Laureate have recently entered into an agreement with TAFE SA to cooperate in various areas and support the recent contract awarded to the group to operate a number of new technical colleges in Saudi Arabia by the government of that country. This could grow into a very significant area of business for TAFE SA.

Torrens University Australia will begin enrolling students in January 2014. It will initially offer bachelor degrees on campus in the areas of business, health and design and postgraduate course degrees in these and other fields of study. Laureate is the largest provider of online higher education programs for working adults in the world. Torrens is jointly developing a range of online master's programs with parts of the Laureate network that will be available for working adults across Australia and progressively in the broader Asia-Pacific region.

By the end of 2013, over 20 staff will be employed by Torrens University Australia in Adelaide. The number will grow as the university introduces new degrees and programs, enrols more students and employs academic and professional staff to support its operations. This team is supported by highly experienced staff in higher education around the globe and in other Laureate institutions and support units.

Torrens University Australia seeks to offer a different education experience to that available at other universities in this state, and indeed in Australia. It will operate on a trimester system, meaning that the typical bachelor degree of three years duration can be completed in just two years. All undergraduate students will be expected to spend a trimester studying at another Laureate institution and also complete an internship program in business, government or a professional organisation. Teaching will be organised around small classes of 20 to 25 students with a strong focus on students and preparing them for their future employment and careers.

The mission of Torrens University Australia is to be a distinctive higher education institution that enables its students, graduates and staff to make positive social, economic and cultural contributions to the societies in which they live and work by creating an environment of learning, scholarship and research that is culturally diverse, career-orientated and with distinct global perspective. Laureate seeks to make high quality tertiary education both accessible and affordable. The international outlook of Laureate prepares their students for a global marketplace.

Besides the teaching activities, Torrens University Australia staff will also be active researchers, with a focus on topics that support its mission. The university has made its first senior academic appointment with the appointment of Professor Barry Burgan, the chair in business and in the position of academic director. Professor Burgan recently completed a seven-year term as the head of the University of Adelaide's Business School. It is hoped that the Liberal Party and the federal and state governments will facilitate the establishment and operations of Torrens University and that neither they nor their agencies allow any bureaucratic hurdles to get in its way.

The Hon. R.B. SUCH (Fisher) (12:20): I support this bill, but I will take this opportunity to say something about the university sector in South Australia. Unfortunately, we do not often canvass the university sector in this place, and we should, because universities are very important institutions, not only because they employ a lot of people but also because of their role, obviously, in education and training.

We have the long-established universities of Adelaide, Flinders and South Australia. I know in the past, when private universities or other universities have been encouraged to set up here, there has been some concern that it would be at the expense of those existing longstanding universities. I do not believe that should occur. I think the more opportunity for people to study and train the better.

I think we need to remember what the main function of universities is. The fundamental role of universities is to search for truth, and they should never deviate from that path. A lot of people get confused in looking at education and training, and they are not the same thing. They are often interlinked, but they are not the same thing. You can train someone to pull levers, say, but that does not necessarily make that person an educated person.

We keep coming back to this issue of whether or not the three traditional longstanding universities here should continue as separate entities. That is only partially true, because the three of them now cooperate in a lot of areas, and I think that should be encouraged. If we are not going to have one large university, then at least make sure that the three universities cooperate in regard to course offerings and other areas. Certainly, in administration, they could no doubt cooperate more.

One thing that has happened to our universities over time is that they have become squeezed in relation to finances. That is unfortunate, because I benefitted from studying at university as a result of the Whitlam era, having left school to work as a farm worker at the age of 14. A farm worker is a fancy name for a farm labourer. I was able to come back through the system and eventually I graduated from each of the three universities.

I am very passionate about giving people the opportunity to study at a university, TAFE or wherever to the fullest possible extent of their capability and ability. I do not want to see a situation where people are denied access to higher education when they have the necessary entry requirements. In my first year at Flinders I was living off savings and ended the year hay carting down in the South-East, which was quite an experience. He was a grumpy farmer. Most farmers are not grumpy—

Mr Venning: Hear, hear!

The Hon. R.B. SUCH: There are some exceptions. When I finished the year before I went down the South-East, I think I had a dollar in my pocket, but I managed to get a scholarship and went on from there. I ended up doing eight years of part-time study at university and eight years full-time, and then training teachers, designers and other people like that at university for 17 years. So, I am very passionate about this sector.

What we have seen in recent times, sadly, is a decline in the quality of what is offered in some courses by virtue of the fact that the class sizes have become rather large. That is not so in all universities; some have stuck to a fairly strict tutorial size. When I went to Flinders Uni—which is a long time ago—we knew a lot of the staff. In fact, the professors used to have barbecues on weekends with the staff.

Those days are gone, sadly, but we had tutorials with about 15 students at the most. The lectures were usually 40 or 50 or sometimes a bit smaller but now, at some of the lectures at some of our universities, you are looking at potentially hundreds of students and so-called tutorials with 30 or 40 students. They are not tutorials. They should call them something else.

We have seen a big move to online delivery and electronic delivery and there is a place for that, but there is no substitute for the personal, human growth by interaction face to face. You can study online as much as you like, but you are not going to get the same enrichment and experience as if you are dealing with people face to face, whether it is arguing in a tutorial with real people or in extracurricular activities, which I am sure many members in here engaged in at university. I think we have to be careful that we do not end up simply having an electronic offering because it is cheaper, because you will short-change students in the process.

We have made it a lot harder for people to study at universities. When I say 'we', I mean governments over time. I have never been a supporter of HECS, not in its current format. I believe you should pay back your cost of education according to the income you earn when you graduate. If you end up becoming a highly-paid lawyer—and there are some of them around; there are some not so highly paid—then you pay more than if you become a social worker. I think that is the fairest system.

Currently I do not know the exact figure but I think it runs into the billions owed to the HECS scheme anyway, because people do not pay it or have not paid it or are delaying the payment. As a nation, there is an obligation to allow anyone with a potential to study at a higher level to do so, whether it is at a university or TAFE. I am not against some sort of financial assistance. I am not opposed to paying back for the benefit of a higher education but I do not believe the current HECS scheme is the ideal model.

There has always been an interesting relationship in our universities between teaching and research. Usually, the teaching side gets less kudos than the research side which is unfortunate because unless you have good research, you will not have good teaching and vice versa. However, in the popularity stakes, there is more emphasis on the researchers than on the teachers and the lecturers. I think now the staff in universities really have to put in. I am not saying they never did in the past, but I think they have to put in a lot of hard work at the moment dealing with large numbers of students and often very tight budgets.

The introduction of another university is good. At the end of the day, universities live or die by their reputation. Here in Australia, people are a bit simplistic in judging. If someone says they have a degree, people just take it at face value. In the United States they look to see where you got the degree. Was it from Harvard or the Southern Louisiana Knitting School? They differentiate in the United States—

Ms Bedford: What's wrong with Louisiana and knitting?

The Hon. R.B. SUCH: I digress for a minute. I just spoke to the Knitwit group at Aberfoyle Park following the member for Reynell raising it. We have some highly capable, community-minded Knitwits out there. In the United States the emphasis is on which university you went to, rather than what degree you have, necessarily.

Here people are very simplistic and we see the system abused in some of the universities dishing out honorary doctorates and people then using them for employment purposes and other inappropriate uses. That is not what they are meant to do. An honorary doctorate is not meant to be used outside university-type activities.

People need to have a look at the history of it, because it has become an endorsement for getting, often, political favours or trying to curry favour with particular sections of the community. What that does over time (the same as what has happened with PhDs in some instances) is devalue the award, so it becomes, in my terminology, Mickey Mouse. We have to be very careful that universities do not devalue what they offer, because at the end of the day it will come back and bite them because people will know that it is not worth, literally, the paper it is written on.

Universities have to maintain proper standards. We have seen efforts, and I believe the incoming federal government will move to tighten standards for people entering the teaching profession. For a long time it has been an easy option, which is in contrast to years ago when some of our best scholars, who wanted to go into teaching, were the top scholars in schools. That is a reflection of the devaluing of the teaching profession, which is sad and unfortunate, because teaching should be valued as probably the most important profession. It is the mother profession.

The other thing—and we see this in the way universities market things—is double degrees. Well, they are not really two degrees; they are usually a combination (a bit like a Chinese restaurant) of two incomplete degrees. We are also seeing, for example, in medicine that they have scaled back the amount of anatomy that is taught now. I raised this with a medical specialist, and he said that it might be alright for a GP who needs a general idea of where your heart is, but as a surgeon—and I am talking about the top people in Adelaide—they have to know where every nerve is, every organ, in detail.

I heard the member for Unley suggest that people should be able to do a quick degree at Torrens University. I hope, if it is fast, it is still of quality. This tendency, which we are seeing in the technical area, of trying to train people in five minutes has a risk in that if you do not put in the hard yards and the detailed work you will end up with second-rate not only tradespeople in the technical area, but also second-rate people coming out of university. We are seeing that trend now because of the cost pressures on universities, where you can now become a medico, or something like that, pretty quickly, building on an existing degree which has very little to do with medicine, for example.

I welcome the introduction of the Torrens University. I do not think the established universities here—the big three—have anything to fear. If this new opportunity is available for more people to get a tertiary education then I am all for it. I would encourage the government, state and federal, to assist students to participate in a tertiary education irrespective of their financial circumstances or their family's economic position.

The Hon. G. PORTOLESI (Hartley—Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy) (12:33): I would like to thank the member for Unley and the member for Fisher for their comments and for their support. To recap, the successful passage of this bill through parliament will be a statement of support for Torrens University and its operations in South Australia. Torrens University Australia is a private Australian university. It is a Laureate International Universities network member and has been fully underwritten by LEI Higher Education Holdings Pty Ltd. No state government financial assistance has been provided to Torrens University to establish operations in South Australia.

Torrens University is advanced in establishing its operations in Adelaide. Enrolments for its first accredited program of study, the Bachelor of Commerce, were opened in June 2013 and teaching will begin in 2014, I am advised. In addition, the university will offer coursework degrees in management and commerce and health and education by January 2014. Torrens University is also planning to offer a Masters in Business Administration in January 2014 along with higher degree by research programs including Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy in the fields of management and commerce and health and education later in 2014. That concludes my comments on the bill. I will address any further questions in committee.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading

The Hon. G. PORTOLESI (Hartley—Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy) (12:35): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.

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