Today in Parliament Abigail spoke about the concerning state of corporate governance on university boards and creeping privatisation of universities.
Ms ABIGAIL BOYD (20:14):
On behalf of The Greens I contribute to debate on the Universities Legislation Amendment Bill 2024. My colleague the member for Ballina, Tamara Smith, is The Greens spokesperson for education; however, I understand she was unable to speak on this bill in the other place. I put on record that The Greens appreciate the Minister's accommodation of a discussed amendment to make a lease provision for 21 years rather than 99 years. The Greens support the bill in its current form.
To be frank, this is a minor bill that makes small amendments to the legislation, but it exists in the context of a broader debate about the university sector that has been bubbling at the Federal level. Other members have reflected on where they were in their university days and how things have changed. I have real concerns about the increasing privatisation and reliance on the commercial dollar in public universities. There has been a lack of funding over decades from successive Federal governments. Education is increasingly viewed as a means to an end rather than something with value in itself. Research is also viewed as something that must be saleable and publishable for profit, preferably in partnership with some corporation, rather than done for its own sake. Over just a few decades, universities have become reliant on external rather than public funding to survive. That has created some perverse outcomes.
One area of concern is the state of university boards. There is a growing appetite, perhaps even from this Parliament, to look into the governance of universities. I would be very interested in an inquiry into the corporate governance of certain universities. Vice-chancellors earn millions of dollars. Apparently Bill Shorten is off to earn a million dollars as a university vice-chancellor, which is an extraordinary turn of events. Vice-chancellors are effectively elected by a boards on which it seems the members all elect each other. The parliamentary inquiry into consulting last year did not focus on universities because they are more of a Federal than a State concern, but the number of current partners at consulting firms who are also sitting on university boards is pretty extraordinary. I am bemused that people sit on one or more boards while holding another job. There is a real industry of people who have four or five board memberships. That a partner of a consulting firm could carry that full-time workload and also be an effective member of the board of a major university strikes me as something worth looking into.
I am incredibly concerned by the amount of money that each university expends on consultants and the relationships that they are building with consulting firms. While student fees are going up and there is increasing casualisation and precarity for teachers within the university sector, there is also cronyism on university boards and incredibly inflated salaries for vice‑chancellors. I am sorry to break it to those vice-chancellors, but their salaries are far beyond their value. Nobody is worth that much. It is quite extraordinary to me that those jobs are going to ex-politicians and not to people who have any real experience or skills in managing large institutions. There is definitely something to look at here. This is a minor bit of legislation. But given that we have this overlay of State responsibility for the legislation governing the public universities, I hope that members of this Parliament turn their minds to what the governance of these institutions should look like going forward.