A “vicious circle” of red tape is making paperwork the “primary focus” of Australian universities and sidelining staff from teaching and research, a Senate committee has heard.
Western Sydney University (WSU) said a “thicket” of about 330 separate regulatory instruments, many of them “past the use-by date” or “questionable in the first place”, was diverting an “enormous amount” of universities’ resources into “ticking boxes”.
Vice-chancellor George Williams said his university wanted to devote 45 per cent of staff to teaching and research, up from a current level of 39 per cent, but would need “partners in government” to “help us streamline” the compliance obligations.
“I’ve set up a red tape task force to cut through as much of this as possible internally…but there’s a limit to what we can do,” Williams told a hearing of the Education and Employment Committee’s inquiry into university governance on 8 September. “I don’t want to downplay the critical role our professional staff do, but too often they are doing things that aren’t of high value because they need to for compliance reasons.”
He cited the 2020 foreign arrangements scheme, which requires state and territory entities – including universities – to notify the foreign affairs minister of their agreements with foreign governments or institutions.
While the minister has veto powers over arrangements found to adversely affect Australia’s foreign relations, this has happened on just four occasions – none involving universities – even though agreements involving universities constitute the majority of the 18,000-plus arrangements notified to the scheme since its inception in 2021. ?
A on the scheme, released on 1 September, found that Monash University alone had notified more than 3,000 agreements to the scheme and assessed another 23,000 to determine whether notification was warranted.?Universities had assigned multiple staff to manage their obligations under the scheme.
Reviewer Rosemary Huxtable made 23 recommendations to reduce notifications – particularly of “low-risk” agreements – and administrative overheads. She cited university concerns that the “multiple layers of scrutiny from government” were increasing the “underlying risk” of foreign deals because staff did not have time to “understand the substance of the issues”.
“University arrangements are already subject to significant government scrutiny under other legislative and non-legislative frameworks such as the FITS [Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme], UFIT [University Foreign Interference Taskforce] and the Defence Trade Controls Act,” Huxtable noted.
WSU chancellor Jennifer Westacott said her university had “a very clear objective” to boost academic ranks. “But you can’t if you’re spending a lot of time just doing compliance.
“It also means that boards and subcommittees are focused on…multiple compliance issues versus what we need to be spending more time on, [like] how we improve student success.”
“Blurred lines of accountability” exacerbate the problem, she said. “People ask for similar data in slightly different ways, and…that takes another half-day of someone’s work. We need to be able to produce one report for many masters, if you will.”
Westacott said incompatible state and federal regulations undermined the “interoperability” between universities and TAFEs, their vocational equivalents. “[Students] ought to be able to do a vocational subject and have that accredited as part of their university qualification. We can do that, but…TAFE can’t accredit their own qualifications.”
Williams said “incoherent regulation” between the commonwealth and states was stymieing the government’s aspiration for a joined-up tertiary sector. “We need…clear pathways for students from TAFE into university and vice versa, but the regulatory scheme puts enormous barriers in the way of students.
“It’s not lost on me, the irony of a Senate committee looking at governance controlled by state legislation.”
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