Page 975 - Week 03 - Thursday, 3 April 2008
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both ANU and UC for their starting salaries. Both ANU and UC get four stars for student-staff ratios. UC scores the top ranking in the guide for graduate employment prospects, and it is the fifth successive year for which it has had this ranking. UC is one of only four universities which scores top marks for having the best paid and most employable graduates.
The University of Canberra’s strategic plan for 2008-12 was only approved late last year. It is a fresh document which contains frank recognition of the challenges faced by the university. It will be up to the minister to keep an eye on how these challenges are being met. It clearly recognises the many advantages enjoyed by the institution and it sets out strategies to strengthen UC’s capabilities and competitiveness. The campus has always had a strong vocational focus to its work, and its excellence is well recognised locally among commonwealth government departments who send their officials to UC to obtain skills and advanced education that complement their work in public administration. I had that opportunity as a graduate in the former Department of Transport and Regional Services.
The broader Bruce precinct is a centre for innovation and research, and UC is well geared towards collaborative and commercial ventures. I am very interested in working with UC to see how the ACT government can do more to assist the university to grow, to enhance its reputation and to attract more students from interstate and abroad. The campus is on a very large plot of land and there is significant scope for UC to accommodate greater teaching and research facilities, as well as a growing student population housed on campus. I think this would be a positive for the university. Certainly, one of the great things about the ANU at the moment is the genuine sense of community.
It is worth examining the financial problems. There will be a deficit reported in 2007 of around $15.9 million, which, as a headline figure, is certainly a concern. Mr Mulcahy did not go into some of the details. I think Mr Stanhope touched on them but I would like to go into them as well. In previous years, the ratio of administrative staff to academic staff was higher than the sector average, especially considering it was a single-campus university. University management assessed that there needed to be redundancies, and I understand that some $4.7 million of the deficit in 2007 is explained by voluntary separation packages.
The Assembly should note that the reduction in administrators will mean more money for teaching and research in this calendar year. The voluntary separations were not supported by the National Tertiary Education Union. They argued that a recruitment freeze could achieve the same result. But the UC branch secretary, Greg Barrett, did acknowledge last year that these changes had been quite well implemented.
The redundancies are not the only factor behind the deficit that are of a one-off nature. A further $2.7 million relates to bad and doubtful debts from earlier years. The largest component of the deficit, $7.3 million in repayments to the commonwealth covering two years of liabilities, was accrued in 2007 to improve the position of the university going forward.
When you look particularly at that $2.7 million in bad and doubtful debts from earlier years, I think the government does need to take its share of responsibility for that. The
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