Page 3345 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 22 September 2015
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Fifth, while time is short, patience must always be long. Setbacks, delays, and criticisms are inevitable and Penn experienced its share of all these things.
They had a few debacles in their development. The book talks particularly about an incident where they tried to develop a theorem and it did not quite work out. But it is about the role that the university and the higher education facilities play not just in our community but in all communities. And they are very, very important.
One only has to look at the stats. Higher education export income to the ACT is $409 million, as reported on 15 June. Three per cent of all students enrolled in university in Australia attended a university in the ACT. That is an impressive figure given the ACT only makes up 1.7 per cent of the country’s total population. The overall stats show 39,313 university students are at the ANU, with 22,393 students or 27 per cent from overseas. UC has 16,920 students, with 22 per cent from overseas. And that is not counting interstate universities with campuses in our city: the University of New South Wales at ADFA with 2,685 students, the Australian Catholic University with over 1,000 students and the Charles Sturt University.
Then there are the economic benefits. Just looking at ANU and UC, according to a Deloitte Access Economics report, the two institutions contributed over $1.7 billion to our local economy in 2012. That is almost five per cent of the economy’s size. One in nine Canberra residents is either a staff member or a student at these universities. Both universities educated approximately 10,000 foreign students and 10,500 interstate students, earning $351 million, and created about 2,450 FTE jobs. This is on top of the 11,500 FTE jobs making up about seven per cent of the total ACT workforce. So it goes on. The two universities contributed about 12.6 per cent to the ACT through their payroll tax alone in 2012, paying almost $41 million. I think we need to acknowledge their role. We certainly need to be able to bolster it. But we also certainly need to be able to call them again if we have concerns.
I take the remaining moments I have to speak about concerns I have about the School of Music, the future of the School of Arts and the future of dramatic arts education at the Australian National University. It would be an understatement to say that the School of Music at the Australian National University has had a period of turmoil over the last four or five years. The recent removal of the head of the school I think is a very, very sad and retrograde step. I understand there are rumours that at least another six of the academic community there have now resigned also. We are seeing an enormous turnover following an enormous turnover. That would indicate that there is something wrong.
Peter Tregear was brought in with a promise of an agenda of reform to build the school back up. All of the contemporary literature on the importance of music in society, let alone the importance of music in education, is quite clear: music brings us enormous benefits. Mark Latham, commenting on opera and classical music, said that it is the field of the rich. It is not. Music is in every feature film, it is in every ad, it is in every TV show. There is music everywhere.
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