The Australian | 13 October 2012
Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven thinks it now implausible that the higher education regulator TEQSA and the vocational training regulator ASQA will be combined because of the fundamentally different natures of the two sectors.
TEQSA and ASQA were developed in “close consultation and, following their establishment in July last year, the two signed a memorandum of understanding and issued a joint communiqué on the regulation of dual-sector providers.
The perception that the two regulators might merge any time soon was hosed down last month by Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans:
My objective is to get them both up and running and properly managing a risk-driven role – not over-regulating, but dealing with the risks. I think they’re moving more in that direction now as they build capacity. But the discussion about having one regulator – I’m not up for that at the moment. Life’s too short.
Craven said a university is one of the “basic constitutional institutions without which civil society does not operate”, alongside the free press and politically neutral armed forces.
If you want universities to be independent, intellectual bullets of civil society, you can’t regulate them in the same way as other institutional bodies The existence of a free intellectual sector in society, irritatingly independent and capable of randomly turning on any government if it thinks its ideas are wrong, is a fundamental part of our constitutional system. That is a basic difference between universities and TAFEs. t’s incredibly important that TAFEs equip Australia with the productivity that we need, but they do not discharge a high constitutional function of intellectual freedom.
He also said a revamped Universities Commission, which he has been proposing, could help set the high-level policy directions of vocational training as well as higher education.
