If you are ever asked to chair a government inquiry (and with the Rudd Government's seemingly inexhaustible appetite for reviews, you just never know when that magical phone call might come through), here are a few handy hints.
First, make sure that your terms of reference enable you to find out what the Government thinks it needs to know. Second, ensure that you get plenty of submissions. You will, of course, ignore most of them, but their presence gives your report legitimacy.
Third (and this is most important), do not, on any account, acknowledge in your report that the issues with which you are dealing have ever been inquired into before or indeed have ever been subject to public policy of any kind.
And if you do mention previous reports, make sure you never mention what, if anything, was done about them. Your duty is not to learn from the past. It is to find fault with the present, in a way that is likely to generate politically attractive options for the government. Finally, if you run out of inspiration, recommend a new council, commission or coordinating body to fix everything up.
These maxims are well-exemplified in the reports of two recent inquiries: the Bradley Review of Higher Education, released late last year and broadly endorsed by Minister Julia Gillard in a series of speeches in March, and the Cutler Review of the National Innovation System, released in September last year, and favourably received by Minister Kim Carr.
How much of either report is ever implemented is, of course, another matter. With the budgetary situation as it is, the Government is likely to cherry-pick each document for recommendations that suit its immediate fiscal objectives, and leave the rest to a later date.
Of the two, the Cutler review seems less intent on ignoring the past. But the effect is one of de{aac}ja vu, rather than a real engagement with the underlying causes of our difficulties.
How many inquiries over the years have found that, in world terms, Australia does not do that much research and development? How many have found that businesses lack venture capital? How many have found that small businesses struggle to keep up with technology? How many have found that governments do not do as much as they might to stimulate innovation?
The Cutler Review finds much the same causes for disappointment as its predecessors, with one significant difference. Previous studies drew attention to the importance of public sector research to Australia. All that has happened in 20 years is that successive policies, by pushing the public sector into undertaking commercial roles, have undermined what was once Australia's one claim to fame the extent of its public research infrastructure.
The review urges more funding, but does not make too much of the point, perhaps because the damage started in the Hawke-Keating years.
Similarly, in reading the Bradley review, you would never think that the Australian university sector had ever been inquired into before, still less that it bears the imprint of more than 30 years of federal government policy making.
For Bradley, it is as though the universities have no past what matters is the kind of stylised critique that gives rise to recommendations. And what recommendations.
For connoisseurs of policy potpourri, the Bradley review has it all. For those who like targets, the review proposes a particularly hearty one: 40 per cent of Australians in the 25-34 age group to have a bachelor's degree by 2020.
For those who like markets, there is substantial deregulation: by 2012, funding is to follow student demand, and universities will be able to enrol as many students as they can attract into their courses.
For those who like regulation, there will be a system of national accreditation for all universities, administered by a new regulatory and quality agency.
For those who like negotiated arrangements, there is a requirement that each university will enter into a compact with government, in which it sets out what it expects to achieve in key areas. And for those who like cooperation, there is an emphasis on improved flow-through from TAFE to the university sector.
No one appears to have asked how all this (if it is ever implemented) is supposed to fit together. For the universities, the sensation will be a bit like being force-fed and strangled at the same time. On the one hand, if the Government's incentives work, there will be many additional students wanting places. On the other, the level of funding per student is likely to be too low to fund the staff and support services that will be needed if quality is not to be compromised.
We know that every review feels obliged to recommend more of what it is supposed to be reviewing. Yet I have not noticed employers saying that we need more people with bachelor's degrees.
What they say, repeatedly, is that while the possession of a bachelor's degree usually (although not always) delivers technical knowledge, it does not mean that the person concerned has the skills to function effectively in the workplace. When asked what these skills are, they invariably talk about communication and teamwork.
In other words, they want people who can read and write properly, and converse effectively with others. If the education system is falling down in these respects, we need to think carefully about its overall performance, rather than expanding the tertiary part of it.
It is true that there are shortages of people in a number of professions (medicine being the most notable) where university training is most certainly required. But what we need, surely, is a close look at all our systems for delivering people with professional qualifications.
There has been so much paring back of the public sector over the past 20 years that many of the traditional training partners (public hospitals, for example) have found it difficult to keep up with the numbers of existing graduates. Why is it so difficult for politicians and their advisers to understand that adding (or cutting) one part of a system creates imbalances elsewhere, which can take years to address?
As for innovation, this is a word that has become so over-used as to be almost meaningless. There is little innovation without a proper understanding of the past. If the past tends to suggest that many of our problems might be a bit more subtle in their origins and a bit more difficult to fix than the present agenda-setters are prepared to let on, then so be it. Such a realisation might just be the beginnings of some real evidence-based policy.
Dr Jenny Stewart is associate professor of public policy at the University of Canberra.
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