Julia Gillard's government gets easily distracted. The big issues for her this week have been things like gay marriage, sport on television and the national broadband network. Only one of them could lay claim to having any long-term significance to the nation.
In 2011 the Gillard government could try a new strategy. For a start it could stop taking the Greens so seriously. Yes, the Prime Minister needs Green support, but that doesn't mean she has to be in complete thrall to them. Realistically there's only one side in Parliament the Greens would ever support, and Gillard and her caucus should understand that.
Next, the government could try focusing on things it generally considers important. Like education.
An immediate priority is to address the overseas students crisis. A medium-term priority is to overcome the heavyhanded regulation of the country's universities.
Australia has a high-skill and high-wage economy. Selling education services is exactly the sort of industry that we should be involved in. It's also something we're pretty good at. Education is the country's fourth-largest export earner after iron ore, coal and gold. About 20 per cent of students enrolled at Australian universities are from overseas.
Yet in an effort to eliminate the abuse of the system by overseas students more intent on getting Australian residency than an education, the federal government has dramatically tightened the regulations applying to all higher education institutions. It's an example of the ''one-size-fits-all'' regulation that Canberra is so fond of.
The problem is that the government is treating the country's elite universities in the same way as a hairdressing academy with a dozen ''students'' operating in the back room of a fast-food restaurant.
The situation has been made worse by the high exchange rate and the internationally publicised physical assaults on overseas students.
The result is predictable. Monash University's vice-chancellor reckons a $17 billion industry could be halved. Some universities will experience over the next few years a education in their total revenue of up to 30 per cent.
Australia is one of the few developed countries in which more than half of all funding for tertiary institutions comes from private sources. This is a good thing. But the government can't demand that universities become more self-sufficient while stopping universities from generating their own funding.
The fact that Australian citizens are not allowed to purchase from Australian universities the same product that foreign citizens can buy must be one of the most bizarre forms of discrimination an Australian government has ever enacted.
Overseas students can invest in their own education by paying full fees for an undergraduate course at an Australian university, but because of ''equity considerations'' Australian students cannot.
Ministers and administrators can't resist the idea that more university regulation produces better research and teaching. University bureaucracy verges on the Kafkaesque, according to James Allan, a law professor at the University of Queensland. Here's an example.
In an effort to assess ''research quality'', the Australian Research Council (ARC) measures the success of law school staff at getting their work published in academic journals.
The journals are ranked, with publication in the most prestigious journals indicating better quality research. According to the ARC, publication in the Griffith Law Review or the University of NSW Law Review is of the same status as being published in the Harvard Law Review. As good as our two local law journals might be, they ain't no Harvard Law Review.
As Allan says, ''no one outside Australia would treat the list as anything other than a joke, and most Australians would too''.
The ARC won't disclose who drew up the list or how they were selected.
Another measure of success for academics is now how good they are at getting government grants.
So according to that classic axiom of ''what gets measured gets done'', we're going to end up with a generation of university academics who are very good at getting government grants.
As we know, because she has continually told us so, the Prime Minister regards education as a priority and far more interesting than foreign policy. Here's the opportunity to make a real difference, and fix some problems that (for a change) are not entirely of her own making.
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