Universities Australia has sought to draw a line under its support for the government’s ill-fated plan to deregulate student fees, resuming its long-standing calls for greater public investment in the sector.

The main body representing public universities planned to publish newspaper advertisements on Wednesday that called on the government to “fund our future” because public spending now ranked 24th out of 25 advanced economies as a share of gross domestic product.

The Universities Australia chair, Professor Barney Glover, was due to tell the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday that greater investment in the sector was “pivotal” and the political impasse was “intolerable”.

In speech remarks distributed to media in advance, Glover cited UA-commissioned research by Deloitte Access Economics showing that university education added an estimated $140bn to the productive capacity of the nation last year.

He also laid out eight fundamental principles for the university system, including accessibility, quality, and “sufficient, stable and predictable” resourcing. The speech notes did not mention deregulation directly, but said universities “should be autonomous, self-accrediting institutions with responsibility for their own affairs”.

We are effectively in funding limbo Professor Barney Glover, Universities Australia chair

Glover was also set to emphasise the need for affordability because “cost must not deter any capable student from pursuing a university education”. He was also set to declare a need for policy stability.

“It’s been nearly 18 months since the announcement of possibly the most far-reaching reform proposal in the history of Australian higher education,” his speech notes said.

“The ensuing debate and eventual legislative impasse has effectively left the nation’s third-largest export industry and leading service export without a structural and strategic vision for the coming decades.

“Worse, we are effectively in funding limbo. In the context of the considerable challenges and opportunities I’ve touched on in this address, this kind of instability is simply intolerable.”

Although UA has previously called for an increase in public investment in the sector, the speech represents a change in emphasis.

Last year the peak university body offered its qualified support to the Coalition’s plan to remove limits on student fees as an alternative way to ensure stable long-term extra funding.

UA described fee deregulation as “the logical next step in the evolution of higher education” and wrote to senators urging it to support the legislation, but with changes including reducing the size of the government’s proposed 20% funding cut.

Christopher Pyne’s plan was blocked by the Senate twice and the new education minister, Simon Birmingham, is vowing to consult the sector to find a way forward.

In March 2015, UA’s chief executive, Belinda Robinson, began to signal the need for a rethink. Robinson spoke of the need “to engage more broadly with the general public and bring them into our confidence”.

She told the National Press Club that UA had supported deregulating fees because it wanted to reduce the universities’ “exposure to the consequences of erratic and unpredictable policymaking” and because the existing funding model was not working.

Since Malcolm Turnbull’s ascent to the prime ministership last month, the government has indicated it will review its higher education policy, while the Labor party has released its own policy to increase public funding by $14bn over a decade and encourage increased completion rates.

In his speech on Wednesday, Glover was set to note that Turnbull and the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, had both stressed the importance of innovation. He was hopeful the next election, due in 2016, would be “an optimistic contest of ideas rather than a negative battle of wills and ideologies”.



UA’s pre-election policy blueprint, under the theme “keep it clever”, noted Australia’s public investment in tertiary education of 0.74% in 2011 was well below the OECD average of 1.13%.

It called for investment in a major technology and innovation program; the establishment of an “innovation board” to provide strategic leadership; and the creation of a “student innovation fund” to encourage undergraduate entrepreneurship. UA said Labor’s recently announced policies on start-up finance were “potentially complementary”.

Glover, who is also the vice chancellor of the University of Western Sydney, has been chair of UA since May when he succeeded Professor Sandra Harding from James Cook University.