The 2022/23 Australian Federal Budget Papers are available online: Here
are some items of interest on information technology and higher education.
IT Items
The big ticket items for IT are $2.4B for NBN Co fibre to 1.5 million
premises, and $757.7M for rural mobile and broadband. What this lacks is
a strategy to incorporate new options, such as low earth orbit satellite
access to small fixed locations, and direct to mobile phones. Also
lacking is a way to encourage, or require telcos to share mobile
infrastructure in regional and remote areas, for more coverage, at lower
cost.
The big ticket items for education are $921.7M for 480,000 fee‑free
vocational education and training (VET) students, and $485.5M for 20,000
extra university places. The university funds will be targeted at First
Nations, first in family, rural and remote students to do teaching,
nursing, engineering, and other priority courses. The VET places will
target jobs and regions in need, but there is no mention of priority for
disadvantaged groups, as there is for the university places. That is
unfortunate as VET is a good first step to higher education.
One small program of interest is the $15.4M Startup Year, with 2,000
loans for recent graduates, postgraduate and final year undergraduate
students per year. The students will do a one‑year accelerator program
at a university.
I could find no mention of micro-credentials, or other more flexible
forms of education in the budget. This lack of flexibility will continue
to be a barrier for students from disadvantaged groups. It is all very
well to be offered a place in a university, but if this is 1,000 km from
home, because the university has cancelled the online study option
introduced during COVID-19, then many rural and remote students will
have difficulty attending. This also applies to those who cannot leave
their job, children, aged parents, or cultural commitments, to study
full time for years, to get a qualification. We need policies, and
incentives, which see universities introducing the sort of flexibility,
for short, part time, online courses, already in place in the VET sector.
Also there does not appear to be any funding to support Australia's
international education industry, which faces threats from technological
change, and geopolitical tensions. In 2016 I warned Australian
universities to be ready to teach online, in case geopolitical tensions
kept international students outside Australia. That didn't happen, but
COVID-19 showed what could still happen to Australian education, if
there is a military confrontation in our part of the world, with no
warning, which stops students attending Australian campuses.
--
Tom Worthington, http://www.tomw.net.au
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