[LINK] Australian 2022/23 Budget Lacks Funding for More Flexible Telecommunications and Education Options

Tom Worthington tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Thu Oct 27 09:13:51 AEDT 2022


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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