Australian Politics
Universities waste a fortune on consultants. When will they learn?
Jenna Price, writing below, lets her hostility to business apear but she is broadly right. Universities are a unique institution and need their own rules. I personally see little wrong with the original model where a university was entirely run by its senior teaching staff
My refugee parents were obsessed with education to both protect and embolden me. Mum, mother of the naughtiest girl in the school, was relieved when I graduated. At universities in those days, you actually had permission to talk in class. It was powerful and transformative.
That’s not what’s happening now. Universities are now online assembly lines where interrupting wildly is nearly impossible, and the atmosphere is more likely to be lagging from our unpredictable internet connections than anything else. Staff aren’t paid properly. Class sizes grow. Student satisfaction has plummeted.
How did we get to this? Sherryn Groch, writing for this masthead, reveals a disturbing pattern – Australian universities are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year hiring consultants, including from scandal-drenched PwC.
Groch listed wage theft and cruel – often involuntary – redundancies, but there’s more to add to the list. Education, the experience of connection and of intellectual intimacy are being stolen from this generation. Young people have never paid so much for so little.
In the meantime, the consultants –and those who hire them – go about their business with no concern for the ethical aspects of what they are doing. Every single researcher at a university has to complete ethics approval. I doubt consultants would get to first base with such a requirement. The PwC revelations show us we should have trust issues with consultants.
How have they come to dominate the culture of higher education? Just look who is on the councils of these institutions. Academics for Public Universities say there has been a dramatic shift and now barely a third have expertise in the sector. Councils are crammed with big business types and the culture trickles down to vice chancellors and on to deans.
One academic staff member tells me she has to explain to other council members that teaching university students is not like working in a factory. Yes, you might be lucky to get a vice chancellor who can persuade a bunch of profit-hunters that universities are about something higher than money. Staff representatives can’t stand up for everyone on their own.
Business loves cutting costs and restructures. Are those the values we should bring to our future – our teachers, nurses and doctors, engineers, computer scientists, sociologists and lawyers?
In 2017, a consultant interviewed me at a Sydney cafe about the faculty in which I worked. Too noisy to record, she took desultory notes. The experience of my colleagues in that review was pretty similar, although one told me, she instructed her interviewer: “Write this down.”
I asked questions, she already had answers. My trust in the process disappeared entirely. The “strategic assessment” cost the university many thousands of dollars and ended with a document that generative AI could have written if you’d put the words visionary, mission statement and “do better with less” into its prompt.
A few years later, the whole process happened all over again. This time it was a bunch of international academics who had as much understanding of the Australian job market (or, indeed, Australian universities) as I had about herrings.
At Deakin, consultants delivered a course on change management and leadership. Jill Blackmore, Alfred Deakin professor of education and president of the Australian Association of University Professors, who sat in on the course, said: “Worst course I’ve ever been in, and we paid for it. It did not understand what leadership in a university was all about.”
Just now, at a university near you, a consultant has been called in to investigate the use of offices. The academics have said, repeatedly, hot-desking and open-plan offices might be OK if you didn’t have to deal with sobbing students and more recently, sobbing colleagues. After two years of consultations, enthusiasm has cooled and the report is shelved. Money for nothing.
Look, every organisation, be it universities, hospitals, telcos, or banks, needs to have reality checks. But let’s engage experts who think about the national good and not the bottom line.
The nation’s 10 top-ranked universities alone spent at least $249 million on consultancies last year, more than they spent before the pandemic.
Universities spend money on consultants instead of education. Every teaching academic I know has had to defend paying casual staff – those running tutorials – to attend lectures. I once had to do an entire cost proposal which took me hours for the sheer bloody-mindedness of my then-boss – at the same time, we were wasting money on consultants.
The University of Melbourne’s Michael Wesley, author of the new book Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life, knows we have a problem. We hire people from the corporate sector, and they lose their minds at what they see as waste.
“But as my boss points out (Duncan Maskell who last week called for free higher education), we are a not-for-profit organisation ... [the] ruthless pursuit of shareholder value is utterly alien to the university. The corporatisation of [Australian] universities is almost unique in the world.”
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UQ rises in world university rankings
As I have a degree from there, I rather like this report. QS is one of several university rating systems. It is a private organization that was founded by Nunzio Quacquarelli in 1990 to provide information and advice to students looking to study abroad. It has become widely read. The Leiden rankings are the most objective so it is pleasing that they rate UQ even more highly than QS does
The University of Queensland has jumped seven places to be ranked 43 in the world in the QS World University Rankings for 2024.
UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry said the results place the University in the top three per cent of the 1,500 universities ranked.
“Our achievement in these important global rankings is a testament to the impact of our teaching, research and innovation across a range of fields, to help solve some of the most pressing challenges facing the world,” Professor Terry said.
“UQ’s network of more than 430 international research partnerships, includes the recently announced collaboration with Emory University to accelerate vaccine discovery and development.
"The Global Bioeconomy Alliance with the Technical University of Munich and Sao Paulo State University is another great example of our globally significant cooperation.”
The QS World University Rankings for 2024 measure a university’s performance across indicators including Research and Discovery, Global Engagement, Learning Experience, Employability and Sustainability.
“UQ consistently ranks in the world’s top 50 universities and this reflects what is an unwavering commitment to teaching excellence and delivering positive learning outcomes for our students,” Professor Terry said.
“We know UQ graduates are sought after by industry and business, and engagement with these sectors is critical to shape our programs, connect students to the workforce and equip them with skills that make them relevant now and into the future.”
In the 2023 Nature Index based on research outputs in prestigious journals in the previous year, UQ was second in Australia.
In the CWTS Leiden Ranking 2023, UQ was ranked 35 in the world and third in Australia overall, and was the top rated university in Australia in the field of Life and Earth Sciences and sixth in the world.
The Leiden ranking measures the scientific performance of more than 1,400 universities worldwide.
https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2023/06/uq-rises-world-university-rankings
*************************************************Queensland's insanely expensive pumped hydro plans
With desperately underfunded hospitals, police, schools and roads, this is gross
The Queensland government surprised many when it announced last year that the state would construct two new pumped hydro schemes, dwarfing the troubled Snowy Hydro 2.0 project in NSW.
At the core of the Energy and Jobs Plan, announced in September 2022 by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, is a commitment to turn off coal-fired power stations by 2035.
By the same year, Queensland would be running on 80 per cent renewable energy thanks to dozens of new solar and wind farms that would traverse the state.
To meet that target, the state needs a ready supply of stored power to draw upon when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing — enough to power the state for hours at a time.
That is where pumped hydro comes in as a large-scale storage option.
What is pumped hydro?
Pumped hydro works similarly to big batteries, filling in supply gaps when the grid needs a top-up of electricity.
The design involves two dams built at differing elevations, connected by a tunnel, with transmission lines then connecting it to the grid.
When there is plenty of sun and wind to power the grid, energy is in high supply, so water is pumped to the upper reservoir using surplus electricity.
When the sun goes down or there is no wind, water is released to the lower dam through the tunnel, generating electricity as it passes through a turbine.
That electricity is then injected into the grid via high-voltage transmission lines.
The debate
The criticism is broadly two-fold: firstly, that pumped hydro comes at a monumental cost and is being outpaced by other technologies (namely batteries), and secondly, that Australia simply does not have the workforce needed to construct such huge pieces of infrastructure by 2035.
The Energy and Jobs Plan proposed a 2-gigawatt pumped hydro scheme at Borumba Dam — west of Gympie — and another much larger plant called Pioneer-Burdekin, approximately 1,000 kilometres north of Brisbane, west of Mackay, offering an unprecedented 5 gigawatts.
The government has promised that the 2GW Borumba project would store enough energy to power 2 million homes continuously for 24 hours.
If constructed, the 5GW Pioneer-Burdekin project would be the largest energy storage (PHES) in the world.
Currently, the largest PHES schemes are in China and the United States, with plants of around 3 gigawatts each.
Pumped hydro is also expensive. The cost and delivery time frame for the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme bears little resemblance to what was originally announced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.
It was estimated to cost around $2 billion, not including power lines, and to be completed by 2021. Now, it is expected by December 2029 at a total estimated cost of $10 billion.
New transmission lines
The sheer amount of energy that will be stored in each of Queensland's pumped hydro centres means that new high-voltage transmission lines need to be built, replacing the current mostly 275kV lines that connect the grid.
Powerlink, the state-owned company that constructs and manages the transmission lines, estimates the new 500kV lines will cost $6-8 million per kilometre and will become the backbone of a new "super grid" that will connect the state's renewable energy network.
The company announced a compensation scheme for those that will be impacted by the new transmission lines surrounding Borumba at meetings and via letters earlier this year.
Powerlink CEO Paul Simshauser said the route had been designed to run through as much state-owned land as possible, but that some impacts on landholders were unavoidable.
"We've come up with what we think is the lowest-cost solution for Queenslanders," he said.
But the former CEO of Powerlink, Simon Bartlett, warned that the current plans would come at an exorbitant cost because Pioneer-Burdekin was so far away from the main population centre of South-East Queensland.
"A basic rule of planning is: build your generation, if you can, as close as you can to the load centre. That reduces what you spend on transmission, and it reduces the risk of long-distance transmission," Professor Bartlett said.
"But the plan doesn't do that, the plan wants to build it 1,000 kilometres from the main load centre [Brisbane] – it just makes no logic to me, I'm afraid."
Professor Bartlett also says it is high risk for Powerlink to connect the pumped storage schemes by only one new line of 500kV towers that carry a double circuit, due to the risk of fires or vandals bringing down towers.
"What they're proposing is just a single transmission line, that's a major flaw in the design because that can come down, and every half a kilometre there's a tower, and all the wires are on the one tower. So that can come down and totally blackout a large part of the state," he said.
Mr Simshauser refuted that, arguing two lines of towers were not needed.
"We believe at this point in time anyway, [it] will be a cost that we won't need. We believe we can manage it in other ways," Mr Simshauser said.
"There are always risks in running a transmission network, any of our system plans will always take into account the most probable and credible contingencies that we can envisage and make sure that the balance of the network is, you know, available to deal with those contingencies."
What about batteries?
Queensland's Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said he considered the state's plan to be "the best path possible" to transition to renewables.
Professor Bartlett is urging the government to re-think the scale of the two schemes, in favour of emerging grid-scale batteries.
"They say it's the world's largest scheme. As soon as someone says that: watch out. There's a reason that others haven't gone that big," Professor Bartlett said.
"There are other ways of getting storage besides pumped storage, and there's been incredible developments in chemical batteries, the costs have just come down dramatically.
"[Australian Energy Market Operator] AEMO's own report shows that 8-hour batteries are about half the cost of an 8-hour pump storage scheme.
"Pumped storage is expensive because of the civil engineering, the concrete, the steel, the labour … and while pumped storage has getting dearer, batteries are getting cheaper."
However, Powerlink CEO Paul Simshauser said that it needed to make decisions based on current market conditions.
"At this point in time, the only serious battery proposals that we've got on our book are lithium-ion batteries, and all of them have congested around a 2-hour storage time, which tells us that that's what the market deems as economic at this point," he said.
"In terms of long-duration storage, really the only long-duration storage project proponents we've seen are pumped hydro," he said.
Similarly, Mr de Brenni said the government had closely considered the alternatives.
"We've worked for a number of years considering all of these options, and pumped hydro energy storage is the proven technology that will enable us to reach our renewable energy targets," he said.
Who is going to build it?
The construction industry is sounding the alarm that there are too many projects in the infrastructure pipeline, and Australia simply does not have the workers to complete them.
Engineers Australia CEO Romilly Madew said governments around the country were not learning from major infrastructure delays on other big projects.
"When you take into account the infrastructure pipeline that's already in place, you've got the Queensland Olympics coming up in 2032.
"You also have AUKUS now been added into the mix from the federal government. And then you add in energy transition. The capacity isn't there," Ms Madew said.
"If we say it's going to take 10 years, let's say it's going to be 15. There are so many unknowns at the moment and we really need to make sure we have contingencies on these projects,"
"We must remember it's taxpayer money — so are we reporting transparently on the time frames, on the delivery and on our commitments, and being really realistic about those?"
Mr de Brenni agreed there were workforce issues but was not concerned the state would not be able to attract workers.
"Whilst there are challenges in the infrastructure market, today, we're confident that we'll be able to attract the very best workers so that it's delivered, and it will be a quality outcome for our state for generations," he said.
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Senior Queensland cops desperate emails reveal crime crisis, lack of police resources
Leaked police emails give alarming insight into the true state of Queensland’s frontline with no one available to respond to dozens of calls for help and supervisors so inundated they fear making a serious mistake.
Over several emails to superiors in the first half of 2023, a senior Gold Coast officer lays bare how offenders are using the M1 as their own private raceway, homeowners are becoming vigilantes and in one night 90 of 122 call-outs could not be serviced.
In his emails to police bosses, respected Glitter Strip district duty officer Senior-Sergeant Arron Ottaway reveals his frustrations over a lack of manpower, including one incident where an off-duty top cop could not get police help as he fought off a violent and drug-addled intruder in his own yard.
In one email, Sen-Sgt Ottaway told a superior how “frustrated” residents opted to chase teen criminals themselves and smash the window of their stolen car rather than call police.
He even admits that the lack of support and stress had driven him to drink.
In another email in late April, Sen-Sgt Ottaway told a superior of recent shifts where police had to deal with up to 122 jobs at a time, with as many as 90 “unresourced”.
“The QPS is asking too much of me – I cannot continue to work by myself as a DDO on the Gold Coast at peak times (or I will) make a mistake that will have a high consequence,” he wrote.
“We, as DDOs, are continually getting asked to overview more, make more decisions, run multiple high-risk jobs, consider high-risk DV offenders, liaise with QAS over mental health, approve transports … you get it, the list goes on.”
In one email, sent in late January, he wrote that he was the only District Duty Officer (DDO) on duty and “there are so many jobs and competing interests that I’m losing my mind”.
“Tonight has been relentless, just like last night, ” he wrote. “Last night, I didn’t stand up for four-and-a-half hours due to the workload. I eat at the computer.
“Last night, on the way home, I stopped at a bottle shop drive thru, bought a six-pack and drank all of them once I got home, just to try and calm myself down.
“I once dealt with a mental health consumer who said that he drinks for the “comfortable numbness” – I think I understand what he is speaking about.”
In the email, Sen-Sgt Ottaway told how three stolen cars were rolling through the Gold Coast, “one at high speed treating the highway like a racetrack”. “So bad was the driving that members of the public were calling Triple 0,” he wrote.
“Yet conversely, so frustrated are the members of the public, that instead of calling police when the crooks were actually breaking into the house, the street got together, chased the baddies and smashed the front windscreen of the stolen car they were in.”
In another case, Sen-Sgt Ottaway said, an off-duty senior commissioned officer rang for help “because a UID (under the influence of drugs), violent, shirtless offender was in his yard and he was rolling around on the ground fighting with him”.
“It gets worse,” he wrote. “The off-duty officer and his wife had called a number of times. You guessed it – no cops, no on-road DDO, no RDO (regional duty officer) to go.”
Sen-Sgt Ottaway said he had to decide “on countless occasions” whether to allow police crews to transport a mental health patient to hospital because an ambulance did not turn up or was unavailable.
“I’m asked to decide, with zero medical training and virtually no information, of whether I should allow our people to do these transports,” he wrote.
“I guess I’ll be the one in trouble for that as well when the patient dies in police custody.”
Sen-Sgt Ottaway also told how he was trying to deal with 23 “unresourced” domestic violence cases at one time and how there were “no police” to respond to an urgent request for help from paramedics.
He said the South Eastern Police District was “more interested in its budget” than providing urgently needed manpower and “our people are struggling”. “There cannot be just one DDO on,” he wrote.
“DDOs are losing their sh-t because every single shift is like running a marathon. And I can’t keep up any longer.”
The seasoned cop has been relegated to desk duties amid an internal investigation into the pursuit of two teenagers in an allegedly stolen car.
Footage of the low-speed chase shows cops attempting the controversial precision immobilisation technique, or “PIT manoeuvre”, where pursuing police force a vehicle to turn sideways and the vehicle to lose control.
An official police report obtained by The Courier-Mail states that the “tactic of boxing in” was approved by the police communications controller to stop the vehicle which was travelling on its rims at an estimated 10 km/h.
But some police claimed Sen-Sgt Ottaway had been “targeted” over the “justified” pursuit because of his complaints about a lack of officers on the Coast. “Our boss has been ‘benched’ because he was trying to catch crooks,” a source said. “We have never been taught or trained on how to box in or PIT a car. The offenders were never going to stop.”
South Eastern police region Assistant Commissioner Brian Swan said the Gold Coast was a “really challenging” policing environment and he had ordered a comprehensive review into officer safety and well-being, including rostering and support programs.
“The thing that worries me the most is the well-being of our people - that we have healthy and safe workplaces and healthy and safe people, not just physically but psychologically safe as well,” he said. “We’re in the process of changing the way we do things, but it’s going to take time.”
Mr Swan said staffing levels were continually monitored and millions of dollars was spent on overtime, with police able to call in extra officers in busy periods.
“We could have a police officer on every corner in every suburb and some shifts, that won’t seem like enough,” he said.
“The complexity of what our teams are doing every day is just immense.
“I’ve made it very clear that budgets are not to get in the way of officer and community safety.
“My priority is the safety of the community and the safety of my workforce and that’s the bottom line.”
Mr Swan said there was no link between Sen-Sgt Ottaway being stood down and the concerns he had raised over police numbers.
Emails written by Sen-Sgt Ottaway to his superiors in the months before the pursuit reveal his stress and frustration at a lack of back-up.
After Sen-Sgt Ottaway first spoke out, Gold Coast chief superintendent Craig Hanlon emailed DDOs to tell them he appreciated that “we are all under increasing pressure to complete our jobs with demand increasing and associated staffing issues”.
“However, I and the District Management team sleep well at night knowing you are reviewing calls for service and demand and managing resources throughout the District under our Priority Policing Policy,” he wrote.
Last month, an inspector emailed Sen-Sgt Ottaway to tell him his concerns had been “taken seriously” and Coast police bosses had decided to launch a review into issues including DDO rosters, equipment and health and safety.
The Queensland Police Union said it was supporting Sen-Sgt Ottaway
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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