Reported today that 25% of Australian youth are not in work or education.
Well done John Dawkins and you richly deserve the couple of hundred thousand a year pension you are getting too!

I agree with some of the points made about Dawkins' achievements but I think some glaring failures are ignored in the article. I also get irritated when Labor Party supporters insist on referring to every change Labor makes (even change for the worse) as "reform".

I worked in the old Employment, Education and Training department back when Dawkins was Minister. The big pieces of policy he introduced were HECS, the Training Guarantee, and the amalgamation of the former Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs) and Universities. After those changes, there developed a perception that he had lost interest in the portfolio, and was simply bursting to be made Treasurer (which eventually happened).

HECS is widely recognised as a positive achievement and has been copied overseas. The Training Guarantee is generally recognised as an unmitigated disaster and was subsequently abolished (though some state schemes exist in its place) . There are mixed views on the amalgamation of the CAEs and universities. My personal view is that it was a big mistake.

The Training Guarantee required organisations with an annual national payroll above a prescribed level to spend at least a minimum percentage on structured training activities, or else pay the shortfall amount to the ATO. It came to be viewed as just another tax on business. Companies that did not perceive a need for extensive training often preferred to spend the monies on wasteful "training" activities rather than lose it in taxation. The government also spent something like $20 million on a series of training surveys in support of the scheme.

The amalgamation of the CAEs and universities has nominally resulted in a unitary higher education system. In reality, the former CAEs, still often referred to as "Dawkins' Universities", comprise for the most part a second-tier set of university institutions that tend to reduce the prestige of the sector as a whole. The former CAEs had occupied a useful niche through emphasising teaching and the application of the disciplines they taught, and placing reduced emphasis on academic research

I didn't follow or know much of the Dawkin's reforms. when they were introduced, I was already well and truly in the workforce, and burning the midnight oil, learning some of my current skills and mathematical abilities; and learning on the job, by the seat of my pants, through an inherent overly inquisitorial nature, and a more than useful scientific/techno library.
That said, we more than ever, need several Dawkins now, tasked with completely overhauling and quite massively reforming our inordinately and unnecessarily complex, feudal inspired, multi-layered, massively avoided, highly flawed, tax system.
The one shining light of the Dawkin's reforms, his HECS scheme, is now the subject of a speculative, education Minister, Pyne's proposed privatization reviews?
There's no harm in a review, is there? And it would be scare funds well spent, particularly during a budget crisis, wouldn't it?
A privatization prospect, which would almost certainly in reality, completely undo or reverse Dawkin's most outstanding, enduring, egalitarian and essential tertiary education reform!
Is privilege to once again replace merit, as an entrance to, more essential than at any other time in our history, nation building higher education!
Makes one Pyne for previous administrations. doesn't it?
Rhrosty.

I was working in the university sector before, during and after the Dawkins "reforms". Two of many signifiers of the changes:

1. Parking places reserved for managers are known as "sacred sites". You only had to visit any university around the time of the Dawkins disaster to see the explosive expansion of the sacred site area.

2. I can't find the documentation so the following is from memory: Some time in the mid-1990s an article in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement noted that the proportion of the university funding dollar devoted to teaching and research had declined from 92c in the mid-1960s to around 35c by the date of the article. That is, an expansion from 8c in the dollar to 65c in the dollar wasted on management.

The profound quantitative and qualitative attack on the delivery of teaching and research in universities through the neoliberal Dawkins "reforms" is described in vivid and well-referenced detail by neuroscientist Dr Donald Meyers in a free online book (Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline) which can be downloaded at http://www.australianuniversities.id.au/ - - a ball to ball description of what was and is occurring in my own university, which is on the opposite side of Australia from Dr Meyers'.

It is why I debunk the plaintive calls from the university sector for better funding. Let them first sack nearly all their counterproductive managers - until there is no more wasted on them (as a proportion of total expenditure) than in 1965.

As an academic who worked in a University for the whole period of the Dawkins so called "reforms" I acknowledge they progressed Labor ideology, but also downgraded tertiary education enormously. We are all paying a massive price for Dawkins hubris. Colleges of Advanced education (CAEs) did an excellent job for training career professionals. Universities provided an essential space for the boffins - that gifted group of slightly strange persons that drive the creation of new knowledge and produce scholarship. Dawkins was IMHO an abject failure.