Oh dear! The poor university sector. Serves them right, greedy buggers, turning what was meant to be education for Australians into what they laughably call an 'export industry'. The chickens have most certainly come home to roost.

"Many students have gone home to their own countries". Good. That's where they belong, particularly the ones from the country where the virus started. And, as far as local students go, most of them don't need to be at universities to get the jobs most of them end up doing. Then there are the made up courses bordering on idiocy.

"Universities must change to survive". Obviously. And they should do it themselves, without the help of millions of taxpayers who have never attended a university. Only about 27% of Australians hold a degree, and many of those degrees are useless.

The university sector is going to be scratching for sympathy.

Maybe? I do know that if you're a kid from the bush you do a bit more than struggle, particularly if you come from a small town where it is another disadvantaged, self-perpetuating, postcode poverty trap.

We started this particular problem by changing education from a universal right, to an income-earning, business model heavily reliant on cashed-up foreign students, many of who clearly bought their degrees?

Without that income stream, we are virtually unable to fund very important research! And we are confronted by a current ideological imperative to maintain or even expand the self-funding model!

The only possible way to change this is to throw out the ideologies who created this particular model and who will die in a ditch before they allow a rational change.

And given that is so? Allow the cancer that is Chinese communist influence to grow and infect the student body.

There are answers, but none that the current, imprisoned in ideological straight jackets, science-free zones, that are our parliaments, will allow! TBC.
Alan B.

To get change, we need to change the way our representatives are elected! And starts with primaries where the preselection is done by the registered voters of a particular electorate.

And for all parties and candidates! To eliminate for all time the power brokers and those who purchase political influence, etc-etc.

I mean unions only represent 15% of the workforce, but want to be the tail that wags Labor and all Labor party policy! And then they and other power brokers want to do dirty deals in the dead of night to swap preferences, so we can see particular candidates who up to 85% of the electorate rejected the first time around, winning the seat on traded preferences?

And may be a Labor candidate helicoptered in at the behest of powerful union advocacy? So, do the numbers and then understand what 15% of 15% represents and just who and what they represent or stand for!? And then we wonder why the country is buggered and why we are up shite creek without a paddle.

If we can lift our heads out of the warm and comfortable places they're in? We may be able to understand, we are all in this together and or united we stand, divided we fall and the same old is the same old BS we've been served for so long!

There're solutions, but none of them in the same old, same old BS that's the only item on the menu beside divide and rule politics and greed is good individualism that is sending the country to the nearest taxidermist. We're all in this together, bah humbug! TBC.
Alan B.

Funding trade education is far more profitable in the long run ! Trades people create revenue, Theorists merely squander it !

We might have made a bigger deal about the shonky colleges that Gillard set up and nobody got around to checking up on or restricting.
I guess Michaelia Cash will think it's all about tradies and their utes?

We have to fund the education sector with a means-tested endowment to the parents! That'll ensure all get an equal chance at the starting post of life and succeed on merit rather than the size of the parental pocketbook, or influence.

The diabolically dumb ass prohibition on nuclear energy must be lifted to at least allow some university R+D in this area and for which there will be mucho plenty of research funds and endowments! Particularly if that research is on alternative thorium and MSR SMR's e.g.

If the aim to decarbonize the economy with a solution that will simultaneously turbocharge it and create huge medical tourism in our cash strapped outback!

After that, we need to completely jettison our current tax system in favour of an unavoidable 15% flat tax! Which is already around 2% more tax than the top corporate taxpayers pay in real terms and a whopping great 15% more than the 40% who pay none at all.

This one simple, easy as, solution, will lower the total tax related burden on the average bottom line by 7%. Thus making the real rate of tax-related spending, in real terms, just 8%. And means all the other expensive items like subsidized super, negative gearing, family trusts (tax avoidance vehicles) etc., can be junked along with the annual billions we lose/lose, as we allow these shonky rorts to continue ad infinitum. And then as we currently do, expect the coming generations to pay the piper! And to add insult to injury, without allowing them to call the tune!

We can properly fund our universities or some of the above! Your choice? If we choose wisely, then those paying the bill will get some say in how their cash is spent! Or who's hand is deepest in their collective future pockets! Let's fund the future, not the past or unadulterated, abhorrent, undeserved greed.
Alan B.