By Andrew MacDonald. Under the plan, all adults sent to offshore immigration centres on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island would be prevented from ever entering Australia, even as tourists or on business, regardless of whether they’re found to be refugees or not. Concerns have been raised the ban may contravene article 31 of the international refugee convention, which states signatory nations shall not penalise refugees for illegal entry when they have come directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened. Amnesty International says the outrageous and unnecessary law discriminates against people seeking safety based on their mode of arrival, a clear breach of Australia’s obligations. More...
NTEU condemns Monash plan to slash counselling service
By Andrew MacDonald. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has questioned Monash University’s commitment to the mental health and wellbeing of students and staff, in response to management plans to cut in-house counsellor jobs. More...
Advocate vol. 23 no. 3 out now
By Jeannie Rea. Since we sent this edition of Advocate to the printer, Donald Trump has been elected the next President of the United States. A lot can happen in a few days. But rather than be superseded, the theme and features of this Advocate are even more relevant as writers address the issues in our local industrial and political climate, focusing upon the attacks on secure decent work and the poor government and university responses. More...
New report shows there is no crisis in higher education funding
By Paul Kniest. A recently released LH Martin Institute paper entitled Resourcing Australia’s tertiary education sector authored by Mark Warburton (October 2016) provides a comprehensive analysis of funding of tertiary education (both higher education and VET) over the last decade or so. It concludes that there has not been a blowout in higher education funding as is being argued by the government and that the government’s vision of a deregulated market with the provision of income contingent loans is destined to certain failure. More...
How does big data impact education?
Big data refers to the high volume of varied information that our societies produce today. The amount of data generated is so vast that it is even difficult to capture, manage and process it through conventional means. More...
Proposal for Irish Super-University
Irish universities have performed badly in some recent global university rankings although Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin continue to make significant progress in others such as the Russian Round University Rankings (RUR) and the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). More...
Economics Rankings from IDEAS
IDEAS (Internet Documents in Economics Access Service) is a bibliographic economics database prepared under the supervision of Christine Zimmerman of the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. It is based onthe RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) archive and contains over 2,000,000 items most of which are full text and downloadable. More...
New Ranking from Russia
A proposal for a new international university ranking has just been announced by Viktor Savonichy, who is Rector of Moscow State University and Chairman of the Russian Union of Rectors. The new ranking was initiated by President Putin and will be produced by the Expert RA research Center and the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM). More...
Boosting productivity is key for Malaysia to attain high-income-country status
Posted . Productivity growth is essential for living standards to durably improve. Malaysia has reached a development stage where growth needs to be driven more by productivity gains than the sheer accumulation of capital and labour inputs. The 11th Malaysia Plan (2016-20) sets an ambitious labour productivity growth target of 3.7% per year, well above than the 2% average growth recorded from 2011 to 2015. More...
Successful macro transformation in Malaysia, but challenges remain
Posted . Malaysia has sustained rapid and inclusive economic growth for close to half a century, as documented in the OECD’s first Economic Assessment of Malaysia (OECD, 2016). Real GDP growth has averaged 6.4% per year since 1970, outperforming most of its regional peers. More...