If you want higher wages, which I guess all workers would prefer, it’s simple — you need to work at a place that has high productivity and profitability, or else you work for the government. The AFR runs a great story on how to deliver smarter and more productive graduates and it also looks at why “business doesn’t trust Tony Burke”, which is a problem as he’s the employment minister.

The beef that business has with Burkey is with his and Labor’s goal of their “same job, same pay” proposed law. If the bill becomes law, they say it will hit individual’s income and flexible work practices and then affect the productivity and profitability of businesses.

So, education experts say our universities are producing unproductive workers and Labor wants to pay all workers the same, while businesses want to pay the more productive workers more than the less productive contributors in the workplace.

On the common-sense test, given we are a country that’s worried about whether our productivity can deliver better profits and higher wages, then we should be hellbent to make our universities ‘produce’ better workers and our businesses should reward them accordingly.

Labor clearly has good social reasons to help casual workers get more pay, but with interest rate rises strangling many businesses bottom lines and a recession threatening, should a Federal Government Employment Minister be making workers more expensive to business?

This is clearly going to be a battle that will get hotter with the Business Council of Australia set to go hard in the media to fight Tony Burke on this matter. “The government wants to create a new test on how a casual worker is defined and that could mean that people who have a regular pattern of work could no longer be classed as casual,” said BCA boss Jennifer Westacott. “This proposal will make it harder for people to work an extra shift for that extra pay they need to make ends meet.”

What is interesting is that the Albanese Government is trying to make casuals more secure at a time when lots of workers want flexibility. One bank employee who works a lot from home has a tag line on his email explaining he’s making his work compatible with his life goals! The tag goes something like this “I’m sending this message now because it suits me, but I don’t expect that you read or respond to it outside of regular working hours.” My question is – will he respond to me as the bank’s client when it suits my regular working hours?  While I think it’s great that people have life goals, this employee must make sure his life goals are compatible with his customers and the bank who pays him money to look after their clients.

And it would be a big help if uni students coming out of these august education ‘factories’ (as the great cricket spin bowler and educator Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly used to call them) are well trained.

However, the informed view of the AFR’s Education Editor, Julie Hare (and the experts she surveyed) is that they’re not well educated or trained, and the size of universities is part of the problem. “Smaller, specialist tertiary institutions, a sharper focus on teaching quality and reversing falling school academic achievement levels could help the education sector pull its weight in boosting national productivity, Ms Hare wrote today. “Economists and experts say the once-irrefutable link between rising education levels and productivity improvements has been broken over the past decade. The population has never been so highly educated, with over 50 per cent of young people attaining a university degree, but productivity is lacklustre.”

Even the Productivity Commission says our universities are a big part of the problem.

Unis have become more factory-like, with the Productivity Commission pointing to “…capped university places, poor quality of teaching, including online, and too much emphasis on research” as factors contributing to the disappointingly educated people coming out of universities.”

It's a big call but there are plenty of experts suggesting that changes are needed.

Economist Richard Holden says unis should be into specialising to create comparative advantages and sums up one of our problems this way: “We have a very strange system where all our public universities charge the same fees for the same courses to every student. We have 39 law schools. Why?”

Student surveys give big universities the thumbs down, while the AFR reports  that “ smaller institutions such as the University of Divinity, Avondale University and Bond University always outperform comprehensive, research-intensive institutions, which often linger at the bottom of the pile.”

Universities Australia, which represents the big unis, say teaching isn’t the problem. They say it’s government funding that’s killing productivity.

“If we could lift investment in higher education R&D by just 1 per cent, we could raise productivity and increase the size of Australia’s economy by $24 billion over 10 years,” UA’s chief executive, Catriona Jackson, said. “To reverse Australia’s productivity fortunes, government must seriously invest in the institutions that drive productivity and grow the economy in ways that pay for themselves.”

That’s a huge revelation that needs to be investigated but it could mean we add another problem to the hopeless regard about teaching in stuffy universities. And we must address the calibre of students when they come out of schools and the impact of unis needing foreign students to survive economically, and then all the other challenges of dealing with a tech-addicted, younger generation, who could now have Chat GPT writing their essays for them!

It's such a big issue that has such huge productivity, profitability and employment implications, that something needs to be done out of Canberra to lift our education game.