Tag: glyn davis

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Australia 2020 News, 14 March 2008

Summit deputy chairman Professor Glyn Davis reckons Australia’s universities should be run like the American higher education system.

Professor Davis will argue in a speech today that America’s higher education system is more stable than Australia’s because it is more decentralised, with legal and financial responsibility primarily in the hands of the states. Universities are also given more power to set their own tuition fees, and students are offered a wide range of institutions from which to choose.

Well, “he will have argued”, because this was this morning’s newspaper reporting something that hadn’t actually happened yet. Newspapers know the future.

Apart from that, nothing much new to report. Everyone is presumably busy going through nominations. Tomorrow I’ll look to see what the blogosphere is saying.

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Australia 2020 News, 13 March 2008

I wonder if Australia’s Jewish communities will be suitably placated by having their own kosher pre-summit summit on 14 April, since the main Australia 2020 Summit on 19-20 April clashed with Passover?

Meanwhile, the process of selecting the 1000 “best and brightest” (minus the politically-handy pre-selections) started yesterday. There’s “more than 10,000 applications” to deal with — though previously the figure was 7000+ so who knows who to believe.

[Summit vice-chairman] Professor [Glyn] Davis met Mr Rudd on Tuesday to review progress for the huge gathering. A team, including Victorian public servants and some of Professor Davis’ staff, is working on the agenda, while a Queensland bureaucrat is helping with background material for the summiteers.

Mind you:

The committee also has lists of possible summiteers sent in by the public and CVs that are not accompanied by formal applications.

I’d have thought that being unable to follow the published nomination process would automatically exclude you from being Australia’s “best and brightest”.

It’s sounding like we’ll know the list of 1000 early next week.