What is also not being debated is diseconomies of scale. Larger institutions cost proportionally more to manage. Cutting back office functions affect front line services. The NSW government is currently pretending front office services won’t be cut by sacrificing back office staff – front office staff are spending more time on back office work instead of their front office responsibilities. Universities that imagine they can save money by cutting back office staff need to remember this.

The talk of using technology to deliver programs to remote sites is also flawed. As number of students to number of staff increases university education becomes no more than a comprehension test. What students take away from University is not principally knowledge but skills in thinking (most of what they learn at university is out of date the day they graduate). That requires direct debate between students and staff; this is determined by student/staff ratios. The debate that is being ignored is that the Unified National System was flawed from the beginning. There has always been a need for a CAE/Polytechnic sector. Return places such as CSU/SCU to what they remain, CAEs.

In NSW, we have five universities offering tertiay education in agriculture/food. Some of these are under-resourced and need updating. There are multiple degrees at the various institutions which overlap.

What is required is to look strategically at the demographics, the existing institutions, the forecasts for production and human resource requirements and then align future education to meet those needs.

For example, Charles Sturt Univerity is, and could be, even more strongly aligned as the University of the Murray Darling Basin - and all the challenges of food production, resource management in that region.

New faculties such as some of the human medical and veterinary science faculties are attracting the capital and resources needed for modern education, but much more is required.

This fits in with the review of biosecurity in Australia and our loss of ability to deal with incursions and the increasing risk to major industries.

New England University is the centre of animal production and these resources need strengthening.

A more strategic view will inform us as a nation as to whether amalgamations offer any real value. It is not clear what SCU and CSU would gain, and more importantly our national capacity would gain from such a merger.