Gigi Foster

On Australian ABC's Q & A, 28 July 2020, "Fight of our lives," Bill Bowtell[1] alone seemed able to conceptualise the biological restructuring of our economic environment, although Gigi Foster, economist, NSW, seemed to know instinctively what she needed to combat in order to keep the global, privatised economy going. She advocated allowing people to die from COVID-19, Swedish-style, in order to maintain business more or less as usual. However, when it was put to her that this would make everything less predictable and also incapacitate our health-care system, with no end in sight for the virus, she could draw a logical conclusion, which was, "[...] If we keep our borders closed, until there is a vaccine, we have to restructure the industrial mix in Australia." But this conclusion, anathema to her ideology, seemed ridiculous to her.

Not so to Bill Bowtell, Adjunct Professor, UNSW and Strategic Health Policy Adviser, who has a history of success in policy-making and promotion in the HIV-AIDS pandemic. He said, "The greatest enemy here is nostalgia and looking backwards. The Australian economy, the 30 years of the boom, have gone. They have disappeared. They were the product of a plan that came in in the 1980s, the Hawke-Keating government and the subsequent reforms. That's gone. The assumptions that underlie that plan have evaporated. The globalisation, the international economy functioning as we used to know it. So now we need Plan 3. The third plan since the war. And that will take all of the intellectual capacity that we have in Australia, the committment of the Australian people - they've got to buy into it - and the economy that will be born now will be very different than the economy that we have been used to. We can do it. We can make a better economy. The question of borders - Look, in the world, the Coronavirus caseload is going up like a rocket. There will be no opening up of international borders, as people seem to think there will be. We saw, in the last few days in Europe, where they opened up the southern borders in Spain, and then they had to shut them down again, because, guess what, the virus kept going up. Now, we have problems also with the Australian borders. I cannot see the outlying states opening up to a situation where we have Coronavirus cases at the level we have in Victoria and New South Wales. I don't see Western Australia doing that. The Federal Government is in court at the moment trying to force the West Australian Government [to open (?) interruption by compere, saying time running out and gives opportunity to another panelist to make final comment.]"

Karen Soo, Executive Officer at the Haymarket Chamber of Commerce, said, "I think this is a time for universal pause enables us as a society to really review what's important, and I think, as all people, I think it's really created a lot of equity and parity. So, everybody's now looking at the homeless, it's looking at multicultural societies, it's looking at everybody to say, 'How do we work together? How do we move forward? And how do we ensure that everyone can have a future together? And I think, it's going to hopefully be - I am quite optimistic - I think it's an opportunity that businesses will review and innovate and work together - local communities will be very market-driven until the borders are open once we are safe enough to function in a new way. Like, there's going to be a new way to operate in business."

NOTES

"Bio:
Mr Bill Bowtell AO, Executive Director, Pacific Friends of the Global Fund. Bill is a strategic policy adviser, with particular interest in national and international health policy structures and reform. He trained as a diplomat, with postings in Portugal, Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe. As senior adviser to the Australian health minister, Bill Bowtell played a significant role in the introduction of the Medicare health insurance system in 1984. He was an architect of Australia’s successful and well-regarded response to HIV/AIDS. Between 1994 and 1996, Bill Bowtell was senior political adviser to the Prime Minister of Australia. He maintains a close interest in the potential impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the other communicable diseases, on the social, economic and political development of the Asia-Pacific region. Since 2005, Bill was Director of the HIV/AIDS Project at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and, since 2009, the Executive Director of Pacific Friends of the Global Fund. Pacific Friends is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In these positions, he has sought to increase knowledge and awareness of the challenges posed globally, and to the Pacific region, by the three diseases. He has written and broadcast extensively on these subjects and participated in many international and Australian conferences and seminars especially in relation to HIV/AIDS." Source: https://kirby.unsw.edu.au/event/kirby-seminar-mr-bill-bowtell-international-and-australian-perspectives-three-decades-hivaids.

Gigi Foster of UNSW is a researcher whose analysis of the marking of international students' work provided for the first time evidence of universities passing their work despite inadequate English-language skills.

Foster says her statistical analysis reveals that international students are being allowed to underperform and this is being camouflaged to an extent by grade inflation. The dumbing-down of our universities is due to an over-reliance on foreign students, and they will eventually be victims of their own success in luring overseas dollars. Standards will fall, and with tighter restrictions on PR, our universities won't be so attractive internationally.

At the same time, these poor English skills weigh on the results of domestic students in the same tutorials. It would also prohibit the level of conversations for native English speakers.

The research by Dr Foster raises important issues about university grading, especially whether lower language fluency affects grades received.

According to a report in The Australian , an academic in the business faculty at a Victorian university said Dr Foster's concerns were "spot on". The academic, who asked not to be named, said three-quarters of his classes tended to be made up of international students, of which half "could barely hold a conversation".

Gigi Foster has done a study looking at the marks of students of different backgrounds in different classes. The variation she can work with is the performance of international students relative to domestic ones in courses that have varying degrees of these two types (at UniSA and UTS). She consistently found that the internationals do worse but, because courses are graded ‘on the curve’ (the distribution of marks is almost mandatorily the same across large courses in university) international students do better when there are fewer domestics in the course to pinch the higher marks. So their results are relative to the standard of the contemporary students. Thus, our university standards will "improve" (on paper) with more foreign students enrolled!

Amanda Vanstone says .."we have a wonderful system that allows you to get a tertiary education and to pay later . . . much later. So the remaining two-thirds of school-leavers just have to make the best of their lot". It would be interesting to know what study-loan debt Amanda had. She probably did her university education in the days when people could got to university for free, or at least when they were paid a living allowance.

Those studying at TAFE in Victoria, and who already have tertiary qualifications, are also charged with HECS-like loan fees, to deal with "skills shortages". Without parental support, the costs of studying are prohibitive.

There is no "free ride" for university students. The costs are tremendous - in the study-load, the stresses of juggling living and working, in long-term commitment, and financially. The outcome does not always guarantee wealth, or career certainty.

Ironically, while our universities and educational institutions are being touted overseas as of high quality, it is also being publicized that we have "skills shortages". Australians are dumb or lazy?. It means that our government is failing to provide quality affordable education to our young citizens, potential professionals and skilled employees. They are being bypassed in favour of those who are trained overseas, at their own expense. They are also being disadvantaged by foreign students who could be compromising the standard of our own tertiary education system, and the number of supported students in our universities.