Abolish the ARC

Here are the core benefits of abolishing the ARC, TEQSA, ERA and most of the Department of Education in Canberra:

· It will save the taxpayer a load of wasted dollars.

· It will end tedious debates between academics and politicians about what is and is not useful research.

· It will allow researchers to simply get on and research the things they and their colleagues think are important.

· There will be no more costly compliance for universities. This wastes time and resources and creates positions in universities that re not needed and simply did not exist fifteen years ago. Spend taxpayer dollars on academic salaries instead.

· There will be no more "national" research priorities for universities to bow before. Governments telling university researchers what to research is essentially fascist and, for those who understand how innovation works, patently absurd. Universities have outsourced to governments and markets decisions about what they specialise in. It is time they took back this most basic of responsibilities of the academy.

· It will engineer a return to the primary goals of the university – teaching and scholarship.

The good thing about this proposal is that it will save the taxpayers heaps of money, by allowing a massive downsizing of the largely unnecessary Department of Education in Canberra and by saving all that competitive grant money that is now so wastefully sought.

Just as importantly, this is a proposal that will be simply loved by working academics.

It will allow the dismemberment of the whole ghastly edifice of research "management" constructed so elaborately by grant-troughing university administrations these past years. It will kill off all the internal markets created by senior administrators to sort out the research sheep from the goats. It will allow more university resources to go towards actual research, or even, gasp, scholarship (the word you almost never hear on campus any more). It will substantially reduce the need for university administrative staff. It will reduce marketing budgets. It will get scholars doing more old fashioned things – talking to one another in tea rooms, putting on seminars and conferences, engaging with their communities, indeed teaching their communities. It will free up academic time. It will get the great scholars back to the classrooms. It will also increase the smiles on campus.

The system of funding university research in Australia is flawed, and requires fundamental rethinking. The arrival of a new government is as good a time as any to have the discussion about how this should proceed. Nothing short of a power-hosing of the grotty stables is required.

Universities have become very sad and stressful places, and places that are needlessly costly to the taxpayer. And I think I know why, and what can be done about it by an innovative, laterally thinking incoming government with loads of political capital.