The role of universities in the regions

All Australian universities share the common principal purposes identified by the Higher Education Council in its 1992 report Higher Education, Achieving Quality, i.e. • The education of appropriately qualified Australians to enable them to take a leadership role in the intellectual, cultural, economic and social development of the nation and its regions; • The creation and advancement of knowledge; and • The application of knowledge and discoveries to the betterment of communities in Australia and overseas (Higher Education Council, 1992, p. 12). The Higher Education Council (1992) also notes that one of the goals of Australia’s Higher Education system is the encouragement of ‘diversity so that all courses reflect the regional, social and cultural differences that impinge upon individual universities’.