Interview with Tamworth Regional Council Mayor, Col Murray, who is joining the UNE Council.

Why are you joining UNE Council and what do you believe you can contribute?

I’ve always had a strong interest in administration and been involved in a lot of different sporting organizations. Everything I get involved in, I’ve got to get right to the core of it.

So I got involved in the squash club committee because I thought we could improve a few things and ended up as president. I was president of the local harness racing club for 14 years, and I’ve spent 29 years on the committee. I ended up on the board of Harness Racing NSW — this was the first board that was privatised from government control. We had a mandate to make the industry sustainable because there was some question marks over the racing industry at the time. It was a pretty tough gig. We had to close a number of clubs and re-structure the whole industry.

My wife and I had a civil construction business here in Tamworth that we built up from nothing to 40 employees. It was a high turnover, high risk, highly geared industry, and we sold the business in 2004.

I had a crack at the Tamworth council elections in the same year, and got elected. I was on the ordinary council for six years, then deputy mayor for two years. And then the past nine years as mayor.

I’m proposing to stand down at the end of this term, and I was approached by UNE Chancellor James Harris to see whether I had an interest in joining the UNE Council.

Of course, TRC and UNE are doing a lot of work together, and I’ve been working with the Vice-Chancellor and others, so it was a natural step.

I badge myself as a commercial realist.

I see that financial sustainability is really, really important. Being prepared to make the hard decisions to arrive at financial sustainability; really digging into the strategies to understand what you have to change; I see this as necessary for the prosperity of any enterprise.

Two or three years ago we did a complete restructure of Tamworth Regional Council and refocused away from the traditional local government model. That major structural reform, and the emphasis on financial sustainability, are themes not dissimilar to what’s happening at UNE.

Universities and local governments have relied on government handouts. I just can’t see that as sustainable. I’m really interested in the University’s challenge of sourcing its own revenues away from its traditional funding streams.

How important is the UNE Tamworth initiative to the future of the city?

UNE Tamworth is absolutely critical to the city. Tamworth is at a crossroads. It can continue evolving as a blue collar town, or it can go through a period of transformation and become a much better place to live, work and play. UNE Tamworth will certainly be a big part of that.

We’ve identified through all our strategies that having a university campus and a strong university presence in the city is a non-negotiable improvement.

It’s good that UNE won the bid to establish a university presence in the city. Tamworth is still very much aligned with agriculture, and UNE has a significant focus on agriculture. And in health, and there’s a lot of synergy in that too.

Has the role of education been given adequate prominence in regional development to date?

Historically, Tamworth has had pretty poor performance in educational attainment. Not everybody needs a university degree, but there’s a portion of the community that requires that level of education. If they can attain a degree, the benefits just flow on to affect so many things. The effects of higher incomes permeates right across the local economy and into the cultural aspects of growing regional city.

So educational attainment supports growth and development, investment, lifestyle — all the things that we like to think are important.

Do you see potential for research alliances between the university and the city?

Absolutely. I think there’s a very strong opportunity there. The concept that the Vice-Chancellor is proposing for Tamworth, where the University is engaged and integrated with business, is a really good fit with the city’s commercial landscape. I think it will be a natural value-add to UNE to draw investment from industry partners.

As an outsider, what do you see as UNE’s strengths? And what do you regard as its potential weaknesses?

In terms of Tamworth, I think having that UNE’s strong background in agriculture and a very visible appetite for innovation in agriculture is valuable. Tamworth’s economy reaches far beyond the local government boundary — we’re talking pretty much about the entire northwest of the State — so that’s really important. Then there’s the University’s work in health, and what it has to offer Tamworth culturally. We have one of the largest Conservatoriums of Music in regional Australia here, and our performing arts sector seems to be just exploding across the city.

In terms of weaknesses, UNE is not a great fit with the Tamworth industries built around engineering, and things like the renewable energy engineering sector. So perhaps there can be some further lining up of the dots in these areas.

I would qualify all this by saying I’m not experienced in how a university operates; I’m just offering a point of view.