Former public servant Renee Leon to lead Charles Sturt University

Charles Sturt University has appointed career public servant Renee Leon as its new vice-chancellor, who will target skills shortages, particularly in the IT field, and opportunities to commercialise research.

As a former head of the federal department of employment, Ms Leon, believes universities can play an important role in preparing students for the job market and by addressing labour force needs, including those in the IT, health and aged care sectors.

Renee Leon, Charles Sturt University’s new vice-chancellor and former department of human services secretary.

“There are significant skills shortages in every kind of digital and data space and so the university’s focus on cyber is really important,” she said. “Regional communities really need people in teaching and in healthcare and in social support.

Ms Leon said the university should also find new ways to serve the agriculture sector and help it adapt to changing global economic patterns. The sector would need to capitalise on global trade opportunities and be resistant to climate change.

As secretary of the department of human services, a position she held until early last year, Ms Leon had to mop up the federal government’s robodebt policy failure. Robodebt used a faulty way of calculating incomes to suggest hundreds of thousands of people had been paid too much welfare, which it then demanded back. The government conceded it was unlawful in 2019 and settled a class action last year for a total cost of more than $1.8 billion without admitting liability

“It was a policy of the government of the day,” Ms Leon said. “The department was faithfully implementing it as is our job. Once it became apparent that those debts weren’t validly raised, the program ceased, which was good.”

Ms Leon was one of five Commonwealth department secretaries who lost their jobs early last year in a restructure which reduced the number of government departments.

“One accepts that if there is a restructure, sometimes there are not the same number of chairs when the music stops. I had a very successful career at the senior levels of the Australian public service, and I’m looking forward to taking all the experience that I got from that into this new role,” she said.

Ms Leon, who will start her new role next Wednesday, said her long public service career was always about wanting to “make a difference”. “Higher education is so critical to national prosperity and well-being, so it seemed to me a really ideal opportunity to put my experience to good use,” she said.

She said it was a challenging time for universities which had lost billions of dollars in revenue from international students during the coronavirus pandemic and national border closures. The sector was also going through changes in regulation and funding.

Ms Leon said she had not yet been briefed on the status of complaints about Charles Sturt’s financial management and allegations of fraud, saying she understood these problems were “being handled appropriately”.

“I’ve worked in a lot of large organisations and I think it would be rare to say there were any that haven’t from time to time had some allegation made about an irregularity,” she said.

“I think it is always best to make sure you have good processes in place to make sure any of those allegations are properly investigated and that strong procedures are in place to make sure money and other processes are handled appropriately.”

“Charles Sturt, like most universities, has done what it needs to do to get onto a good financial footing. We’ll be working with the government and within the health settings to get international students back as soon as possible.”

Ms Leon, who will move to Bathurst as soon as COVID-19 restrictions allow, said she would explore whether the university was doing all it could to commercialise research. She would also look at making sure that outsourced education programs for international students were high quality.

Ms Leon is an adjunct professor at the University of Canberra and has a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the Australian National University. She also has a Master of Laws from the University of Cambridge, where she was selected as the Menzies Foundation Law Scholar in 1995. She was awarded a Public Service Medal in 2013 for outstanding service to public administration and law in leadership roles in the Australian Capital Territory and the Commonwealth.

Anna Patty is a Senior Writer for The Sydney Morning Herald with a focus on higher education. She is a former Workplace Editor, Education Editor, State Political Reporter and Health Reporter.

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