Elanor Huntington is thrilled Nick Birbilis is joining her as deputy dean (below). “Our band of co-conspirators to reimagine engineering and computing grows,” the ANU dean of those disciplines tweets. Good-oh, but isn’t secrecy core to a good conspiracy and who is Professor Huntington conspiring against?

Labor has announced the panel tasked with preparing the terms of reference for the party’s promised “once in a generation” inquiry into post-secondary education. The panel will meet on June 19, which just happens to be National TAFE day, which institution the Opposition uses as a synonym for training. As Labor shadow education minister Tanya Plibersek put it yesterday, “Labor wants prospective students to see TAFE and uni as equally attractive study options.”

The panel of notables includes astute choices. Student-funding policy expert Mark Warburton is there.  As is Jennifer Westacott from the Business Council of Australia who wants a clear role for TAFE. The indefatigably optimistic Rod Camm from the Australian Council for Private Education and Training is a member. But given the backgrounds of many members it seems overall terms of reference from the group will start with the inquiry asking why TAFE is a good thing and escalating the positives from there.

Full membership is: Jennifer Westacott, Catriona Jackson, in-coming chief executive of Universities Australia, Ross Milbourne, former VC of UTS,  Mark Warbuton, Sally McManus, ACTU secretary, Rod Camm, Jeannie Rae, national president of the National Tertiary Education Union, James Pearson, CEO Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Pat Forward, Australian Education Union TAFE secretary, Craig Robertson, TAFE Directors Australia, Mary Faraone, CEO Holmesglen TAFE, Don Zoellner, TAFE policy expert from Charles Darwin U, Shelley Mallett, policy researcher at the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Brian Howe, Hawke and Keating governments cabinet minister.

Simon Birmingham was wearing his education minister hat with his SA senator jersey yesterday, announcing the snappily named Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Innovative Wine Production. The University of Adelaide based centre will work with Charles Sturt U and partner organisations on “industry challenges” “plus cutting production costs and improving quality.

For a $4m investment it’s a cost-effective announcement compared to the huge amounts of defence production money going into SA Chris Pyne announces (below).

QUT has built its brand on the applied technology it teaches – which makes marketing so much easier than it is for universities who are not much different from their competitors and rely on slogan led strategies. The new QUT recruitment spot has a simple and all there more credible for it, message about what studying there delivers. “As technology evolves you can too.”

Lara McKay is moving back to the University of Melbourne. Ms McKay rebuilt the university brand with brilliant briefs for the Collision and Made Possible by Melbourne campaigns. She left last year to run marketing comms for the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games but will return to UniMelb in August to become master of Ormond College. Her predecessor there was Rufus Black, now VC of the University of Tasmania.

Nick Birbilis is moving from Monash to ANU where he will be deputy dean of engineering and computer science.

Simon Wilkie will be the next dean of business and economics at Monash U. He joins from the University of Southern California. It will not be his first experience of a Group of Eight institution, having done an undergraduate degree at UNSW. Professor Wilkie was chief economic policy strategist at Microsoft from 2014 until this year. He starts at Monash in January.

Isabelle Skinner from James Cook U is the new CEO of the International Council of Nurses, the global umbrella body for 130 national associations. Dr Skinner is now a research fellow at JCU’s Mount Isa Centre for Rural and Remote Health.

Mike Daube was made WA Australian of the Year last week and this week Curtin U awarded him a professorship emeritus, along with Gwidon Stachowiak and adjunct professor John Stephens. PVC Andris Stelbovics becomes a John Curtin distinguished professor.

Defence industry minister Christopher Pyne enthusiastically promotes defence industry-university research partnerships in his home state of South Australia, providing opponents of them with a convenient list of hard targets.

Yesterday the National Union of Students hopped into one of them, attacking Flinders U management for partnering with British defence company BAE Systems , which Con Karavias from NUS says “sells arms to despotic war criminals,” citing Saudi Arabia. With the other two SA universities also engaging with defence providers there are ample more examples for the NUS “books not bombs campaigns.”

Officials from the Department of Education and Training had a terrible time in Senate Estimates yesterday as Labor senator Doug Cameron asked difficult questions about their failed apprenticeship management system -including having to take on notice who the training minister was when there were first problems. But there was some good VET news yesterday, and it is while since CMM could write that.

The estimable National Centre for Vocational Education Research reports that while 2016-17 full-year apprentice and trainee numbers were down 2.8 per cent, starts in the ’17 December quarter were up 7.6 per cent on the previous year.

The new UMultirank is out featuring comparable data on hundreds of universities, including 29 Australian ones. Want to know why people look at the commercial top to bottom league tables? Spending some time comparing institutions on UMR