Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women's Issues) Share this | Hansard source

The average outstanding HECS debt is $10,500. Ninety-seven per cent of students are in Commonwealth subsidised places. The average repayment time for debts that have been fully repaid is just over seven years and, as any accountant will tell you, a HECS loan is just about the best loan you will ever get in your life. Of those who have a debt, around 88 per cent owe less than $20,000 and 72 per cent owe less than $14,000.

These students know the value of their investment in education. Average lifetime earnings for male graduates are around $622,000—less for women, about $400,000— more than for those who do not have a university degree, and the lifetime unemployment rate is one-quarter of that of a nongraduate. So, over a lifetime, a full-time worker with a degree will earn about $2.62 million and a full-time year 12 graduate can expect to earn about $2 million. Graduate doctors and lawyers earn a great deal more.

Let us turn to the government supported places—what we call HECS places. There are record numbers of HECS places available for Australian students. As the Prime Minister pointed out, 97 per cent of all Australian undergraduate students are in Commonwealth supported places. This means that, on average, this government pays three-quarters of the cost of their study.

In 2003 the Australian government committed to creating more than 39,000 places between 2003 and 2009. More than 18,000 of these places have been added to the system since that commitment was made. I announced almost 5,000 new commencing places only a few weeks ago, with a particular focus on the skills shortage industries such as nursing, teaching and engineering. As a result of this massive injection of new places—and the member for Jagajaga knows this—unmet demand has dropped by more than 61 per cent since 2004. ‘Unmet demand’ is the number of students who would have been eligible to go to university but did not get a place.

More than 90 per cent of eligible year 12 completers who applied to university in their own state received an offer from a university. That is the best result in decades. When the Leader of the Opposition was the Minister for Employment, Education and Training, what did he do about unmet demand? The number of eligible applicants who could not get a university offer reached something like 100,000 when the Leader of the Opposition was the education minister. So what did he suggest? The Sunday Telegraph of September 1993 reported:

School leavers must be prepared to miss out on university—

this is Kim Beazley—

the federal government warned.

This year in New South Wales, unmet demand fell from 5,000 to 3,000; in Victoria, from 6,000 to 4,000—and it goes on. Tasmania had unmet demand of 200, which would have been annihilated by my announcement a few weeks ago of 290 new places for Tasmania. You have to contrast this with 100,000 eligible applicants who could not get into university in 1992 when the current Leader of the Opposition was the minister for education. What was his answer? He said: ‘You’ve got to miss out on going to university,’ or ‘We’ve got too many universities in this country. We’re going to have to cap university expansion. We don’t need any more.’ He did not allocate more places, as this government has done; he said, ‘You've got to close down universities.’

Today, under this government—and thanks to our generous investment in higher education and training—unmet demand for university places is virtually negligible. Entry scores are at their lowest in decades. Universities are looking to give back thousands of unfilled places this year, and I am going to reallocate them to other providers who are still experiencing student demand. The reality of the situation is that any qualified student who wants a Commonwealth subsidised, taxpayer supported place can find one—and the member for Jagajaga knows that.

In 2003 the coalition brought to this parliament a plan to revolutionise funding for universities. Rather than get block funding, universities would receive payments for the subsidised courses they actually delivered for university students. This was accompanied by an $11 billion injection in new funding for the sector. That is new funding of $11 billion over the next decade. As part of that package, students were offered loans for full fee degrees.

The Labor Party introduced full fee degrees in postgraduate courses. This government introduced loans for full fee degrees in undergraduate courses in both private and public institutions, and this is known as FEE-HELP. We have recently lifted the amount a student can borrow from $50,000 to $80,000 in all degrees, but in medicine, veterinary science and dentistry a $100,000 cap applies. As a result, almost no student is prevented from entering a degree on the basis of up-front fees. So, like HECS students, students who access FEE-HELP only need to start repaying their loan when their income reaches the threshold, which is $38,149 this year. Also as part of that package, the coalition government directed over $400 million to create more than 43,000 scholarships for Australian undergraduates to help them recover their living costs while studying.

Turning to the facts about full fee paying students, at the latest count in 2004 there were no more than 16,299 Australian undergraduate full fee payers in the higher education system. We are talking about a student body of one million students and 6,000—or about 37 per cent—of them were in intensive summer and winter courses. The fact is that the average annual fee for a full-time, fee-paying undergraduate student is $12,112. The member for Jagajaga is out their scaremongering, saying that you have to sell your house to go to university, when the average annual fee for a full-time, fee-paying undergraduate student is $12,112, based on latest figures.

Students undertaking a three- to four-year degree with these fees would usually complete their course for less than $50,000. And yes, the Good Universities Guide lists some degrees costing more than $100,000. It is a good thing that students have these facts to inform their decisions, because HECS places are available for them. But has the member for Jagajaga actually bothered to find out how many students are enrolled in these courses? I am advised by the University of New South Wales that the medicine-arts degree that is listed at $237,000 has one enrolment. The $219,000 medicine-arts degree at Melbourne has no enrolments. And—guess what?—Melbourne proposes no intake of students into this course next year. Monash has a mere three or four takers for its medicine-law combined course. Also, Monash has a combined biomedical science and engineering course listed at $101,000 that has one student.

Labor’s position on full fee payers is full of hypocrisy. Astonishingly, in their so-called white paper—it is increasingly a brown paper—on higher education, their first commitment was to maintain the coalition’s policy of voluntary student unionism. Their second commitment was to abolish full fee paying places in only public universities. So Labor are committed to throwing 16,000 students out of their courses. By contrast, Labor have no problems with foreign students from China, Malaysia, Singapore and India coming to Australia. Under Labor, they can come here in their thousands, take up university places and pay full fees, but that opportunity is denied to Australian students. If a prospective student is determined to undertake a particular course and just misses out on it, Labor would force that student out into another course or into another institution or into another state.

Under Labor, there is no opportunity for an Australian student who has just missed out to follow their ambitions into a particular discipline at a particular university. Labor denigrates these students as being unworthy of university study, yet full fee payers have shown themselves as competent at study as their colleagues. In fact, each year around 700 full fee paying students—about eight per cent of the total fee-paying cohort—transfer into HECS places. These students are more than competent enough to undertake a degree and succeed. They do not deserve the denigration that the Labor Party heaps upon them. It is competitive to get into full-fee courses, and a quick review of the Good Universities Guide shows that full fee places are offered in the highest demand courses—with law, medicine and veterinary science chief among them.

Let us take an example: say a student from the member for Jagajaga’s electorate gets 95 for their tertiary entrance ranking score. That student desperately wants to do law. They have a choice: they can go to ANU, one of Australia’s top universities, in a Commonwealth supported place, or they can go to the University of Melbourne in a full fee paying place. They got 95 but Melbourne university’s HECS cut-off is higher. Just because that student chooses the University of Melbourne, which is closer to home, Labor would have you think this student is unworthy of that course.

A review of the Labor policy shows the extent of Labor’s hypocrisy. Labor wants full fee payers out of public universities, but Labor has no problem with full fee payers in private universities—nor, it would seem, any problem with HECS places in private universities. So it is okay under Labor for a full fee payer to sit next to a HECS student in a private university but it is not okay for a full fee payer to sit next to a HECS student in a public university. Where is the logic in that?

Do you know what Labor’s ideological hatred of full fee payers in public universities will cost universities? They would throw out 16,000 students, and more than $520 million over the next four years would be lost to universities. If you add that to the $1.5 billion that universities would lose under Labor’s mooted reductions to HECS, the $400 million more it would cost in scholarships, the more than $600 million it would cost to pay for student clubs and activities, and the $850 million it would cost to change the parental income test which applies to youth allowance—all options in Labor’s paper—it can be seen that you would have a very, very expensive education policy under Labor.

I ask the Deputy Leader of the Opposition—and it is a question that I know her backbench colleagues are asking her: where is the money coming from? And there is division in the Labor ranks. An article in the Age on 7 April 2006 reported:

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley will face pressure from his own party to abandon Labor’s long-standing opposition to full-fee-paying places for Australian undergraduate students.

…     …         …

But the Age has learned of a behind-the-scenes push within the party to review the policy, which universities claim would cost them millions of dollars. (Time expired)

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