Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to participate in this debate on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006. It is a very important one. I am also very happy to support the series of amendments, all seven of them, that the shadow minister for education has moved. Like the shadow minister, and like everyone else in this place, we have had one week to prepare for this. We have an explanatory memorandum but, as with so many other bills in this place, there is no Bills Digest from the library because they have been engulfed with work on the other bills in the education area that they have had to deal with.

The library does a magnificent job under immense pressure to assist all members and senators in their preparation for speeches in this House and the Senate. It provides another point of view, which is useful, from people who are expert in the field. But it is indicative of the approach the government have taken with this particular piece of legislation, which has some very significant provisions in it, that they have rushed it through in the way that they have. That point was made by the shadow minister well and tellingly, and it is an indication of the respect the government have for the other side in this place—given that there is some assistance to their members in preparing for debate in this House. That is point number one.

Point number two is that that will not stop us dealing with this, even at short notice. I will start with our amendment and then relate it to this bill. The amendment is that we will give this bill a second reading but we will condemn the government for two things to begin with. The first is:

(1)

jeopardising Australia’s future prosperity by reducing public investment in tertiary education, as the rest of the world increases their investment ...

We have seen that Australia alone amongst the developed countries in the OECD has effectively reduced its education spending on higher education in both the university and TAFE areas by seven per cent. At the same time we have seen, as the shadow minister pointed out in her speech, the OECD’s Education at a glance 2006, a 454-page in-depth analysis of education across the world, which shows that those other countries have increased their investment in public education by 48 per cent. Simple mathematics shows that there is a 55 per cent differential between what is happening in Australia and what is happening elsewhere. Every vice-chancellor in Australia knows the impact of the reforms Dr Nelson put in place, the amount of red tape and bureaucracy and the significant detriment that all universities face because of immense funding pressure.

Another indication of that is in the provisions in this legislation for indexation. We know that the government does not believe in full indexation of costs for universities. If you look at the particularities of it you get a pretty clear and stark message. The reason this is so serious is that the rate of indexation is lower than their costs in terms of what they are paying their staff. The differential is in the order of $500 million. I quote the shadow minister:

The rate of indexation being applied to university operating grants this year means that they will increase by just two per cent. By comparison, average weekly earnings rose by an average of 4½ per cent annually between 1998 and 2004. As salary costs are the largest component of university operating expenses, ranging between 45 per cent and 70 per cent, this gap between indexation and wage costs continues to rise.

She talks about the increase being in the order of $500 million. She notes the increased funding cap for the Australian Research Council in schedule 9 of this bill, and we are supportive of that. But we underline the fact that if you continue to take this approach to indexation, our tertiary institutions cannot but fail to meet their commitments. We do not have a ‘McDonald’s-ised’ education system where they can run out and get all that extra funding from the private sector. The fundamentals that they have to undertake are very great.

One of the other provisions in this legislation which we support is the allowance for what are termed winter schools. We already have summer schools operating in Australia where universities undertake a range of different academic activities, some involving intensive courses, to allow students to catch up or to move ahead. There is a proposal here to have winter schools as well. That means you do more with your existing staff. The staff are required to undertake that work during those periods. Where you have a situation of inadequate indexation it is a significant problem and a significant burden, and a lot of our best people have, over a number of years, been attracted overseas because of the continuing problem. All universities are suffering this.

I know that the impact on the University of Western Sydney has been particularly great. A series of cutbacks has been made, including cancelling future courses in osteopathy. That course has been very successful but they have had to abandon it. The current students going through will be the last. The provision of highly skilled people in osteopathy from the University of Western Sydney was concordant with its general foundation as a teaching institution producing high-quality teachers, nurses and associated professionals. They cannot do it because the funding pressure has been too great. And that is a university that has had a very wide span in Sydney from the south-west through to the north-west, and also in terms of its different activities and the institutions that made it up in the first place.

The second thing we condemn the government for is:

(2)

failing to invest in education, training, distribution and retention measures to ensure that all of Australia has enough doctors, nurses and other health care professionals to meet current and future health care needs ...

The point made by the shadow minister, the point that I am making and the point that has been made by other members of the opposition is that the lack of investment in these particular areas, when those in the university sector called for greater provision and saw that there was going to be a future problem of great significance, over a 10-year time lag relates directly to the problem we have in this area.

This bill finally takes that up in concert with the deal done at COAG regarding the health workforce and mental health package to provide new medical general nursing, mental health nursing and clinical psychology places and increased funding for nurse clinical training. There is provision in the bill for that. We have 605 new commencing medical places, 1,036 new commencing nursing places, that extra funding for nurse clinical training, 431 mental health nursing places, 210 new clinical psychology places and 40 new places for a centre for excellence in Islamic studies. This is an omnibus bill, and you will find all sorts of bits and pieces, not just in the medical area but across a range of different approaches.

There is also money for a commercialisation training scheme for new postgraduate research places in science and innovation. That is a very welcome measure because historically we have had a fundamental problem in turning innovative ideas and products into commercial reality. Translating the great ideas and inventions that we have into something that Australia can really make something of is our one continuing fundamental underperformance. In some areas the reason has simply been scale and the fact that Australia does not have the market depth to develop these onshore. In some cases you have to get the big providers. This was the case with Ralph Sarich’s orbital engine, despite, during our time in government, $500 million plus of support and the support of BHP for that work. In the end, to get it up and running, support had to come from major companies such as the Ford Motor Company.

We do not have one of the great strengths of the United States system—an intersection, an interweaving, of the academic areas with business so that people can move readily from one area to the other. We do not have the interfaces they have that allow them to better commercialise their products because there is that flow, that understanding and that experience. I am highly supportive of that approach. It is extremely welcome. We need to do a great deal more of it, as we need to develop our technology parks—and I will come to that a little bit later—and the interaction that they have with our universities.

I will cover the third and fourth objection briefly, given the amount of time I have. Our third objection is to the massive increase in the cost of HECS, forcing students to pay up to $30,000 more for their degree. The fourth is to the creation of an American style higher education system where students pay more and more, with some full-fee degrees costing more than $200,000 and nearly 100 full-fee degrees costing more than $100,000.

The weight has entirely shifted. The burden of this on Australian students is now in the order of $18 billion. There is a massive disincentive built into this, which is why our fifth objection is to that massive increase in the debt burden on students. Total HECS-HELP debt is now over $13 billion and projected to rise to $18.8 billion in 2009. You cut out a lot of people who see that as a problem and either do not go into the higher education system at TAFE or university because they do not want to burden themselves with that debt or else they do not take on higher degrees because of all the other pressures they have on them in terms of mortgages, the increase in interest rates and so on.

There are lost opportunities in a number of different areas. That is one of the reasons we have such an underprovision of the skill sets that we should have in Australia. There is a fundamental skills crisis in this country because not enough people have been trained. We needed the increase in places for doctors and clinical places for nurses that are provided in this bill well before now, and we need a great deal more.

What is the government currently doing to fill the hole? It is bringing in people from overseas utilising the 457 visa, which was originally for companies like IBM or Xerox to bring in executives or accounting specialists—people they could not otherwise get—as part of their multinational structure. They would bring them here for up to four years and fill those niches. The number of those visas has dramatically expanded into the hundreds of thousands. We need to train young Australians. We need to train them first and we need to train them now. We have needed to do that over the last 10 years and it has not been done. Finally they are making at least some movement in this regard. But the system is under immense pressure because of the indexing changes the government have made and it has less capacity to provide for our needs.

The last two objections are the failure to address serious concerns about standards and quality in the higher education system, putting at risk Australia’s high educational reputation and our fourth-largest industry, and an inadequate and incoherent policy response to the needs of the university system to diversify, innovate and meet Australia’s higher education needs. It is our fourth-largest industry. We earn something in the order of $7 billion a year from bringing students in from overseas. We do that because Labor in government initiated the process of opening our education system up to the world and encouraging students to come to Australia. The reason they came was because we could provide a world-class education system. That world-class education system is not as strong as it should be and it has failed in a number of areas simply because of a lack of government commitment to expanding it and nurturing it in the way that it should.

What is Labor going to do about that? In the white paper Australia’s universities: building a future in the world, Labor set out a significant set of reforms for the next Labor government in the education area. The second last of those amendments that we moved goes to the question of quality. We propose to set up the Australian higher education quality agency and give it real teeth to enhance degree standards and protect quality teaching and research. This is immensely important because our standing in the world governs the income that we will get from students continuing to come here rather than choosing to go to the other two big educational providers—the United States, which has 32 per cent of the international English based education market, and the United Kingdom, with 15 per cent of that market. We currently have seven per cent, and we should be able to grow that significantly if we have the right approach to this.

A series of reports have indicated concerns of international students about our standards being high enough and being maintained. The quality assurance is not there. Those concerns are there, are apparent and need to be addressed, and that is why one of the fundamental keystones of our reforms will be to provide for that. To encourage improvements in quality, we will make sure that there is extra funding for adequate indexation. We simply say to the universities and to the TAFEs: improve what you are doing with the extra funding that we give you—the funding that I talked about at the start. The rate of indexation at the moment is two per cent. What is the rate of wage growth? Four and a half per cent. What is the deficit? Two and a half. Over the years we have seen the impact Australia wide of paring and cutting back the ability of institutions to maintain themselves and to maintain their quality levels. We are fully committed to a full indexation rate. It should not have been changed by the government. You can materially see what changes have been made and the effect that they have had. That is another fundamental step.

We will also scrap full-fee degrees for Australian undergraduate students at public universities, which we have argued since the government introduced them. Further, we will expand associate degrees to address the national shortage of technical skills. As I have argued previously, this is one of our fundamental problems and difficulties. We do not have appropriate technical skills. We have massively imported people from overseas. They are only a stopgap, but they will become a permanent stopgap unless there is a commitment from Australian governments to train our own people to adequate levels.

Ten years ago, when this government came in, Dr Kemp launched new apprenticeships in Australia, which were traineeships that basically took the original apprenticeships and pared them down and cut them back. In the past 10 years, people who have been through those new traineeships and come out the other end and industries that have utilised the skills that have been developed know that there has been a fundamental funnelling and narrowing in the capacity and skills of the people the program has produced. Why? If you do not have a broad enough base and a deep enough set of experiences in apprenticeship training, you end up with people just doing the thing a particular employer needs at a certain time and, over the period of the traineeship, getting experience in that and little else.

If we do a comparison with our previous apprenticeship systems, where people had a broad experience in a number of different areas, we see that they developed their ability, their craft and proven trade skills that were broad enough and deep enough. We have to re-create that situation and not only train more people but train them much better than has been done in the last 10 years. At the end of our period in government we were in a position to launch Australia’s trade skills into the region and send our companies full of tradies into the region to make a lot of money for Australia and for themselves. Instead of that, we have had utterly the reverse— (Time expired)

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