Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 before the House and also on the amendment moved by the member for Jagajaga. This is an omnibus bill that is amending a series of budget outcomes, particularly the commitment by the Council of Australian Governments to the Higher Education Support Act and the Higher Education Funding Act. It is also recognising additional places through COAG to the health workforce and mental health packages and increasing the capital development pool for universities. The legislation includes increases to the FEE-HELP limits, allowing higher education providers to charge different amounts of HECS and tuition fees to different students in the same units. It also introduces a definition of winter school. Why you would want to be going to university for winter school is beyond me; why anyone would want to do summer school is beyond me as well—but we are introducing a definition into the bill.

I want at the outset to say that this is a very rushed bill—so rushed that the library has not had time to prepare a Bills Digest. I am not sure why there was such a rush to get an omnibus measure such as this into the parliament. I do not want to imply any criticism of the Parliamentary Library, which does a phenomenal job in getting together Bills Digests, but there is actually a lot to digest within this bill. Full comprehension of this bill would have been greatly assisted by a Bills Digest. I am wondering why the minister saw an incredible need to rush something through the parliament at this point.

It also does not allow people the opportunity to go out and consult within their communities to ask about the impact of these bills on their institutions. Within my seat of Chisholm, I have three phenomenal teaching institutions: one of Australia’s largest, Monash University; the city campus of Deakin University; and one of Australia’s leading TAFEs, recognised as such on numerous occasions, Box Hill TAFE. These institutions are all inadvertently impacted by this bill, and I have not had the opportunity to speak to the VCs and other people that I normally would consult with before coming into the House and making comment on a higher education bill. I think there is also a missed opportunity in that.

We have had 10 long years of government neglect of higher education—10 sad years of government neglect. If we needed any reminder, the OECD report issued this week gives the Howard government a complete F in its attitude—a complete fail in its approach to higher education. Public investment in TAFEs and universities in Australia has declined by seven per cent. This is appalling.

In an age when we are trying to innovate, when we need to make changes, when we are talking about such things as the fear of climate change and when we should be putting money into research and higher education, we have actually reduced our funding to TAFEs and universities. At a time when we are facing a severe skill crisis and when we should be assisting TAFEs and universities to skill up individuals in high demand areas, we have decreased funding. This goes against every other OECD nation. Those nations have had not a small average increase but a 48 per cent increase, according the OECD’s Education at a glance 2006 report. In Australia there has been a seven per cent decline; on average across the OECD, there has been a 48 per cent increase.

This has occurred at a time when we have seen spiralling HECS fees and spiralling HECS debt. The report shows how the government’s HECS hikes mean that Australian university students are now paying the second highest fees in the world. Australia used to pride itself on a university system that was open to all and accessible to all on merit. Now we have a university system that is accessible not to all but only to those who can afford to pay.

This is an absolute shame and an indictment of the government’s priorities—or its lack of priorities. In 10 long years we have not had any higher education direction policy or platform. All we have had is increasing red tape. The government keeps saying that it wants to be hands off and let institutions run themselves, but in higher education, year in and year out, the government has imposed ever-increasing red tape. The universities are absolutely drowning under it. It went to the stage where the previous minister had the authority at the end of the day to determine which courses went ahead and which courses did not. I am not sure that he is a higher education expert, but he was the one who got to sign it off. That was causing incredible grief within the higher education sector. The OECD has also sheeted home blame for this increasing spiral to the Howard government by stating:

In Australia, the main reason for this increase in the private share of spending on tertiary institutions between 1995 and 2003 was changes to the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) that took place in 1997.

Student debt under the Howard government is ballooning by $2 billion a year and is projected to blow out to $18.8 billion by 2008-09. I repeat: $18.8 billion. I love the new title ‘Commonwealth assisted places’. I think this is highly entertaining. We often hear the wonderful terms that this government comes up with in titles of bills—terms that are just ridiculous. But a Commonwealth assisted place? A Commonwealth assisted place is where a student gets to pay HECS. That is how the government is assisting people. It is assisting them into massive amounts of debt by increasing HECS debt all the time. I am not sure how it is assisting them in any way, shape, size or form. As I said, as someone with two universities—with Monash University being the biggest in the country—within my electorate, it is something that is glaringly obvious and that is brought to my attention day in and day out.

When my younger brother completed university, he said that he had a HECS debt equivalent to the GDP of a Third World nation—and he completed his university degree many years ago. I think that now we probably have students whose HECS debts are the size of the GDP of some very large nations. That is the case. These young individuals find it incredibly difficult to start out in life, because they are burdened by this HECS debt. They need to pay it off to survive.

Where is the government’s policy? We have seen increased interference but no direction. We have seen a decline in standards—to such an extent that we are losing some of the foreign students coming into our universities. We have seen a much higher increase of staff-student ratios. There is increasing pressure within the academic sector because nowadays you cannot have the same rapport with a lecturer: when you are sitting in a lecture theatre with 500 people, it is difficult to have a one-on-one relationship with your lecturer. We have seen a massive increase in class sizes. We have seen a reduction in tutorials. Nowadays tute groups are almost anathema; they just do not happen. I certainly got to enjoy a lot of tutorials during my university degree and they were of great assistance to my education, but they just do not exist anymore.

We have also seen a plethora of online courses. While that situation has assisted in some areas and is an innovation in teaching, it is also a decrease in the ability for student-lecturer interface and a reduction in student-student interface. Some people like it. Some people use it as a resource. It is a benefit for distance education and for family needs. But it also imposes incredible demands on both the staff and the students.

All of us in this place rue the day that email was invented. It means that people want an answer and they want an answer now. A student online—using email—is just as demanding to lecturers. They want an answer and they want it now. They probably interact more across the keyboard and the screen because they do not have to say something in a class where they might be terrified. So this plethora of online courses is also having a detrimental impact on the ability of students to study effectively and is placing an increased burden on staff in the university sector.

The Howard government is so out of touch that it is letting the public investment in universities and TAFEs fall despite calls from Australian businesses for more engineers, doctors, scientists, plumbers, carpenters, electricians—and the list goes on. We are seeing a spiralling HECS debt and a spiralling, out-of-control system. We are seeing greater pressure on people to privately pay for their university degrees. And we have seen a massive decline in research and development, and in research and development spending, that is causing adverse impacts within our economy across the board.

The Howard government’s massive fee increases are also discouraging some young Australians from going to university. The AVCC’s report on applications for undergraduate courses shows a decline in applications over the last three years from a high of 229,427 in 2003 to 218,529 in 2006. Under the Howard government, young people are graduating from university with ever-increasing levels of debt, making it much harder for them to buy a home, start a family and get ahead. The average HECS fee paid by an Australian student has doubled under the Howard government, discouraging prospective students from taking up places at university. The Howard government fee hikes mean that medical students will pay more than $30,000 extra over the course of their degree, law students over $20,000 and engineering students more than $16,000. And that is for HECS places; that is not even talking about full fee paying places.

In 1999 we had the infamous promise from the Prime Minister that there would be no $100,000 degrees. He obviously was not looking too far into the future because we have seen, according to the Good Universities Guide 2007, an explosion of full fee paying degrees that are in excess of $100,000. At Monash University, which is within my electorate, a medicine-law degree costs $214,600. An engineering-science degree at Deakin University, which is also within my electorate, is $105,000. I am not sure where too many families find $214,600 to send their child to university. I do not know how individuals do that. We are seeing that money is buying places in universities over merit—and that is an outrage to our egalitarian society.

Several years ago a constituent who had received a score of 99.5 came to my office. That score was a pretty good effort. I thought she would get into law at Monash. She had won the Monash University law prize the year before. The cut-off for that year was 99.7—she needed another 0.2. If she had been a full fee paying individual, she would have got in with 91, but she was not. She was the last of nine children from a large Italian Catholic family within my electorate. She had done brilliantly, but she did not get to go and do law at Monash. In fact, she did not do law at all that year; she did a communications degree at the University of Melbourne that she paid for through HECS and by working in numerous casual jobs. She subsequently transferred to the ANU, where she is completing her law degree, much to her parents’ and her satisfaction. But it was cruel and barbaric. If her parents had had the money she could have gone, but they did not. She had done so brilliantly well, and it was just outrageous.

I often say in this place that I am of the first generation within my family that is university educated. There are five of us. We all went to Monash University, and it was the proudest day of my mother’s life when her final child went through and qualified for that university degree. My father was a bank teller. There would have been no way he could have paid for the five of us to go to university if we had had to pay for those sorts of degrees. It never would have happened. But we are going down that path. We are going back to the days that my father-in-law faced, as the son of a tram driver, where he had to repeat his leaving certificate twice so that he could get a fully funded Commonwealth scholarship to go and do medicine at Melbourne University. He went back to university and sat it all again to get the results so that he could get a full Commonwealth scholarship all those years ago—and that is where we are going. We are actually seeing a massive rise in scholarships being offered by universities to attract people to take up places because they simply cannot afford them.

The OECD report said that we are underspending on higher education and we are putting more debt burden on our university students. Another interesting thing in the OECD report is the decline in international students coming into Australia. Education is the fourth largest export earner for Australia. Within my electorate, Monash and Deakin universities rely heavily on international students. They make up an enormous part of their revenue base. But we are seeing a decline in the total intake of foreign students. Why? It is because our degrees have diminished in quality and standard and they are not as attractive to overseas students as they were previously. It is an absolute outrage that this government has allowed this to happen. The other reason is that they are incredibly expensive. They make it incredibly expensive for people to come from overseas to study here. We have the third highest fees for international students, behind the United States and the United Kingdom.

Within this bill there are measures to assist with additional places in medical schools. I welcome that and thank the government for the funding of $18 million to Deakin University for its new medical school in Geelong and for $5 million for Monash University Medical School in Gippsland. At Deakin University, this funding will hopefully see about 120 students going to the Geelong campus by 2008. They are well on track with getting all their accreditations for that, and I congratulate Sally Walker and her team at Deakin for the effort they have put into securing those places. However, I do want to say that I am a little disappointed with Deakin University today. Sadly, Deakin University—while it is a great university and we welcome it within my community—has not been a good neighbour. The campus in my electorate was previously a smaller teachers college in Burwood, and it has morphed into a very large university campus. Every day a new building is going up at Deakin in Burwood. Indeed, it is the largest campus of the entire Deakin University, which is quite entertaining as it is meant to be the city campus of a regional university and not the other way around.

The campus is affecting my electorate’s suburbs. The university, because of lack of funding, cannot provide sufficient car spots. That might seem trivial to some, but with the gridlocks in Burwood, it is making it very difficult for students to find appropriate car parking at Deakin University. Whilst we would welcome other measures such as car pooling and transport into the area, Deakin at Burwood is not sufficiently linked with transport. There is a tram out the front, but I defy anybody who has had to get the tram from Burwood to town or back again to say that it is a great route. I used to have to do it as a child going to school, and it takes forever. So it is not the easiest place to get to. It is within zone 2, so it is also quite expensive in a transport sense. People therefore rely on their cars.

University students also rely more heavily on cars nowadays because they are in and out of the campus and in and out of their part-time jobs. So the lack of car parking at Deakin is having a hugely detrimental impact upon my local residents, so much so that I actually took the university to the VCAT recently. Sadly, today I have discovered that I lost my VCAT hearing. That does not really surprise me, but I thought we would stand up for the local community and say that the university should be a good neighbour. I welcome the university and applaud it being there. It is a great activity centre. But if it is going to be within the suburbs—as it is—it needs to be a good neighbour. It needs to do more about consulting and about providing appropriate car parking.

The decision handed down by VCAT today quite squarely puts the issue of car parking as one to do with economic factors. The university simply cannot afford to pay. We are not only starving our universities of funds to actually educate people; we are starving them of the ability to have appropriate infrastructure so that they are good neighbours within suburban settings. So I am a little disappointed with Deakin University today. I hope that they can be good corporate citizens, regardless of the VCAT decision, and actually agree to put in the thousand places that they had agreed to with Whitehorse City Council. Do something good. I call on the university to behave like good neighbours and, regardless of the VCAT, go ahead and put in the 1,000 places that they had previously agreed with Whitehorse City Council.

There are far more serious issues—although, in my local neck of the woods, Deakin’s effect on the local suburbs is probably one of the largest issues. We have on record the Vice-Chancellor of Monash University, Professor Larkins, bemoaning the lack of spending within the Australian economy on research and development. This is placing a huge burden on the university and its ability to provide appropriate training and appropriate initiatives that an institute of the stature of Monash University should be providing. A recent article in the Age, ‘Australia an R&D “backwater”’, says:

AUSTRALIA is destined to be a science and technology backwater unless business and government lift investment to global levels, according to the head of the country’s largest university.

Monash University was increasingly looking overseas, especially to India and China, for research links as Australia failed to keep up with OECD levels of funding, vice-chancellor Richard Larkins said.

Professor Larkins said multinational companies had failed to take advantage of the quality of research and development in Australia, while the Federal Government had not increased funding to the required level to enable Australia to compete effectively in R&D.

So, instead of going to great companies within our area, instead of going to the government, Monash University has had to go to China and India to get research and development happening. As I said, in a time of ever-increasing change, we need high-tech industries now more than ever. We are losing manufacturing excessively in this country, we are not looking towards other innovations to replace it and we have global warming breathing down our necks. But, instead of investing in research and development, we are forcing Australia’s largest university to go and seek links in India and China. This is an outrage, and this government stands condemned for its complete disregard of the higher education sector.

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