Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also place on the record a contribution to debate on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007. I do so, of course, on behalf of the people of Adelaide and also to show my support for the second reading amendment moved by the member for Perth earlier today. After listening to government members speaking in this debate, including the contribution by the previous speaker, some of us could be mistaken for thinking that after this legislation is passed all of Australia’s higher education sector problems are going to be miraculously cured. Sadly, this is not the case. After 11 years of neglect by this government, our higher education sector needs a lot more work and a lot more input than that which is contained within this legislation. Whilst it is refreshing to see that the government have been reminded that they do indeed have responsibility for our universities, many people in the community may have forgotten that over the past 11 years for good reason. At times I forgot that during the contribution of the previous speaker when we were hearing about the waterfront and interest rates. Anyway, it is very refreshing to have the government come to this parliament and introduce measures for our universities. It just would have been better if they had been realised and acted upon at some time during the last decade, not just in the lead-up to the next election.

I was reminded that in previous elections this government has had some problems having things to say on the matter of higher education. At the last federal elections in my seat of Adelaide, which is a marginal seat, we had a series of debates during the campaign, which the then sitting Liberal member was happy to attend. We debated human rights, poverty, homelessness, health and range of issues. But for one issue the member was absolutely adamant that she was unavailable to attend a debate. That issue was higher education. One of the universities in the electorate tried to organise a debate, and the sitting member was continuously unavailable at the time suggested. Finally, it was given to her to find any time she could come and talk about the Howard government’s record on higher education. Sadly, she was unable to do that and, for the only occasion in any of those debates, sent along a senator instead because she did not want to discuss higher education in the seat of Adelaide.

At least this legislation does offer some long-awaited positives. Sadly, it also contains some further nasties for our higher education sector—nasties which I argue are not in the best interests of our country and our students. In particular, I would like to outline my concern about measures in this legislation that further increase the HECS burden on many young Australians. I also want to speak about the latest move, contained in this legislation, to lift the cap on Australian full-fee-paying places—something I personally find absolutely abhorrent. But first I will commend the government on some of its measures, particularly the announcement of the Higher Education Endowment Fund. Within my seat of Adelaide there are two universities and several campuses. The University of Adelaide is one example where funds for infrastructure are very much needed. It is an absolutely beautiful campus with some very old buildings. I am sure there will be people at Adelaide university who are delighted to see that parliament is discussing putting more funding into infrastructure on our university campuses. The University of South Australia is also in my seat of Adelaide. It is a university that has undergone some amazing capital works projects recently. It has built some new, state-of-the-art facilities and would also welcome more government investment in university infrastructure.

The issue of higher education, and particularly this government’s neglect of the higher education sector, is something that has affected my life. It may be credited, or discredited, as one of the factors which led to me being here today. I was not an overly political person until, during my time as an undergraduate student, I had the misfortune of being at university when this government came into office and slashed the funding to the higher education sector. I saw firsthand the consequences of that and it is something which, at the time, I said I would fight to make sure that Australian students have access to a quality higher education sector with ample government funding.

Whilst the government has unveiled plans to look into the infrastructure of our universities, sadly the problems in our higher education sector are far greater. One problem is the completely inadequate levels of funding to the universities themselves. Another is the massive cuts that have been given to student income support and the fact that we now have students struggling to juggle their studies with three or four part-time jobs whilst they are at university. We have seen the attack on student services on campus through the government’s VSU legislation. We have also seen massive increases in HECS fees and, of course, this government’s introduction of full fees for domestic undergraduate students.

People, quite rightly, point out that it was a Labor government that introduced HECS. I studied under HECS and do not have a problem with the notion of somebody being asked to make a contribution towards their education. There is no doubt that people receive a personal benefit, as well as benefiting the common good, from undertaking their own educational pursuits. The problem is with balance, and we need to make sure that we get the balance between the personal and government contributions right. That is where the government have continually distorted the HECS system to shirk their funding responsibilities. In 1997, the government increased HECS fees by between 35 and 125 per cent. In 2005, they then gave our universities a green light to increase HECS fees by a further 25 per cent. The HECS fees in this country are now so overwhelming that they are pricing many talented Australians out of a higher education.

The Minister for Education, Science and Training states in this parliament that this is not the case. She often talks about reports or studies which state that HECS fees in this country are not a disincentive to students undertaking a higher education. I say to the minister that she should put down the reports, go to a university campus and talk to the students there, because she will hear a very different story.

A conversation I had, which will never leave me, was with a woman in my electorate during the last election campaign. I spoke to an Adelaide mother about higher education and I mentioned that the government had a proposal to allow a green light for a further 25 per cent HECS increase. She was, very proudly, telling me about her son who was in year 12 and about how hard he worked and how it was his ambition to be the first member of their family to go to university and get a degree. She told me about how he was juggling his part-time work and how committed he was to his studies. She then broke down and explained that, if HECS fees continued to go up, she thought she might have to tell her son that that would be a bigger debt than any member of their family had ever taken on before and that maybe he should not go on to university. This is the real-life impact that these ever-increasing fees are having on young Australians and on Australian families. We had that election and the fees did increase. I often wonder what happened to that young man, and I also wonder how many other young Australians are out there in exactly the same boat.

Last year, the previous shadow education minister and I visited Adelaide university and spoke to some of the students and it was a very eye-opening experience for me. We spoke to a group of young undergraduates and asked them what they were studying, and there was quite a diverse range of courses that they were all engaged in. We then asked why they had chosen those courses and the responses were quite shocking to me when people said, ‘Well, you know, I’d always dreamed of going on and doing this other course, but I looked at how much they each cost and this one was much cheaper, so I thought that I’d do this one instead.’ This is what is happening on the ground.

These huge HECS fees are a massive disincentive to kids following their dreams and pursuing the careers that they long to pursue. They are being priced out of many careers because of the massive level of HECS burdens being placed on them. Sadly, this legislation does nothing to fix this; instead it offers further HECS increases. Contained in this legislation we see a green light for further increases in the HECS levels for students studying accounting, commerce and economics and this is precisely the wrong direction that we should be going.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, of which I am a member, recently held an inquiry into balancing work and family in Australia and heard evidence about the impact that HECS fees were having on young people’s decisions to have families. We have a Treasurer who is quite happy to stand up and tell the people of Australia that they should have one for the mum and one for the dad and one for the country, but let us look at what is actually impacting on decisions. If we really want to increase the birth rate then how about listening to those young people out there who are saying, ‘When we have massive HECS debts, that is not an opportune time for us to make the decision to have a family or to increase the size of our family.’ When you combine that with the ever-increasing cost of homeownership in this country—and first home ownership is becoming more and more unattainable for many young Australians—I think this parliament should be debating the long-term consequences of such a massive HECS burden on young Australian students.

Moving away from the HECS issue, there is sadly another nasty in this legislation when we look at the issue of full fees. This legislation removes the cap on domestic Australian full-fee-paying students and enables wealthy students, who can afford massive up-front fees, to access a higher education that may be denied to more worthy students who have worked harder, received better results and are more qualified. Can anybody really say that this is fairness that this government offers in higher education?

It has also been revealed that for the first time ever Australian universities are able to offer some undergraduate degrees solely to those who can afford to pay for them up front. Lucrative courses such as, say, law or dentistry can now be organised under the changes in this legislation to actually offer zero Commonwealth supported places but a number of up-front fee-paying spots. Personally I find it completely abhorrent that this federal government is today introducing an education system which encourages queue jumping and now rewards earnings over learning. That is where we are at in this debate today. Education in this country must be something that all Australians can access. It cannot be that we have a country where young kids who do not come from a wealthy background now say that there are some degrees which they are being priced out of, that they can never access no matter how hard they study or how worthy they are.

What do we hear from the education minister when we put this to her? The education minister has the gall to come into this parliament and say that what the government is doing with Australian full-fee-paying places is offering Australian people ‘choice’. How out of touch is this government if they cannot recognise that there are a large number of Australians who simply do not have the choice to pay $100,000 or more for a degree! This is not a choice that many Australian families have open to them.

The other argument that we have heard about full-fee-paying places, which the Prime Minister likes to come out with every now and then, is that we on this side of the House are trying to discriminate against Australians because overseas students can come in and pay full fees and access university places. But of course there is one very big difference here. Overseas students have not had parents that have been paying taxes for Australia so that their children can access a higher education system. That is a very key difference which the Prime Minister conveniently omits.

The government members who have contributed to this debate have spent some time reading quotes from vice-chancellors praising the move to remove the fee on full-fee-paying places. There is a very simple reason for this: of course they would. These are the vice-chancellors who are crying out for funds for their universities because this government has neglected them for the last 11 years. These vice-chancellors are now becoming increasingly reliant upon either overseas full-fee-paying students or domestic full-fee-paying students because they need any way to get more funding into their universities as the Howard government has neglected them for far too long.

In my own electorate in Adelaide the Adelaide university vice-chancellor has already indicated that the university would try to lift domestic fee-paying places, hoping for an increase from three per cent to five per cent of enrolments. We have also seen one Australian university reveal that it now receives a massive 45 per cent of its total revenue from overseas students’ up-front fees. This is why the vice-chancellors are coming out and raising this proposal, because they are completely reliant on this funding.

It is really disappointing that we have so many members of this parliament that do not take into consideration the effect that this is having on young Australians when they are being placed further and further out of the higher education sector. I look across this chamber regularly and see so many government ministers, many of whom benefited from a free education in this country, that have absolutely no idea of the financial pressures that they are putting on young Australians today.

In contrast, for a long time we have been talking on this side of the House about the need for an education revolution. This does not just include the higher education sector. We are talking about early childhood education, schools, trades, training institutions and our universities. We also believe that it is the Commonwealth government that has the responsibility to adequately fund our universities. We talk about this not only because it is a social issue—and I unashamedly believe that education is one of the best ways to improve people’s prospects of life and improve their future prosperity—but we also argue it because this is a really important economic debate. We need to realise that as we move forward into the 21st century education is not just social expenditure; it is in fact integral to our economic growth. We are a nation intent on competing on the international stage as a knowledge based economy, and investment in education and human capital is surely our very best chance to do that. Investing in our best and brightest is surely the only way to do that. Australia’s future prosperity will be built on fostering education, skills and trades amongst our people, enabling us to compete in a competitive global market not just by pursuing an outdated ideological approach to outsource the cost of our education and increasingly push the burden further and further away from the Commonwealth government and more and more onto the shoulders of young Australians who can least afford it. There are some shameful elements of this legislation, particularly the full-fee-paying measures and any moves to further increase HECS. It is time we got serious about debating the long-term consequences that this is having on the young people that we should be investing in and educating today.

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