Dave Tollner (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am honoured to speak today on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007. The bill will amend two acts—the Higher Education Support Act and the Australian Research Council Act. I am pleased that the amendment to the Higher Education Support Act will enable the expansion of the Commonwealth scholarships program to provide an additional 3,500 Commonwealth scholarships annually. Two thousand of these new scholarships will be available to students who may not otherwise qualify for a higher education place to study a two-year associate degree as a pathway to a full degree. Northern Territory students are set to gain from this amendment.

The bill provides an additional year of funding for 700 Commonwealth Education Costs Scholarships and 210 Commonwealth accommodation scholarships for Indigenous students undertaking a higher education enabling course. The Commonwealth scholarships program will also be expanded to include a one-off payment of $4,000 to eligible Indigenous students to assist with the costs of attending university. In this way, up to 1,000 Indigenous higher education students will be assisted each year. The increase in scholarships provides students from low-income backgrounds, particularly those from rural and regional areas, with increased opportunities to go to university. Participation rates for students in rural and regional areas have been largely unchanged over the last decade. The additional scholarships will provide more help to students who really need it.

The amendment bill will change the current administrative arrangements for the scholarships to ensure that they are offered at around the same time students are offered a place. This will help students make better informed decisions about which offer to accept. Scholarship funding will now be paid directly to students by the Australian government. Commonwealth scholarships provide opportunities to attend university for students who otherwise might not. The increased number of scholarships will help to build the nation’s skills for the benefit and future prosperity of the country. This bill is further evidence of the Australian government’s commitment to making the higher education sector more responsive to student demand by making a university degree even more accessible to students.

The May federal budget was very much an education budget. For young people, it opened up even more educational opportunities, allowing them to recognise their full potential. The facts speak for themselves. Howard government investment in higher education increased 31 per cent in real terms from 1995-96 to 2007-08. The budget provides $1.9 billion for higher education, plus an additional investment of $5 billion in a perpetual Higher Education Endowment Fund. This includes $222 million for further support for students and practical things like extending rent assistance to full-time students aged 25 years and above who are receiving Austudy. From 1 January 2008, around 11,000 students could be eligible for rent assistance for the first time. The measure will support mature-age participation in higher education and will contribute to increasing the skills base at a time of skills shortages. Mature-age Indigenous students receiving Abstudy are already able to receive this rent assistance.

The bill will also extend the youth allowance and Austudy to students enrolled in an approved masters by coursework program which is required for entry to a profession. This is a bonzer budget for education. Do not just take my word for it. The President of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, Gerard Sutton, said that the budget is ‘spectacular’ for the higher education sector. Compare this with Labor’s policy to abolish full-fee-paying places. As the member for Tangney just outlined, this would cost in the order of $500 million over four years, and that is not including private universities, like Bond and Notre Dame, or postgraduate places.

The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007 removes red tape and constraints on flexibility in a number of areas and provides real opportunities for young people. The bill provides Australian universities with more support for structural reform to promote greater specialisation, diversity and responsiveness to our local labour market needs under the new Diversity and Structural Adjustment Fund. The fund will allocate $209 million over four years to universities that can identify strategies to better meet student and employer demand. The fund will particularly focus on addressing the capacity of universities to meet our local market needs. Priority will be given to universities in regional areas and smaller metropolitan universities which can demonstrate the greatest need for structural reform and the greatest input in local labour markets.

The federal government will reduce the amount of red tape that binds universities by working with the states and territories to streamline the relevant regulatory and legislative requirements. It will ask the states and territories to refer regulatory powers over their financial management of universities, which will prevent duplication and reduce red tape. Specifically, there would be only one layer of financial auditing and associated reporting requirements imposed on universities.

The bill is part of an unprecedented investment in higher education. Together with a range of other measures, it will fundamentally reshape the higher education landscape. This will allow more of our universities to be world-class and encourage greater excellence, diversity and specialisation in the sector. Media coverage of the education component of the budget focused on the $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund, which will provide a guaranteed and ongoing stream of earnings to the sector to contribute to improved capital works and research facilities. The Higher Education Endowment Fund is expected to provide a dividend of around $900 million over three years from 2008-09, which will be distributed to universities.

But this is only part of the education good news story. Around 3.4 million students from more than 9,600 schools and school communities across Australia will benefit from more than $1.2 billion in additional funding over four years. This additional funding takes the total level of investment in schooling by the Howard government to over $10 billion in 2007-08. That is a big commitment. New budget measures also support the Australian government’s plan to restore the value of technical and vocational training to help ensure that a high-quality technical qualification is as prized as a university degree. Students, families and school communities across Australia will benefit from the introduction of national teacher training and registration standards announced in the budget. The Howard government will work with the states, territories and other stakeholders to develop a national framework to improve teacher education and to ensure more consistent, high-quality teaching across Australia.

There has never been a better time to be a tertiary student. Only three per cent of domestic undergraduate places are full-fee-paying, and the number of people who want a place at a university but cannot get one is at a historic low. The policy of fully funding overenrolments up to five per cent will effectively mean that every student who wants a university place next year will be able to get one. In broader terms, the amendment bill will benefit higher education providers, who will gain from the increased flexibility that allows them to address areas of skill shortages and who will also receive additional funding for some disciplines.

Students will benefit from additional funding for various disciplines as the quality of courses will be improved—for example, via smaller classes, better course delivery and/or equipment and materials. The higher education sector will benefit from addressing key concerns raised during the review of the Higher Education Support Act 2003—namely, the call for a reduction in the number of clusters to allow institutions to better manage their enrolments and additional funding for key disciplines. A fundamental premise of the Howard government’s education policy is that universities should be accessible to eligible students, whatever their background, and be accountable and transparent to taxpayers, who sustain them. OECD data shows that Australia’s public support for students in tertiary education is 0.4 per cent of GDP—above the OECD average of just 0.25 per cent of GDP. This statistic supports the other tenet of the federal government’s education policy—that Australian universities are expected to not only equip graduates with the skills they need for the 21st century but also create new knowledge that will underpin Australian innovation and global competitiveness.

I would now like to speak a little about Charles Darwin University, one of Australia’s youngest universities, which is in my electorate of Solomon, in Darwin, and exemplifies this approach. It is already becoming a specialist in fields like health, tropical medicine and Indigenous studies. Charles Darwin University is set to receive $1.3 million in 2008 and $2.2 million in 2009 towards the cost of the establishment of an allied health complex at the Casuarina campus. The funds have been allocated through the higher education Capital Development Pool program, which has been used to construct purpose-built allied health and advanced nursing infrastructure to allow the university to effectively deliver its range of health related courses. The complex will include pharmacy dispensing laboratories, a clinical teaching laboratory, flexible ward space and a dedicated lecture theatre and will facilitate an expansion of the programs related to allied rural, remote and Indigenous health.

The Capital Development Pool program supports proposals which assist in new campus developments in suburban growth corridors and regional centres, capital developments to establish or expand courses identified by the government as discipline areas of national importance and communication and IT infrastructure projects which improve the cost-effectiveness and quality of educational delivery. Almost $94 million in additional funding from the Capital Development Pool has been allocated to Australian universities in 2007-09.

The bill we are debating today is also committed to making Australian universities more responsive to student needs and labour market demands while ensuring they are still world class. A good example is the recent funding of Charles Darwin University under the Australian government’s voluntary student unionism transition fund and the Support for Small Businesses on Regional University Campuses Program to construct a sport and recreation precinct and a medical centre. Charles Darwin University will receive $5 million for a sport and recreation precinct and $400,000 for a medical centre at its Casuarina campus. A total of 37 projects have been approved nationwide and they will contribute around $58 million to the higher education sector to assist universities to adjust to the implementation of voluntary student unionism. The projects supported by these grants will provide students all around Australia with improved services and facilities which promote social interaction and good health. The broad principles laid down in this bill will impact directly on Charles Darwin University and all institutions of higher learning nationwide. This is a very positive step for the Northern Territory because it will upgrade quality standards and develop synergies with international universities.

Earlier this year, when speaking on another education bill, I alluded to my support for the establishment of a stand-alone United Nations University research and training centre on traditional knowledge in the Northern Territory. The United Nations University has made an in-principle commitment to build a research centre for traditional knowledge and Indigenous studies. CDU won the backing of the UN University to locate the centre in Darwin against strong international pressure, and once again I congratulate its distinguished vice-chancellor, Professor Helen Garnett, for her vision in promoting this collaboration. Considerable matching funding has been sought from both the Northern Territory government and international philanthropic sources. I am still very hopeful that federal funds will be made available for this project. CDU is seeking funding of several million dollars from the federal government as a one-off contribution or, alternatively, as funding contributions on a year-by-year basis over the long term. The UN University has agreed it will contribute several million dollars to the establishment of the centre, provided that there are matching funds from the Australian government. The proposed Indigenous knowledge centre is acknowledged by Indigenous groups as a facility which will advance economic and social outcomes for Aboriginal people nationwide, and indeed overseas, and will make an important contribution to defining the challenges in the field of traditional knowledge.

The UN University functions as a decentralised global network and adopts an interdisciplinary approach to its specialist fields of study. Its headquarters are at the UNU centre in Tokyo and it is supported by a worldwide network of research and training centres in cooperation with local universities. Although Charles Darwin University is a small university, with a total student population of around 5,300, the proposed UN centre has enormous potential for Charles Darwin. The Territory has the potential to become a world leader in fields like Indigenous studies and tropical medicine, and the location of the UN University at CDU would provide some obvious synergies. The Menzies School of Health Research, for example, received $5.3 million in the budget to expand the school in Darwin and extend its Indigenous health research, which is regarded as world class. And there is a need to rationalise Indigenous education courses and develop centres of specialisation and excellence.

As I said in the House earlier this year, I strongly support the idea of a United Nations centre for Indigenous studies which would consolidate all Northern Territory Indigenous educational groups, including the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, into one world-class centre. The Batchelor institute is controlled and run by Indigenous Australians and specialises in working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students from across Australia, particularly from remote communities. It aims to develop an Indigenous approach to mainstream disciplines and careers. The institute offers higher education and vocational education and training courses ranging from apprenticeships to certificates. The proposed tie-up between CDU and the UN University should strengthen ties between Batchelor institute and Indigenous communities through cooperation in Indigenous research and development.

This will attract overseas students—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—as well as academics to the Northern Territory and reinvigorate higher education, scholarships and research in the Indigenous education field. It will also promote partnerships in research and scholarships with other organisations and researchers. New funding sources and grants, for example, would expand and strengthen Batchelor’s research profile and provide research grants for staff. So far, research activity in the institute’s dispersed environment has been very limited to say the least. There are currently no students undertaking higher degrees by research. If the Batchelor institute were to merge into CDU—a move which, by the way, I am very keen to promote—that would allow them to focus on the areas in which they should do best. Those areas are predominantly in the VET sector—for example, training apprentices and the like in a whole range of fields and skills that are sorely needed in most remote communities.

I commend this Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007 to the House. The legislation is part of an important long-term plan to help secure sustainable funding for Australia’s university sector and to ensure that that funding meets the needs of its students. I am particularly concerned about the situation in the Northern Territory, and this bill will go a long way to improving our circumstances and delivering to us the best possible outcomes.

See this speech in context