Darren Cheeseman (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying earlier today in this debate, these laws are terrible. They resulted in the Prime Minister losing his seat, along with a dozen of his cronies. They are bad for universities, they are bad for TAFE colleges, they are bad for schools and they are bad for every Australian workplace. They are especially bad for universities. And the overwhelming majority of Australians recognised this at the 2007 election. The Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008 will rid us of Work Choices in another important area of Australian life. Our universities will work better for seeing the back of Work Choices laws, and this is one more step towards achieving this. University staff will not feel so constrained to speak their mind. The families of university staff will feel better knowing that they are more secure.

There is another important context to this debate, and that is the financial context of the former government’s financial threats to universities. As we all know, John Howard’s record and the record of the remnants of his former government, on the opposite side, are close to the worst in the Western world on university funding—and their tortuous use of statistics will never hide it. The record of the previous government in funding higher education was truly shameful. The former government’s reign saw a massive drop in funding for higher education, close to the biggest cut, in real funding terms, of any advanced Western country during the same period, at a time when the knowledge industry was the most important in our nation’s future. It was absolutely shameful.

I will repeat a key statistic here that has already been raised in this debate, because it certainly bears repeating. From 1994 to 2004 other OECD countries increased public investment in tertiary education by an average of 49 per cent. In the same period of the Howard-Costello government, public investment in Australia was cut by four per cent. What a shocker. That statistic is perhaps the most damning statistic of any of the records of the previous federal government, and there are many records of shame held by the last government. If we overlay the previous Howard-Nelson government’s threat to further starve universities of funding against this backdrop of ongoing funding starvation, you can see the big stick they were wielding.

Removing the requirement that universities meet the higher education workplace relations requirements as a condition of funding will remove any requirement that universities must offer AWAs to employees. It will remove the enormous mistrust that had grown between the former federal government and tertiary institutions. One of the worst manifestations of this distrust was the requirement that universities abide by the higher education workplace relations requirements, which required them to pursue the Howard government approach to workplace relations or suffer a financial penalty. The end of higher education workplace relations requirements will clear the way for the Rudd government to develop a healthy new relationship with our universities based on trust and mutual respect. Full Commonwealth grant funding will now flow to our universities. In the future, relations will be based around negotiated funding compacts reflecting the distinct missions of each university, not around ideological industrial relations agenda.

In her second reading speech, my Deputy Prime Minister spoke of ‘getting the heavy foot of the Liberal Party off the throat of our universities’. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. That is exactly what they were doing: they were choking the institutions financially. But I would go one step further than the Minister for Education: this is not just about getting the heavy foot of the Liberal Party off the throats of our universities; it is about getting the heavy foot of the so-called Liberal Party—the now very much misnamed Liberal Party—off the throat of university tutors, professors, associate professors, deans and vice-chancellors.

In conclusion, I would remind the Liberal Party that the Australian people overwhelmingly rejected Work Choices at the last election. The Liberal-National coalition of course needs to do a lot of soul-searching about this. But I would suggest to the Liberals that they also need to look even deeper, to think deeply about their own traditions as Liberals. If they do not wish to recover their lost Liberal traditions, perhaps a merger with the Nationals could be made easier. They could just drop the name ‘Liberal’ altogether and become the Australian National Party. The former government’s Work Choices legislation, and other supporting legislation, was absolutely shocking for working families. It very much hurt the core trust that had been built up in universities between staff and those institutions. I applaud this legislation.

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