Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I rise today to make some comments on this bill, it occurs to me that it will not be the last bill before the parliament which seeks to undo the ideologically driven agenda of the previous government. The Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008 removes some of the more odious measures introduced by the coalition in relation to workplace relations. For the Labor Party, this was a threshold issue. No government should be in the position of imposing industrial relations conditions on educational funding. Yet the previous government took this step in 2003. Instead of using the available funding for the improvement of the quality of education in schools, the Howard government effectively blackmailed the universities into implementing its grossly unjust industrial relations policies. In effect, the previous government pushed to reduce conditions and allow AWAs to override existing agreements. Not one of those changes had a scrap of relevance to the universities’ core functions of teaching and research.

I recall an open letter from the National Tertiary Education Industry Union published in the Australian on 7 November 2005 which opposed the legislation. One of the comments in that letter was:

Academic freedom is part of the collegial and collaborative culture of the best Universities in the world, and is at the core of their international reputation.

The international reputation of our universities has suffered greatly in the past decade and this government is now taking steps to revise that state of affairs. This government can say, in truth, that it was elected with a mandate to dismantle the workplace relations agenda of the previous government. That government had no such mandate yet chose to impose its political and social agenda on the electorate.

In its first months, the Rudd Labor government has sought to introduce the changes it promised at the election. The budget last night showed that in a way that I have not seen in the 18 years that I have been in this place and in the 18 budgets that I have witnessed. The first budget of a new government can tell you a lot about a government. The first budget of the Howard government, with its drastic cuts, particularly those to ATSIC of $470 million, showed its mean spirit. The budget last night shows that this government is fair dinkum when it makes a promise and that it will deliver on it in full. The feedback in the electorate is of people feeling pretty happy, pleased and refreshed at a new approach after more than a decade of a different approach. This bill is another step in the government’s intended direction on promises.

When taken with the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill 2008, this bill will take the initial steps towards dismantling the unfair workplace changes introduced by the Howard government. To tie tertiary funding to industrial relations requirements is un-Australian. Fortunately, we are now seeing the dismantling of that strategy and the replacing of it with a fair and balanced system.

To some, the introduction of workplace relations requirements on university funding was seen as the single greatest attack on the autonomy of universities. Under Section 33-17 of the act, a provider could have its basic funding under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme reduced by up to 7.5 per cent if it failed to satisfy the minister that it had complied with both the higher education workplace relations requirements and national governance protocols. It is worth taking some time to consider these requirements. There were five of them.

First there was choice in agreement making. Higher education providers were required to provide choice to employees by ‘offering AWAs to all new employees employed after 29 April 2005 and to all other employees by 31 August 2006’. I fail to see the choice offered under this condition. The requirement to do with direct relationships with employees states that there must be direct consultation between employees and the higher education provider. Involvement of third parties was only able to occur at the request of an affected employee. It is all very well to assume that the people primarily dealing with the employer are articulate academics who are regarded as able to speak up for themselves. But we should not forget the thousands of non-academic staff employed by universities, for whom dealing directly with senior management at the university could be a terrifying ordeal.

Workplace flexibility was, as we have seen, the classic contradiction in terms. The guidelines specified that working arrangements and conditions of employment should be tailored to the circumstances of the higher education provider and also to its employees. What I find incredible is the following specification:

The HEP’s [Higher Education Provider] workplace agreements should expressly displace previous workplace agreements and relevant awards.

Yet the current opposition would have us believe that the whole idea of AWAs was about choice. There seems to be absolutely no choice about the express displacement of prior agreements and awards. There was also a bit about productivity and performance. AWAs were to support organisational productivity and performance.

Finally, freedom of association was, we are to believe, at the heart of these arrangements. Contained within this requirement was the directive that the provider must neither encourage nor discourage union membership. Also specified was the fact that the provider was not to use Commonwealth Grant Scheme funds to pay union staff salaries or to fund union facilities or activities. Freedom of choice seems to be the missing element here.

It is no surprise that the universities were generally not happy with this arrangement. At the Senate inquiry into the provisions of the original bill, there were seven submissions. Of those, six opposed it, including the submission from the then Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee. Labor opposition senators in their dissenting report commented on the fact that the universities surmised that they were being singled out for special treatment in particular regulations for their industry. The dissenting report noted that the universities were joining other industries, such as the building and construction industry, to be special industrial relations targets of the then government.

As I stated earlier, times have changed and the new government has a genuine mandate to reform the industrial relations system in this country. Universities will now be subject to the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill 2008. The removal of the previous grossly unfair legislation will ensure that the government will be able to move forward and develop healthy relationships with the tertiary sector—a relationship based on mutual trust and respect. The bill will provide certainty to the higher education sector. It does not reduce a provider’s Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding. Universities should be subject to the same workplace relations laws as other employers. These amendments give effect to that position.

A second part of the bill we are debating today deals with the governance of universities. The National Governance Protocols are standards which primarily cover the size and composition of governing bodies of universities and the duties of the governing bodies’ members. These will now be removed as a condition of funding. At the same time, the Deputy Prime Minister has indicated that the government will encourage universities to adopt and maintain good governance practices. In any case most of the required measures have been enacted through amendments to the various pieces of state and territory legislation that set out the governance arrangements for our universities.

However, it will be down to the university vice-chancellors and more particularly the chancellors to demonstrate their commitment to good governance, especially in managing and accounting for the use of large sums of public funding, while also engaging in very extensive commercial activities. Something of the scale of this issue was recently revealed in the Canberra Times newspaper, which reported that at one point in the stock market slide earlier this year the Australian National University had lost $100 million—approximately eight per cent of its $1.4 billion investment portfolio. There will be a joint meeting of vice-chancellors and chancellors in Sydney next month and I hope that they will use the meeting to give the government some very clear commitments about maintaining and enhancing governance within the university sector. The government has given them the opportunity to take greater responsibility for management of their own affairs. They will need to demonstrate that they are fully prepared to accept that responsibility.

The university chancellors might also take the opportunity to make a clear statement of their commitment to academic freedom—the principle that makes universities unique institutions—about which the vice-chancellors have been very quiet through the years of the Howard government. It is to be hoped that the rampant commercialism that has been encouraged in higher education institutions over the past decade has not extinguished the commitment of the sector’s leaders to this vital principle.

In conclusion I would like to return to and comment more widely on the primary issue underlying this bill—the matter of workplace relations. As I have already noted, the government has introduced the transitional bill to remove the worst excesses of the so-called Work Choices legislation introduced by the previous government. Time and again we asked the Howard government to reconsider, to play fair by all Australians and to ensure that every member of the workforce was employed under a fair, just and transparent system. We were ignored.

The Australian people have now made their judgement and those laws will be overturned. There is no doubt in my mind that the Your Rights at Work campaign, with its real world experiences portrayed on television and in print, contributed to this decision. In its ideological passion, the Howard government overlooked more than 100 years of history. The system of conciliation and arbitration that has operated in this country since Federation provided an effective base for the Australian workplace. All through our industrial history, that body was the lynch pin for workplace pay and conditions, and it worked, even in the most extreme cases. Australians always knew that they had somewhere to go when all else failed. The Australian community has now voted on Work Choices and we are now able to present to the workers of Australia a fair and transparent system of industrial arrangements, and I know that those instalments will continue under the direction of the Deputy Prime Minister.

I want to finish up with some other remarks that I think are also pertinent in relation to the sector. Last week I was invited to Glebe Books to launch a book about women and IT. The University of Western Sydney’s Bankstown campus is in my electorate. There were I think three or four other universities involved in terms of the contributors to this book. There were about 60 or 70 people present. I was invited to a meal afterwards at which there were about 20 academics and staff, who were all women. I have to say that it was fascinating listening to what they had to say about their sector and to see their enthusiasm and their reinvigoration, not only with the election of a new government—because the AWAs I have just talked about were a concern for them—but there was a refreshing view about the relationship between government and the universities. It was a change from what had happened during the previous decade, in particular in relation to the minister, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. There was tremendous hope, expectation and enthusiasm due to her being the relevant minister for this portfolio. They accept that the government and the minister are not going to be able to deliver on all of their concerns. But they recognise that with the change of government there has been a change of attitude in the relationship between the sector and the government.

From my point of view, I think the education sector is the most important sector that we as a nation need to nurture, because it creates opportunity, not only for individuals but for industry and for our whole community. We are well placed in the region if governments nurture the sector.

I had no politics as such before I went to university in 1974. It was at the time of the 1974 election. It was the Whitlam government’s policy that allowed me to go to university and get interested in politics. It also allowed me an opportunity that I otherwise would never have had—that is, as one of 10 children, to go to university and to have all of these opportunities beyond that once I had a higher education. I would like to think that if you repeat that throughout the industry and throughout our community we will get the same result—and it does not take much; a lot of it is symbolism.

It was fascinating for me was when I was having the dinner with these women, who were quite educated—better educated than me. Their book was about why women in higher education were not using computers as much as men, and they were coming up with solutions. The minister will receive a copy of the book from me because I know it is part of what this government promised in the lead-up to the last election. These studies had taken place over a number of years, and what fascinated the researchers was that the government was in sync with their studies, which were all about improving the education base and improving opportunities for our citizens. Government is crazy not to embrace that, as against harassing it and trying to push a particular ideology.

The second area where there was great hope was that there was great affection towards the Deputy Prime Minister—there was not a person in the room who did not have a good thing to say about her. That was not tokenism; that was based on what she had actually been doing in the sector, in the way that they had received feedback and in the way the government was interacting with the sector. The symbolism meant more to them than the actual substance of dollars and cents or whatever—what was important was the fact that they could have somewhere where they could put their ideas and government could look at them, listen to them and react in a way that had not been the case, frankly, for the last decade or so. So I am pleased to speak in support of the bill and say those few extra words.

I know that those on the other side at the moment are not feeling too good about themselves. And the truth is they have good reason for that. All they have got to do is look in the mirror.

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