Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

in reply—I thank all members who have spoken on this bill and I thank the member for Banks for his very generous remarks. The Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008 is a clear expression of the government’s commitment to abolishing Australian workplace agreements and our clear commitment to removing unnecessary government interference with the workplace relations and administration of our universities and other higher education providers.

Earlier this year I announced the setting up of a major review of Australian higher education to be led by Emeritus Professor Denise Bradley. In announcing that review I said that the Rudd Labor government would be addressing the next reform challenge in higher education, and that is to inject diversity, choice and the highest quality into our mass higher education system.

In last night’s budget, the government began the process of addressing the Howard years and their neglect of funding to higher education. This financial year we are going to invest $500 million in higher education. We are delivering our election commitments for higher education and, of course, we are creating the Education Investment Fund with $11 billion, of which higher education will be a beneficiary.

The previous government, by contrast, not only neglected investment in the higher education sector; by its actions it thwarted the very diversity that we need to develop in higher education. Two of the worst examples of this were the higher education workplace relations requirements, the HEWRRs, and the national governance protocols. This bill amends the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to bring about an end to the previous government’s HEWRRs, which as speakers on this side of the parliament have forcefully reminded the House were all about requiring higher education providers to offer Australian workplace agreements to their employees. This was industrial relations by threat, by coercion and by reference to penalty—because, of course, no matter what choice they wanted to make about their own industrial relations framework, universities were at risk of losing money unless they joined the Howard government in its industrial relations extremism.

The bill also removes the national governance protocols, which impose governance conditions on higher education providers. This is a layer of interference in university management that the government has publicly committed to removing, and today we are standing by that commitment to release our higher education providers from restrictive and unnecessary bureaucratic requirements. We trust universities to manage their own workplace relations and we trust them to develop the approach to governance that best fits their circumstances. We want to see our universities forge their own distinct missions. Universities under this government will be freed from the micromanagement and red tape which characterised the approach of the previous government and freed from their ideological interventions in workplace relations. Universities will now be able to direct their attention and resources back to where they are needed most: the development and delivery of world-class higher education teaching and research.

While the national governance protocols will be removed as a condition of funding, of course the government wishes to encourage good governance practices in universities. We want to develop those high standards of governance in a collaborative way. Our universities are standing ready to meet this challenge. Today, Universities Australia announced its support for the government’s legislation. Its chair, Professor Richard Larkins, welcomed the government’s intention to:

… loosen existing prescriptive requirements and allow universities to pursue their missions as self governing bodies.

Already the government has begun discussions with Universities Australia with a view to leading the development of an agreed voluntary code or set of best practice university governance principles. These will be developed and implemented by universities; they will not be forced on them by government. I understand that this issue is on the agenda for vice-chancellors and chancellors to discuss at their forthcoming meeting in June.

Our approach is one of collaboration and trust. We trust universities to manage their workplace relations. We trust universities to deal with their governance structures in a proper way. This government will—and all governments should—require rigorous reporting and accountability in relation to the expenditure of government funds. This government will have rigorous accountabilities. But this government’s approach is about accountability being around outcomes, not about the micromanagement of inputs. We do not believe that you get the best performance by telling universities what inputs to use; we believe that you get the best performance if you define what outcomes and outputs you want from government funding and then you allow universities to use their expertise, to diversify, to experiment, to innovate, to deliver the best. We are talking by definition about some of the most highly qualified, highly educated and highly intelligent Australians in the nation.

I am aware from discussions with the shadow minister for education that the opposition will not oppose this bill at the second reading. I am also aware that the opposition intends to pursue an amendment to this legislation to keep the national governance protocols on foot. The government will oppose this amendment for a number of reasons. The first is that the government does not believe the opposition’s stated view that, in amending and possibly delaying indefinitely the passage of this legislation, it does not have a weather eye on the industrial relations consequences of that.

This, of course, is the Liberal Party that brought this country the industrial relations extremism of Work Choices, which forced it on to the higher education sector through funding threats and which still supports Work Choices today. I am suspicious that the game playing with the other part of this piece of legislation, the national governance protocols, is really a ruse to distract us from the opposition’s attraction to the higher education workplace relations requirements. That is, we know that this is an opposition that is staggering around unsure as to how frank it should be about its continued support for Work Choices. Its inconsistency in this area means that, on one day, the current Leader of the Opposition, Dr Nelson, will say, ‘Work Choices is dead,’ and then on another day he will say, ‘John Howard had it right when it comes to industrial relations,’ meaning, of course, that Work Choices was right.

So we have a Leader of the Opposition who obviously believes in Work Choices. He certainly did as a cabinet minister and he defended it every day in this House. He no longer wants to be frank about his support for it. That is true of the opposition generally but, given we know that the opposition still supports Work Choices and would reintroduce it in a flash if ever re-elected, we are deeply suspicious that game playing with this legislation is all about Work Choices and AWAs and not truly about national governance protocols at all.

Even if the opposition were to be taken at face value and we accepted, for the purposes of debate, the proposition that they are genuinely interested in national governance protocols as opposed to industrial relations extremism then we would say the following to the opposition. We do not believe that a one size fits all approach is appropriate for the higher education sector of the 21st century.

We believe that the next fundamental reform for this sector is to allow diversity and to recognise the diversity that is there in institutions today. Charles Sturt University is a very different creature from the University of Melbourne—we know that. Government, as a matter of policy, has to recognise that and government has to allow those two very different, very distinct but both very valuable institutions to forge their own way and define their own paths. A blunt instrument like national governance protocols will squash that diversity. It will hold back what should be the next fundamental reform to this sector: recognising and celebrating that diversity and recognising and celebrating that this nation can, if we properly resource and value higher education, have universities in the system of very different shapes and sizes which are world class in what they seek to do.

Secondly, we do not accept from the opposition that national governance protocols are about accountability. We of course are going to have accountability mechanisms for government expenditure. But, when one looks at the national governance protocols, they deal with procedural matters and with process matters, not with outcomes. That was the hallmark of the last government’s approach to funding right across education. They loved to fiddle and micromanage, but they lacked a strategic vision. So the national governance protocols, when studied in detail, really do not add to the debate about accountability. Before I move from that point, on the question of accountability we would also say to the opposition that we do not believe that they can stand before the higher education sector and say that they, the Liberal Party, have the reputation to preach in this area, given things like the regional rorts slush fund and the sorts of breaches of public trust and basic standards of accountability, which, if they happened in any university, would get utter condemnation from members of the opposition. The standard of accountability that they have applied to themselves is an unacceptable one. It therefore really is hypocritical to stand on that platform of poor accountability, of cynicism, of political manipulation and of money for projects that never came to fruition and to lecture others that somehow they know all about accountability and others do not.

Thirdly, in interfering in higher education institutions in this way, the opposition continues to demonstrate distrust towards the higher education sector and it continues to demonstrate its arrogance—indeed, its paranoia. We believe that higher education institutions, universities, can be trusted to get on with the business of management without a government minister purporting to sit on their shoulder ready to wield a funding penalty stick. We believe that we should be celebrating and valuing the contribution of our academics and our universities, but not through this structure that basically sends a message to all the world that somehow these people are not to be trusted. This government is prepared to trust our universities; we are prepared to trust our vice-chancellors, our chancellors and the university system. We do not believe it is appropriate for the opposition to come to this parliament and say that somehow these people are to be distrusted. If the opposition was really being honest about this, it would say that its motivation is really a sort of institutional paranoia in the Liberal Party about universities because, in the Liberal Party’s mind, the history of universities somehow stopped in the 1960s and 1970s. I suspect the shadow minister for education may not have even been born in the 1960s, but I believe he—

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