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

He was obviously a very good football watcher at the age of one and has a very good recollection. So we have finally found the shadow minister for education’s strength—football. If the AFL is looking for a future participant in its governance structure, it might look to him. He might well be better at that job than he is at his current one.

Within the institutional past of the Liberal Party, within its corporate knowledge—and this runs deep in its veins—is the belief that universities are associated with radicalism, that universities are somehow associated with the Left, that universities are somehow associated with unacceptable people and, consequently, it is the job of conservative politicians to come in and to manage them. It is a long time since the Berlin Wall came down, it is a long time since the 1960s and 1970s and it is time that the Liberal Party got over it and recognised that the higher education institutions of today are managed by people who understand their job, who understand how hard it is to compete on the world stage, who do not want to play partisan politics but who do want to manage their institutions so they can forge their way in a competitive world where it is tough to be a university, it is tough to maintain your share of research, it is tough to maintain your international education market and it is tough to maintain quality for undergraduates. It requires smart, sophisticated management and governance, and that is what our institutions are doing. They do not require a politician sitting on their shoulder to do that.

If I can conclude with this: it does strike me as passing strange that here we are in the parliament of this nation and the Liberal Party, with its supposed belief system—when it had one—that was supposed to be about liberalism, supposed to be about allowing people to get on with the job and be their best and supposed to be opposed to unnecessary government regulation and big government, is arguing for the maintenance of microregulation and red tape. It does seem to me passing strange, and I think it will be recorded as another chapter, another piece of evidence, about how the Liberal Party of today has lost its way, lost its understanding of its position in Australian politics, lost its value system and lost any intuitive sense of what it ever stood for. This is one small example, but the response to the budget is a much bigger one. This is an example with significance, though, and it is what is being displayed by the opposition today. The government will oppose these amendments and will support the legislation. I suspect that we will hear more of this in the days to come as the matter goes to the Senate, but the government will oppose these amendments. We believe that we should just let universities get on with the job.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.

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