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

The Deputy Leader of the Opposition may be interested that the Higher Education Endowment Fund board chairman, Phil Clark—the board chairman appointed by the former government, when the Deputy Leader of the Opposition was the minister for education—has welcomed the new broader endowment structure and the end to the inflexible reliance on earnings. He argues, as reported in the Australian:

The $11 billion is good but the totally integrated framework (of the new fund) is the real winner; most people will miss that.

Clearly, amongst the people who have missed that are the people sitting on the opposition benches, the members of the Liberal Party.

The endorsements for the new fund, as reported in the Australian, go on. Mike Gallagher, the Executive Director of the Group of Eight universities, has said that the way in which capital can be spent is ‘a major shift’. He goes on to say:

Otherwise it would just be this drip ... over many years, a couple of hundred of million a year.

He noted that we are ‘billions behind the rest of the world’. The flexible nature of the fund will obviously allow the government the discretion to provide funding where it is needed most.

The endorsements of this new fund go on, endorsements not understood by the out-of-touch Liberal Party. TAFE institutes have welcomed the Education Investment Fund. The CEO of TAFE Directors Australia, Martin Riordan, has hailed the new fund as great news for students and stated:

It will boost TAFE capacity to meet growing demand for 21st century technology training by industry.

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