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

I thank the member for Cunningham for her question. I know that she and members of the House who are interested in jobs today and jobs of the future will be very interested to see this part of the budget documents, Transforming Australia’s higher education system, which delivers the government’s response to the Bradley and Cutler reviews and which charts a future vision for Australian higher education and also records our infrastructure spend for higher education for universities and vocational education and training to support jobs today. This is the next chapter of our education revolution, to ensure that our universities can be a world-class system receiving the resources that they need to offer the quality that Australian students want, to increase the number of Australians with qualifications at the undergraduate level or beyond, to increase the participation of Australians from lower income backgrounds in Australian higher education, and to chart a new vision for research and for innovation. It is this blueprint for reform which has been hailed by the Group of Eight universities as ‘visionary’. It is this blueprint for reform that delivers $5.7 billion to our higher education and innovation systems over the next four years.

Detailed in this document is our major infrastructure investment to support jobs today in the institutions which will matter so much for the jobs of tomorrow. In this budget we announced almost $3 billion for infrastructure in universities, vocational education and training, and research from the Education Investment Fund. This investment included an announcement of $934 million for 31 projects from the Education Investment Fund for round 2. Twelve of the successful projects are in vocational education and training, 11 are for higher education teaching and learning facilities and eight are for research. Taking into account funding that is also being provided by the project proponents, the total value of these projects is $1.8 billion.

I am not surprised that the member for Cunningham asked me this question because she would have seen in this document a major new investment in the University of Wollongong: $43.8 million for the Australian Institute for Innovation Materials. I am sure that there are members on this side of the House, including the member for Ballarat and the member for Bendigo, who would have looked at this list last night with some sense of excitement about the possibilities that it meant for their local universities.

The budget also provides a further $500 million for the Education Investment Fund round 3, and $200 million of this round will be to support the structural adjustment of Australian universities as they move towards a demand driven system for the future. The government has also announced a sustainability round worth $650 million, with $400 million to be dedicated to research infrastructure related to the Clean Energy Initiative, which my colleague the minister for resources has just been outlining to the House, and a $250 million investment for vocational education and training, higher education and research infrastructure related to climate change and sustainability activities. As part of the Australian government’s commitment to creating and supporting the jobs of the future, there is the planned allocation of $2.5 billion of funds into the Education Investment Fund, to be allocated to the groundbreaking Clean Energy Initiative, clean energy obviously being such an important part of the jobs of the future. I wait with interest, like other members of the House, to see whether tomorrow night we will find out that all of the money to support Australia’s universities and vocational education and training institutes will be cut by the opposition, as they are part of the things that the shadow Treasurer will cut, because we do know of course that the track record of the Liberal Party is not to support higher education. I will be waiting to see whether that is one of the things that they will be saying they will take a saving from.

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