Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I can assure you I always have an ear for Madam Deputy Speaker and an ear for my colleagues at the same time.

There is a growing chorus of dissent about the obsession with branding that consumes this government, and this minister in particular. Everything under this minister is described as ‘revolutionary’. We have the education revolution, the digital education revolution and the Building the Education Revolution. Professor Ross Fitzgerald suggested in a column in the Australian newspaper last year that a renovation of a toilet block under this minister might be dubbed ‘flushing the education revolution’. Even the minister’s statement today was entitled the ‘higher education revolution’. The truth is that any examination of their record in higher, secondary or primary education shows that we simply cannot trust this government to actually deliver. While the Bradley review into higher education offered good ideas and highlighted the need for reform, Labor have proven themselves to be all spin and all branding but little substance. I will use this opportunity this evening to respond to the minister’s statement by weighing her lofty sentiment with what she actually delivered as the part-time minister for education.

This part-time minister is responsible for workplace relations, employment and social inclusion in addition to education. She is also the regular stand-in for our jet-setting Prime Minister. Not surprisingly, as a result, education, one of the key areas of public policy that the Labor Party like to claim as their own, has been given less attention and care than our millions of primary, secondary and tertiary students deserve and expect. Far from being the great policy triumph—the education revolution, Labor’s pride and joy—education has become a latch-key kid, mostly home alone, left to fend for itself. Embarrassed and ashamed by the lack of care and attention they have given to education, Labor has done what some parents do to try and remedy a situation like this: they have tried to buy love. So education has been showered with money—borrowed money. But the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister still have not realised what most people know instinctively: you cannot buy love. Quantity is not a substitute for quality.

If there is one thing that every Labor government, including this one, knows, it is how to spend money. But what every Labor government does not know is how to spend it well or how to spend it efficiently and effectively. Spending money you do not have will not get you out of trouble. Spending money will not compensate for the lack of care and attention given to education. The fiasco of the so-called education revolution could not be a clearer example of that. First, we had the digital education revolution—or ‘more computers in schools’ program. It sounded great as a sound bite from the Prime Minister—he was then Leader of the Opposition. Then the reality really hit. Now we know that the whole program has been ill thought out—no attention to detail, badly implemented, way behind schedule and way over budget, with the Commonwealth having to double the initial price tag and the states and parents having to dig deep into their own pockets to come up with another few billion dollars on top of that to actually make it all work.

As of today, 2½ years after the then Leader of the Opposition’s initial brainwave, and more than halfway through the life of the program, only a fraction of the promised one million computers have actually been delivered and none of them have been connected to the very fast fibre broadband as originally promised by the Prime Minister. Then we had the Building the Education Revolution program—‘computers in schools’ on steroids. Instead of giving our schools what they actually needed and wanted, the government decided to give them what it wanted. And what it wanted was thousands of memorial school halls to which a plaque could be affixed and a sign erected to remind everyone how generous the federal government had been with taxpayers’ money.

We know that the implementation of the BER has been as flawed as that of the computers in schools program—grossly overpriced, behind schedule and beset with examples of systemic waste and mismanagement. The government still has not been able to explain how building multipurpose halls will help our children improve their literacy, numeracy and school performance. It still has not been able to tell the Australian people how many jobs have actually been created by this stimulus spending. So here we have another cash splash, one to dwarf all the others, and another example that blindly spending money is not a substitute for well-thought-out and well-considered public policy. Instead, we have a $16 billion excuse for the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to pop on their hard hats, don the high-visibility vests and smile for the cameras. This has been the most expensive photo opportunity in Australian history. Here is Labor’s education policy in a nutshell: nice sounding ideas, plenty of cash, appalling implementation, little value for money, but plenty of spin. This is what we have come to expect from our part-time education minister.

If primary and secondary education sectors have been the neglected children of the Rudd government, largely ignored but showered with money, then tertiary education has become the forgotten and unwanted stepchild, mostly out of sight and out of mind. The funny thing about Labor’s education revolution is that we were supposed to have a revolution in our primary schools and a revolution in our secondary schools but Australia’s universities have been left out. Knowing now how the education revolution has turned out for Australia’s schools, it might actually have been a lucky escape for our universities. But this does not excuse the lack of thought, planning and foresight on the part of the Rudd government regarding the present wellbeing and future prospects of one million tertiary students and the wellbeing of the tertiary sector, which, as well as being one of our top export industries, is so important for the future prosperity of this country. The inconvenient truth is that Labor knows that there are votes in primary and secondary education but not as many in tertiary education, so Labor can afford to take the sector for granted—and it did. That is why Labor came to power without a coherent and consistent universities policy. What they presented instead was a hodgepodge of ideological knee-jerk reaction mixed with some half-baked ideas, all spiced with plenty of spin and nice-sounding rhetoric that in practice meant very little.

So what has been Labor’s tertiary policy? It was the commitment to abolish by stealth voluntary student unionism and slug one million Australian university students with a $250 a year tax to finance services that an overwhelming majority of them do not, or cannot, use and are unwilling to pay for in any case. It was the commitment to abolish full fee-paying domestic places at public universities, denying Australian students who were willing to finance their own education the same opportunity we afford to tens of thousands of overseas students at our universities. Not only has this ideological crusade reduced the range of options available to young Australians but also it has deprived our universities of a fast-growing additional stream of revenue. The futility of the decision to abolish full fee-paying domestic places has now become quite apparent due to the global financial crisis. Universities lost a valuable revenue stream exactly at the time when they needed it most and they were not able to offer enough government supported places as demand for university places spiked recently.

It was also the commitment to reform Youth Allowance. This fiasco is worth examining in some detail. The minister’s proposed changes to Youth Allowance, introduced last year, gave with one hand while taking away with the other. In this legislation the government proposed reform which would have retrospectively impacted upon thousands of Australian students who were nearing the end of a gap year they had decided to take in 2009 in an effort to qualify for youth allowance under the existing provisions. Had it passed the Senate last year, it would have crushed the higher education dreams of many, in particular some of our neediest rural and regional students.

The Rudd government continues to state that students are its primary concern, yet the minister has made no attempt to prioritise the concerns of students or made no attempt to reason with the opposition last year to secure the passage of the student income support legislation. My door is always open, Minister. To make matters worse, the old Commonwealth scholarships were abolished by the minister in previous legislation, leading to the current catastrophic situation where there are now no new scholarships available this year.

The coalition warned the government during the debate that they were putting all scholarships in jeopardy for 2010. We even gave the government the opportunity to split the bill and allow scholarships to be dealt with separately to avoid the disastrous situation we have now. Yet the minister made no attempt at any stage to pick up the phone and discuss the coalition’s concerns in an attempt to secure passage of this legislation. Students are wondering whether they can even attend university at all this year, having had no idea from the government about when they will finally negotiate.

Then we have the university compacts. While the details of the policy are still sketchy, Labor seems to be committed to reorganising the government’s relationship with universities through compacts, or individual contracts, where funding is based on the different characteristics of each university. The problem with compacts is that they try to micromanage university funding based on a bureaucratic assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each individual university. As Macquarie University’s vice-chancellor, Professor Steven Schwartz, has argued, this will have the effect of freezing the status quo, as money is allotted based on reputation, reducing flexibility and making it more difficult for universities to grow and compete with each other. As Professor Schwartz has written:

The assumption underlying the idea of compacts is that government experts have the foresight, creativity and expertise to design better universities than those that evolve from the normal interplay of supply and demand.

Once again, Labor’s penchant for central planning and micromanagement triumph over commonsense and the best interests of the tertiary sector.

Last but not least, we have had the fiasco of the Education Investment Fund. The EIF has proved to be another case of the Rudd government promising big but delivering small. With great fanfare the Rudd government unveiled three nation-building funds as the centrepiece of their first budget. The Education Investment Fund, with $11 billion in assets, was designed to finance capital works in higher education. The EIF was to consist of $6 billion, first put aside by the coalition under its Higher Education Endowment Fund, with an extra $5 billion contributed by the Labor government from budget surpluses.

The reality has been starkly different. Not only has the Rudd government grossly underdelivered on its promise to top up the fund but also it debauched the very idea of a secure, long-term funding source for university infrastructure. It did it firstly by opening up the eligibility criteria for access to the fund to not just universities but also vocational education facilities, thus increasing by hundreds, if not thousands, the pool of potential recipients and therefore vastly diluting the funds available to universities. Secondly, Labor decided that not just the interest but also the very capital of the fund itself would be available for distribution. This has turned what was meant to be a perpetual endowment into another political slush fund that was no different to normal recurrent expenditure under Labor and bound to be splashed around by the minister in the run-up to elections.

This has been the sum total of Labor’s higher education policy: old ideological vendettas mixed with an interventionist drive and topped with a poorly thought out ride on the piggybank. To call this a higher education policy would be to insult the intelligence of Australia’s vibrant and successful tertiary sector, and Labor knows that. But it thought so little of the sector that, instead of bothering to come up with a universities policy either before or even after getting elected, it decided to wash its hands and outsource it to others. Hence, for more than a year after Kevin Rudd’s election we were witness to a sorry and bizarre spectacle of at least 25 inquiries and reviews being commissioned by the government into various aspects of higher education.

The Bradley review has been the most prominent and comprehensive of all the inquiries and reviews carried out. The minister welcomed the report—with great relief, one suspects—because it put an end to the farce of the Labor government not having a higher education policy for more than a year after coming into office and because it absolved the government of the need to come up with policies themselves. And so the minister graciously accepted the Bradley review’s recommendations, but only selectively, because those recommendations cost money and the government no longer had any, having already plunged the budget into deficit. But it underlines very clearly once again what low priority the higher education sector has in this government’s thinking. Labor could find tens of billions of dollars to splash around on things like pink batts, but they could not find enough money to properly resource our universities—one of our very important engines of economic growth and productivity.

In its response to the Bradley review, the government committed itself to a more student-demand-centred higher education system and to increasing participation and equity in higher education. Under the policy, all Australian universities will be funded on the basis of student demand from 2012. The government will fund a Commonwealth supported place for all domestic students accepted into an eligible accredited higher education course at a recognised public higher education provider. The government also committed itself to a target of 40 per cent of all 25- to 34-year-olds having a qualification at bachelor level or above from 2025, up from 30 per cent today.

The coalition is broadly supportive of the government’s avowed commitment to a more student-demand-centred higher education system and, of course, to increasing participation and equity in higher education. But we remain sceptical, based on Labor’s past record, that the government will actually be able to properly implement such goals. Where we are different from the government is in our strong belief that the implementation of the Bradley review is not the be-all and end-all but merely a beginning of a long-term reform process that will see Australian universities and Australian students freer and more flexible to pursue future challenges and opportunities.

The coalition is not encouraged by the government’s more immediate response to the Bradley review. The government claims that it is providing $5.7 billion of new money for universities in its last budget. But, of that, $2.99 billion has been taken in the massive raid on the Education Investment Fund. The real budget spending increases in higher education have been $1.2 billion for research, only $1½ billion for teaching and only an extra $246 million in new funding for teaching measures in the current financial year.

Today, we are celebrating the first anniversary of the Rudd government acquiring a higher education policy. In wedding lore the first anniversary is known as a paper anniversary, and how appropriate that is because all we have seen from the government so far is plenty of paper, a lot of rhetoric and pious sentiments but not a lot of action. Where there has been some action it has turned out to be mostly wrongheaded and counterproductive. Education remains a neglected child of the Rudd government and higher education remains the forgotten, unwanted step child. (Time expired)

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