Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to this debate on the Higher Education Support Amendment (FEE-HELP Loan Fee) Bill 2010, which is currently before the House, and put forward some perspectives concerning higher education more broadly. The bill before us increases the FEE-HELP loan fee from 20 to 25 per cent for the cost of full fee undergraduate university places at our public universities. It does not diminish the value of borrowings available to students; it applies to loans taken out by full-fee-paying students for units of study with a census date of 1 July 2010 or thereafter. This amendment will make some contribution toward the affordability of the FEE-HELP scheme, but as full-fee-paying undergraduate awards are being phased out at our public universities, its effect will be naturally limited in terms of numbers of students over time.

Any debate about our education sector has to come back to what type of economy we have now and what we hope to have in the future. This nation has been seriously blessed throughout the last century. We were the nation that rode on the sheep’s back for many years. We then became the world’s mine, and continued to provide vast resources for the ongoing compounding eruption that is the Chinese economy, with India following closely behind. But our population itself will not be sustained by this. The vast bulk of our workforce will work in other areas, and naturally we look to having work rewarded with remuneration that increases our standard of living across this country.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics data points to miniscule change in the proportion of our workforce engaged in professional and managerial work over recent decades. There has been something like a one per cent increase in the workforce in these areas over 30-odd years. We know that our communities will not become wealthy or retain wealth pumping out cheap manufactured goods. The competition that our workforce faces from underdeveloped nations around the world with much cheaper wage structures makes that almost impossible. As important and necessary as tourism, transport, retail and other sectors are—given the overseas dollars they may bring into the country—we still know that we need to do a lot more.

I think our population will still have its needs met, even if we see a greater proportion of our workforce engaged in work that transforms and adds value—that deals with higher value exchanges that engage the intelligence and creativity of a highly skilled workforce to provide that bit more than the workforce of any other nation. I think we can afford to have a greater proportion of our workforce engaged in work that adds value and is not simply a wheel in a conveyor belt reliant on greater and greater volumes of domestic consumption and waste. This is a commonly held view here in Australia and in both developed and developing countries around the world. Value added workers have a much greater capacity to earn more through driving innovation and benefiting from it. They deliver increased productivity and value for work undertaken.

I know it, and countries the world over know it, and this Rudd Labor government knows it very well, both through investment in skills and the development of expanded high-value labour markets. This government is actively seeking, for instance, the creation within Australia of a regional financial hub—a centre of economic service that uses our stable political and economic environment to facilitate work and investment around the region. This is precisely the type of thing I am talking about—the provision of increased quantities of high-value, professional services. I think it is an incredible blight on this nation that we have an education system that is very, very good—or at least has every reason to be—and yet we have not even been able to train enough doctors for our own needs, let alone to provide services to our rural areas and neighbours. Instead of being a service exporter, we have to import professionals. This is totally unacceptable for our health system, for the workforce itself which is ageing and experiencing burnout. It is unacceptable that our own population, including our own children who may want to develop a career in medical fields, cannot access that requisite education. Thankfully, this shortfall in medical professionals is another area that this Rudd Labor government is addressing. But similar areas of undersupply of skilled labour exist now as they have for years, rewarding value-adding and wealth generating opportunities for our people.

The provision of high-quality tertiary education to our region is another industry that is worth a great deal to our nation and the workforce that supplies that demand. This area of our economy too needs to be protected with appropriate quality control and, where appropriate, investment and facilities that will enable sustainable high-value opportunities to be captured and retained. This area of activity was also contained in the reports to the government that led to the amendment we are now debating, which itself was recommended within the review of Australian higher education, commonly referred to as the Bradley review. Twenty nine per cent of Australians aged between 25 and 34 have degree-level qualifications. Some countries around the world are targeting 50 per cent. Australia has slipped over the last decade in our international standing from seventh to ninth highest proportion of this age group with such qualifications. This is not at all surprising. As the Bradley review observes:

Australia is the only OECD country where the public contribution to higher education remained at the same level in 2005 as it had been in 1995.

It was the last Prime Minister who attempted—and to some extent succeeded—to cast degree-level qualifications as an elite and therefore negative and undesirable pursuit that working-class people need not bother with. Working-class kids getting a job digging ditches and lugging boxes was appropriate, according to John Howard, but a university degree was not. But this is not adequate from the perspective of this government. We know that it is not the way forward because it is not in our nation’s best interests, nor is it in our children’s best interests, for us to tell them that we do not expect much of them. In so doing we are saying that we do not expect much of the future for them.

The Bradley review went so far as to advocate setting national targets for attainment of degree qualifications and national targets for participation of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, coupled with institution specific targets for participation and for performance. Also the review advocates national benchmarking against OECD countries performance in education system quality. The Bradley review puts this focus on expanded opportunity in terms of finding enough young people to train the number of professionals we as a country wish to skill.

It could also be put in terms of delivering observable equality of opportunity. I have long held the view that a society with real equality of opportunity would probably see something like similar proportions of people raising their socioeconomic or professional standing as those who drop in the level of professionalism of career compared to their background. Equality of opportunity would see it being as easy for a child of a very poor working-class background to get a degree and be a professional as it is for a child whose parents are professionals to become something less well renumerated. These are statistics that we would just love to see.

In the 2009-10 budget we saw the beginnings of our tertiary education rebuild. The government supported the higher education and research sectors at a cost of an additional $5.4 billion over four years and will commit additional resources over the next 10 years. This includes funding of $1.5 billion for teaching and learning, $0.7 billion for university research, $1.1 billion for the Super Science initiative and $2.1 billion from the Education Investment Fund for education and research infrastructure. Funding over the next few years for infrastructure is almost unparalleled. We have seen unprecedented investment in capital works around the nation at our local primary schools, with much needed investment interest in the facilities relied on by the majority of children of a majority of families—multipurpose halls, classrooms and libraries by the dozen. What an exceptionally fine action of this government to use the stimulus money required by our national economy for the benefit of this nation’s next generation—an investment that will serve to give multiple generations of Australians wealth for many, many years to come, as will this investment in our universities.

The higher education sector really has transformed over time since John Dawkins was the minister responsible and our system became a mass—not elite—system. This was, critically, an important step. After the previous government’s decade-long sabbatical, we now have the opportunity to take tertiary education to the next level so that it can equip our population and our workforce for this new century, which will see as much change around the world and in our lives as did the last century. To this end, I commend the bill to the House.

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