Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to support this bill, which will return high-quality essential services to university students around the country, and particularly in my electorate of Parramatta, and will return them on a sustainable long-term basis. The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities) Bill 2010 represents a balanced and practical approach to the funding of student services and replaces the heavily ideological approach adopted by the previous Howard government. The impetus behind the Howard government’s voluntary student unionism was, no doubt—and we have just had it confirmed by the member for Murray—the destruction of political activity on campuses but also, as she said, the creation of a user-pays system. The irony in this is that, where once with student unions we had services provided and paid for by the students of the university, once those student unions were abolished the taxpayer stepped in to fill the gap. So, rather than having a user-pays system, everybody paid for the services on the university campus whether they went there or not. It is kind of the opposite of user pays. It is quite ironical really that members on the other side see the abolishment of student unions as moving towards user pays and then ask the taxpayer to pay for it.

It also did not work in the removal of politics from campuses. You do not actually stop people from having political views and behaving in a political manner by taking away one particular source of funds. Politics still exists on campus. It is well and truly alive and well in Western Sydney. Where the VSU did have a profound effect is that it hurt regular students who were simply trying to get by. The member for Murray talks about the financial pressures on students. I can tell her that in my University of Western Sydney there are people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, single parents, who depended on the services that were provided by the student union, they depended on the free shuttle bus services, they depended on subsidised child care, they depended on the affordable cafeteria. So the financial pressures on many of the students in my area were actually increased by the abolition of voluntary student unionism.

The list of services terminated at UWS immediately following the introduction of VSU does not read like a basket of luxuries. Immediately terminated were social sport programs, including tennis, soccer, indoor soccer, volleyball and cricket. For those who think that might be trivial, I care about health and for students who spend long hours on the campus waiting between one lecture and the next, they actually need an easy way to keep up their exercise levels. These sporting associations play a very important part in campus life, particularly if you are there for a long period of time. The UWS yearly planner calendars which had been provided free of charge were abolished. The shuttle bus services between stations and campuses were abolished. The funding subsidies to all five childcare centres were abolished. Quite a lot of the men and women who put their children in those childcare centres were dependent on those subsidised centres. The child care for school holidays program was abolished. The service assisting students to find casual employment was abolished, a change which dramatically impacts on the people most in need of finding employment, so those who have less money behind them suffered the greatest impact in the most appalling way. Prices went up in the affordable cafeteria, and the vice-chancellor has often said to me that that was one of the things that she found most distressing, that there were so many students on campus who were actually depending on that but could no longer do so. So you can see that the VSU, rather than targeting luxuries, undermined sport and exercise, campus safety and support for parents looking after children.

As well as the services terminated at UWS, the introduction of VSU also substantially reduced a number of other services. The number of student book scholarships of $100 each was reduced from 600 to 30. That is 570 people that would have greatly valued that who lost it each year. Funding for orientation week was reduced from some $100,000 to only $35,000. Emergency loans to students were reduced from $300 per loan to $200 per loan and the number of loans was reduced by 80 per cent. Annual direct funding for sporting clubs was reduced and fees and charges for use of on-campus facilities increased. Opening hours for on-campus counselling services were cut back, again services absolutely essential to many of the people that attend the University of Western Sydney. Annual funding for interuniversity sport was reduced from $141,000 to $16,000.

So what did voluntary student unionism attack under the previous government? It attacked modest scholarships to help students who could not afford the books they needed to complete their course, it attacked services to orient new students to university, it attacked funding for sport and exercise, it attacked counselling services for students going through a tough patch.

The story at University of Western Sydney was repeated nationally, as consultations with the universities in 2008 found that $170 million had been stripped from funding for services and amenities, resulting in the decline and in some instances complete closure of health, counselling, employment, childcare and welfare support services. Also what went was the building of new facilities. We would all know that in our older universities there are extraordinary facilities for sport, health, cafeterias, clubs, you name it, that had been built over years. All that was well and truly put on hold. VSU did not undermine unions or political activism; it undermined fundamental services that helped students to navigate university life and achieve success in their studies and that enabled them to participate in sport and the university community. We have established that VSU did great damage to essential services.

The second point that should be considered is the replacement cost of these services. Again this did not introduce user pays; the taxpayer paid. We all paid, so it was the opposite of user pays. By their very nature, essential services cannot simply be discarded; they need to be replaced. Here is where VSU ran into even greater problems, because replacement was achieved through greater student debt, cuts to other areas of university funding or the taxpayer. It is quite remarkable here. It is students who are being forced to pay the price of the $170 million both directly and indirectly.

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