Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In the lead-up to the budget there were a lot of people around the country who were taking quite some heart from the rhetoric about Australia becoming a smarter country and spreading the benefits of the mining boom, and there were people who were looking forward to an investment in our higher education sector and perhaps some relief for the tens of hundreds of thousands of students around the country who were suffering under significant debt burdens and who do not have an income that is enough to make ends meet.

Instead, on 13 April, the newly appointed Minister for Tertiary Education, Dr Craig Emerson, announced $2.3 billion in cuts to universities and their students. The cuts mean a $900 million efficiency dividend of two per cent in 2014 and 1.25 per cent in 2015, which will mean less funding per student—an amount of about five per cent less public funding per student, according to the National Tertiary Education Union. There will be a $1.2 billion saving from scrapping Student Start-Up scholarships and replacing them with loans, putting even more debt onto students, and further savings from removing the HECs discount for up-front payments.

These cuts come to a sector that was already under significant pressure. They come on the back of last year's cuts to the university sector that totalled around $1 billion, including the abolition of university facilitation funding of $270 million, reductions to the Sustainable Research Excellence, the SRE program, of just on half-a-billion dollars as well as savings in relation to student income support and scholarships of $250 million.

The University of Melbourne, in my electorate, faces cuts of $52 million, with Victorian universities generally facing cuts of almost $200 million over two years. These cuts contradict the advice that has been given to the government. As the NTEU points out, in 2008 the then education minister, Julia Gillard, asked Professor Denise Bradley to undertake a comprehensive review of Australian higher education. It was for universities what the Gonski review was for schools. One of the key recommendations of the Bradley review was the need for an immediate 10 per cent increase in funding per government supported student to ensure universities had the necessary resources to provide high quality and internationally competitive education. These findings were reaffirmed by the Base Funding Review, chaired by Dr Jane Lomax-Smith, and released in October 2011, which found that universities were significantly under-resourced to provide the teaching and basic research capability expected of them.

Bill Scales, who is not only Chancellor of Swinburne University of Technology but also served on both the Bradley review of higher education and the Gonski review of school education, has described Labor's funding cuts as 'not only incoherent but schizophrenic'.

In 2010, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said:

We know that Australia's universities have a critical part to play in making this country smarter, fairer and more prosperous. In order to meet our economic and social ambitions we need to make sure that our universities are properly resourced and able to tackle the problems, and teach the workforce, of the future.

But now the Prime Minister is presiding over cuts which will harm our universities. Labor's cuts to universities, research and student support will harm students, our education system and the economy. We are going to need an economy when the rest of the world tells us to stop digging. That point may come sooner rather than later and that economy is going to be based on our minds, not our mines. We cannot have a smarter country if we cut funds to universities, we cannot have a fairer society if we do not support students from low-income families to go to university and we cannot have a strong economy if we cut back universities and research. Taking money from universities to fund schools is robbing Peter to pay Paul—and it just does not add up.

Instead of a cash grab to fund an election commitment on schools, Labor should have the guts to stand up to the big miners and put in place a proper mining tax and then we could fund the education we need from child care, to kindergarten, to schools through to universities. What this shows is that the old parties cannot be trusted to look after education. If we were serious about preparing Australia for the challenges of the 21st century, if we were serious about having a government that cares for its people and its students, we would be investing in higher education. We would not be threatening 1,500 jobs in my electorate of Melbourne, which will go because of the cumulative effects of these cuts. We would be putting more money into universities.

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