Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

I am sure the minister at the table, the Minister for Industry, would absolutely be opposed to that sort of centralisation of decision making. So Labor removed those prohibitions on universities and put in place a demand-driven system. That actually means that a lot more students are attending university now—190,000 more than when we came to power.

It is also important to identify that Commonwealth funded places increased by 35 per cent under Labor. With this there was an increase in the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, as the shadow minister indicated, attending universities, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. When I was the Minister for Higher Education and Schools, one of my great joys was to go to many of our universities and meet first-in-family people who were attending university. These students were the first in their families to be able to do attend universities, and increasing numbers of them had an Indigenous background. So it was a really important task to undertake. Perhaps most importantly for the sector we introduced fair indexation for the first time, helping prevent university funding from falling behind year on year, as it had under the decade of coalition neglect of this matter. For students themselves, we made sure that support payments went to those who needed them most by improving access to student support. This meant that 220,000 young people received the maximum rate, a higher rate or a payment for the first time.

We introduced the relocation scholarship, a payment to remove financial barriers for low SES students who must relocate to study, particularly those from regional and remote areas and Indigenous students. And we introduced the student start-up scholarship, which helped students with up-front costs of studying such as textbooks and specialised equipment. We have a proud record in higher education.

If we compare this to the opposition, we see a fairly appalling record on higher education from those opposite. I remind the House that, when the coalition was elected to government in 1996, one of the very first things they did was to cut a massive five per cent from the higher education budget. That massive cut was also not announced before the election. There was no warning for universities; there was no warning for students. Student fees skyrocketed. Commonwealth supported places slumped and billions of dollars were stripped out of the system in the decade of neglect that followed. All of this took place, I would point out, while the now Prime Minister was a senior voice in the cabinet. Much of it was orchestrated under the stewardship of his deputy leader, Julie Bishop.

Let us not forget the $103 million those opposite plan to rip out of the Australian Research Council. And in the past week, while announcing his three different policies on school funding, the Minister for Education announced that he had found another $1.43 billion of cuts, with the Prime Minister confirming that this is over and above the savings that they identified before the election. There were $235 million on Tuesday and another $1.2 billion yesterday. Those opposite have form when it comes to massive cuts to higher education. They are at best indifferent to the knowledge economy, which Labor believes is vital to this country's future. Their neglect of the knowledge economy is again demonstrated by their failure to appoint a minister for science—

See this speech in context