Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014 is an attack on aspiration. This bill is designed to stop people from being able to access higher education unless they have the financial wherewithal to pay their way through. It is pricing people out and it is being widely condemned. Regardless of what people say in here, out in the broader community people know exactly what this is doing. This is injecting unfairness into Australian society, which has always valued at its core the fact that, with merit, people can get ahead and, with talent, they will have opportunity. They do not need to always be from a well-off background to be able to get ahead. We always celebrated the fact that in this country we were classless, but, when you see what is happening here, this is designed for one class of people—the people who have the financial resources and capacity. This is the only avenue. These are the people who will have the opportunity for a higher education, not anyone else.

In my region, I had the opportunity recently to talk with someone who was once the economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and had graduated from the high school I went to in Western Sydney, Mitchell High. He was the second person from my high school to go to university in the late 70s, the school being opened 50 years ago. In a short space of time after the Whitlam reforms, he was able to get into university, and the local community literally had a party. They literally celebrated the fact that someone from there, without necessarily having the resources, had opened up to them the chance to go to university. What do we have now? After all that progress, we have the winding back. We have the move to basically entrench university to privilege and income and to deny it to others.

When we raise these points, those opposite say, 'You're just engaging in class war.' You have opened up the class war. When you deny people the chance—people who have the ability but not the money to go to university—you are opening up the class war. So do not for one minute try and suggest that this is all about enacting or enraging a class war. You are opening it up with these very reforms. The University of Western Sydney—the university I was proud to graduate from—can basically boast, and it is something we should all celebrate: 65 out of every 100 students are the first ones in their family to be able to go to university. In my own family, when I look at my extended family overseas—my dad immigrated in the late 1960s—I could count on one hand those who actually got to university. How grateful are we in this nation that we have a chance to get ahead by going to university? So why would we want to do what is proposed in this legislation?

There are three elements to what is being proposed. The first is to cut public funding to universities by 37 per cent. The coalition know that the universities cannot survive with this funding ripped out, so what is the second thing they do? They say to the universities, 'We'll let you set the fees for the courses that you are providing.' The third thing they are doing is expanding the amount of debt that students have to carry in paying off their fees. In particular, they are changing the interest rate that is charged on loans, going from CPI to the bond rate, from about two per cent to six per cent in rough terms. They are lifting that, and when you consider the combination of those things you realise that this becomes a financial decision. Instead of being able to get ahead and improve themselves, people will actually have to weigh up whether or not they will be able to afford it. Saul Eslake said in the Hobart Mercury back in June:

It would be irrational for people not to consider the cost in relation to their working life, in the same way as when you borrow to buy a house …

He is referring to the fact that people will weigh up whether or not they can afford to go to university. This is wrong.

In trying to justify these reforms, the education minister said, 'Cleaners and nurses are paying for the education of university students.' I have never had anyone run up to me in the street, grab me by the shirt front and say, 'I don't want to pay for education. I want us to have a dumber nation, not a smarter one.' No-one ever runs up to you in the street and says that. Everyone recognises that education is not a cost to this nation; it is an investment in its future prosperity—not just for the individual but to make sure that there are people within our economy who have the skills to keep it running.

In a climate where we have skills shortages across a range of areas, to put in place a system or a scheme like this, that would deny people the ability to go into higher education and then deny our economy the talents of those people, defies logic. It defies logic to consider that that is a worthwhile scheme. But that is exactly what is being proposed.

I go back to the fact that in my region, in Western Sydney, where we finally got—as a result of the Dawkins reforms under the Hawke-Keating government—our own university. I was amongst the first wave of people to graduate from that university. We finally had our own university in Western Sydney so that we did not have to travel long distances—I am sure it was the same in other parts of the country too where they did not have tertiary education at their doorstep—to get that education. We have it in our region and it is now opening up the doors of universities to families who never thought they would be able to do it. Now we have people being priced out of it. This is what universities have told me is more than likely to happen: the stronger universities will jack up the fees for courses, and we have already heard a scale of fees likely to be confronting people—over $100,000 for some courses—forcing students to pay them off for the best part of their working lives. Some universities will jack up their fees but there will be others that will know that they cannot. For the people they tailor their courses to, and in the regions where they operate, they will not be able to lift their fees in the same way. So you will have this double-barrelled impact of not being able to charge the fees and, at the same time, you are trying to deal with the fact that you are not getting the funds and the support from government that once existed. What happens with those universities? They basically shrivel. They lose their capacity to deliver education to the same quality and standard that they previously did, while the big universities—the established universities that are concentrated in capital cities—flourish. How is that fair? How is it fair that you should have a different standard of education based on where you live? It is not right. It flies in the fact of everything we have done in terms of reform to make education in this nation more accessible.

I am just talking about my area of metropolitan Sydney. What about the area that the minister represents? What about the area that the Nationals represent? We have not heard one thing out of them resisting what is proposed. If the two-tiered system of education that denies a quality education to people who live in regions affects the people I represent in Western Sydney, what about the people that the minister or his colleagues in the National Party represent? I say to the minister at the table: the last time I checked, your surname was 'Joyce' not 'doorstep'. You are not a doormat allowing these people to walk all over the people you represent and deny them the right to get a quality education.

Mr Joyce interjecting—

The fact of the matter is, Minister, I have spoken up on issues when my community is affected. You are too busy talking and not listening; you would not remember the times that I have spoken up. The fact of the matter is: your side is allowing the other side of the coalition to bring in these reforms and to deny the people that you represent the quality education that they should have. What you should be doing, and what every National Party member should be doing, is joining with the Labor Party and saying, 'This is not good enough for the nation.' It is simply unacceptable to the welfare of the nation that you would allow this reform through.

There are other impacts in terms of what is being proposed. The legislation we are debating now, in terms of the $3.9 billion in cuts, will slash funding for Commonwealth supported places in undergraduate degrees by roughly 20 per cent, on average. For some courses it is nearly 40 per cent. It reduces the indexation arrangements for university funding to CPI in 2016, and it is down from the appropriate rate that Labor in government introduced. That means about $202 million in cuts over forward estimates—but it is a major contributor to a $2.5 billion per annum shortfall in 10 years time. Those are the statistics generated by the Parliamentary Budget Office. There are cuts of almost $174 million from research training schemes, which support the training of Australian research students. It introduces fees for PhDs and, as I reflected upon earlier, it introduces a real rate of interest on HECS moving from CPI to the 10-year bond rate capped at six per cent. These are just some of the changes that have been put forward.

In terms of fee deregulation, we are told that there will not be substantial fee hikes. But nowhere in the world has the deregulation of university fees led to the price competition that is being promised by those opposite and by the minister. It has not led to lower fees. In the UK, fees were deregulated in 2012. There was a cap of 9,000 pounds. For the 2015-16 academic year, there will only be two universities out of 123 that will not be charging a fee of 9,000 pounds. Why is that? It is because price is an indicator of quality—and those universities that initially charged less actually suffered because they were perceived to be not so good. So competition does not lead to lower prices. It actually leads to acceleration amongst universities to see who can jack up their prices to attract students.

We should be spending more time in attracting students and attracting quality education than going into a bidding war between universities. We have those opposite say, 'Well, the universities support us.' As I reflected yesterday, of course the universities are going to support this. What choice do they have? When you look at the universities who are potentially having their funding cut, they have no choice but to support fee deregulation. This is pretty much a case of the hostages reflecting favourably on the captors. They have nowhere else to go if they do not support fee deregulation. They are not going to get money out of the government. The only thing that universities have spoken up against is the move to change the interest rates on student loans. But that is not good enough. As educators, and as people who operate within their regions, they know that doing what the government is proposing will impact on the welfare of the people they work with, live with and feel responsibility towards.

I have listened to some of the contributions made by coalition MPs in this debate. They have said reform is not easy. They are making out that this is taking a great deal of courage. Oh, it is really courageous to tell people before an election that you will not do any of this, that you will not charge fees, that you will not cut university funding—and what you do when you come in? You cut it. And this is not just in terms of the changes here in higher education. We have already commented on and resisted strongly what is being done in terms of education. Look at the combined impact for health and education. There has been $80 billion cut there, plus these changes in terms of higher education, which is an absolute outrage. Where is the courage? Reform is not easy. Reform is easier when you are honest. Reform is easier when you are up front. Reform is easier when you have taken people into your confidence and let them know what you are doing and why. If the reform is hard, build the support for it. Don't do what you are doing now—which is breaking a promise and holding universities to ransom so that, if they do not support it, they will not get the money that is required to undertake education.

The other comment that I heard quite often—it must be in their talking points—is that you have to 'deal yourself into the game'. Really? In the last term of the previous parliament, when we were inviting everyone to work on big issues and trying to get cross-party groups together on some of the big issues like climate change, who was the only group that did not get involved? The coalition. And they are now saying to us that we should get involved in this process!

This is not an invitation to be involved in what they are doing. This is an invitation to underwrite the ripping apart of our university system and undermine education in this country. That is simply not something that we are prepared to do. As has rightly been pointed out, we will fight every step of the way—and we should fight every step of the way. For people in the area that I represent, we will fight this because it does not represent your best interests in the longer term. It does not represent the nation's best interest. More than anything else, it is a breach of trust by the coalition. A compliant National Party is allowing the Liberal Party to get away with blue murder.

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