Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canning for that question without notice. I am asked about the alternatives to supporting the government's reform bill on higher education. Unfortunately, I think the most generous description of the alternative from the opposition is confused. We know that, when they were in government, they wanted to cut $6.6 billion from higher education. They wanted to mug the university system, without giving universities any opportunity to replace that revenue by increasing revenue from their students.

Yesterday the opposition leader gave a fire-and-brimstone speech about our higher education reform bill where he said he was voting against all of the reform bill. He said he was voting against increased research under the national collaborative research infrastructure scheme; against increasing research by establishing more future fellows; against the increase in research funding to the Australian Research Council; against expanding the demand-driven system to diplomas and associate degrees at the sub-bachelor level, meaning tens of thousands more places for Australian students. He is going to vote against all of those benefits for research and for students at university—benefits that accrue to the lowest socioeconomic status students in our community, to first generation university goers. That appears to be Labor's position. They are going to vote no to more money for research, and they are going to vote no to more students getting the opportunity to go to university.

But perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps I was wrong when I listened to the Leader of the Opposition's speech, because last night the shadow minister for education, Senator Kim Carr, put out a press release saying that in fact the Labor opposition was going to support elements of the reform bill. Senator Kim Carr, the shadow minister for education says that the opposition wants to support elements of the reform bill.

The Leader of the Opposition said, 'Yes, they do.' Apparently today they do. Yesterday, it was all or nothing; today it is a little bit of something.

Perhaps the answer lies in the deal that was done on the minerals resource rent tax. Perhaps Labor have worked out that, by saying 'No' to every measure the government puts up, it deals them out of the national conversation and renders them irrelevant to politics in Australia. Perhaps we are seeing a chink of light from the Labor Party, where they recognise that they need to work with the government to deliver great reform—just as the Howard and Peacock oppositions did in the 1980s, just as we did supporting Hawke and Keating and just as Kim Beazley supported the Howard government when it got the big calls right. A big Labor Party know when to support reform and when to deal themselves in. The one led by this little man does not know when to do it.

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