Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It has been interesting listening to the points raised by colleagues across the chamber. I wonder if those comments would have been the same during the Dawkins period, when the major reforms were occurring, because the changes were significant. They were not minimalist. John Dawkins, the Labor education minister from 1987 to 1992, instigated a series of Australian tertiary education reforms which were announced ultimately in a higher education policy statement—the white paper published in July 1988. The Dawkins reforms were targeted at improving the efficiency and international competitiveness of Australian universities. That is why I thank the member for Kingston—sometimes it does not hurt to go back and reflect on what education ministers have done. Certainly over time the greatest reforms in education were under Dawkins and many cuts were made of a substantial nature, including AbSec and changes to Abstudy which took away advantages for Indigenous Australians.

The Dawkins reforms were targeted at improving the efficiency and international competitiveness of Australian universities as well as addressing the perceived or real brain drain of talented young Australians overseas. I remind those on the other side of the chamber that the Dawkins reforms included income-contingent loans for tuition fees through the HECS, and conversion of all colleges of advanced education into universities, which was opposed by the Group of Eight universities, who argued that by doing that you were dumbing down courses. The expansion into the TAFE sector was a problem from a university perspective. It took a career pathway away from the vocational focus which universities and the TAFE sector were hooked into. Universities were to provide plans, profiles and statistics to justify courses and research.

Further, it was noted that under the higher education reforms the number of undergraduate students increased substantially. They increased under those reforms, when we went from free education to where you had to take out a HECS loan. Education and tertiary pathways do need reform to put us into a contemporary position. That also allows students to pay back those loans. We have heard comments from my colleagues about the rate at which they will pay them back and when the fee payment kicks in. These increases in students took place in an era when universities were given an economies of scale paradigm. This was in contrast to the Whitlam government's free higher education approach. It would have been interesting to have listened to Labor members in their party and the caucus arguing against what Dawkins was putting in. If they were consistent with what they have been saying today, they would have been saying it then and they would have been defending those students who were affected. But they did not—I was around at the time and there was silence.

Tim Watts, in an article on 14 July entitled 'Future of growth, new progressive thinking', wrote of Joseph Stiglitz's recent visit to Australia:

Dawkins needed to create an education system that could produce a dramatically higher number of skilled graduates to power the Australian economy in a competitive, globalised world, while at the same time curbing the spiralling costs of the sector in a tightening fiscal environment. However, crucially, in tackling this fraught task, Dawkins embedded the values of fairness and equality of opportunity in the policy making process.

That is no different from what Minister Pyne is doing in the reforms that he has put forward. He is putting forward a proposition that enables students from regional Australia and all around Australia to access universities and for universities to seek out those who are highly competent and highflyers who they would want in their courses. Scholarships will provide those same pathways. Again, I make the point that when I was going through I had a Commonwealth scholarship. It gave me the opportunity to achieve an outcome.

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