Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I would point out to the House that postgraduate degrees have always been deregulated in this country, or at least they have been deregulated for many years. Therefore, in the university sector right now we have deregulated postgraduate degrees, we have deregulated international students being offered full-fee places, and undergraduate degrees have a market on one side of the mechanism, which is the demand driven system, but no price point in the market. That is why the system cannot work without a price point. If the Labor Party understood markets, they would know that on one side of the market is the offer, which is the service in this case, and on the other side there needs to a price point for the market to operate. That is what the government is proposing to do.

But let me quote from someone who has not always been a great friend of the coalition. In fact, Glyn Davis, the vice-chancellor of Australia's highest ranking university, Melbourne University, was a close confidant of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. I am not sure which side the deputy leader of the Labor Party was on. She was on both sides of the Rudd-Gillard divide. Nevertheless, he writes in The Australiantoday:

… without major tax increases, or diversion of public funds from other sectors, the current system is not sustainable.

In other words, without the government's reform, without the opportunity to get new revenue into the system, there is no possibility for universities to be world class in the future. Labor ripped out $6.6 billion from higher education to cut costs. They gave universities no opportunity to replace that revenue. As Glyn Davis says, 'Unless the Labor Party is proposing to increase taxes or pay for universities through ripping services away from other areas of the economy, then the university sector is not sustainable in the short, medium or long term.' Therefore, the government has a reform agenda, unlike Labor that has absolutely no agenda. We believe in it and we will continue to prosecute it. I will continue to work with the crossbenchers to bring about change. I only wish that Labor and the Greens would want to be part of the national conversation rather than simply play politics with every measure.

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