Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On Monday of this week, the Prime Minister told the Australian public that 'good government starts today'. He told his party room that, if they just gave him a chance, if they gave him six months, he would change. There would be no more captain's picks, no more asking for forgiveness instead of permission and no more knighting princes. Well, you do not have to be Dr Phil to be sceptical about a repeat offender like this Prime Minister promising that they would change, five years into a relationship. Talk is cheap. As the Prime Minister knows full well, promises are easy to make and hard to deliver on. It is actions, not words, that count.

That brings us to the Higher Education and Research Reform Bill 2014. While the Prime Minister promises change, what he is actually delivering is more of the same: another bungled, broken promise, another ideologically driven attempt to change our country under the cover of a manufactured crisis. This bill in particular is deja vu all over again. Fresh from the Minister for Education's humiliating defeat at the hands of the Senate last year, the minister is once again trying to push through his toxic plans to inflict $100,000 degrees on Australian students and their families. This is not change; this is more of the same, and more and more Australians are beginning to speak out against it, including the 39 members of the coalition backbench—some of whom may be leaving the chamber as we speak.

This week the Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University, Peter Dawkins, from my own electorate, in Footscray, spoke out against the changes to funding that would pave the way for $100,000 degrees in these reforms. He is one of a growing number of voices who deplore the ad hoc, high-handed policymaking of this fractured and disunified government. Professor Dawkins argues:

The federal government's initial package represents a radical move toward deregulation, with minimal safeguards against associated risks.

Professor Dawkins joins a growing chorus of criticism by experts and members of the university sector about these proposed changes. They have also failed to gain support from Stephen Parker, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra, who said that the proposed changes to higher education funding could 'blight the lives of a generation, unless Australia comes to its senses'.

Any MP need only stand on the corner of any street in their electorate, and they will soon hear directly from the voters what Australian families think of these reforms. It begs the question: how are we still talking about the higher education and research reform amendment bill? On the eve of the 2013 federal election, Tony Abbott sat in front of a camera and made a last pledge to the Australian public before they entered the ballot boxes. While being interviewed on SBS, the now Prime Minister said there would be 'no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS'. Now we all know that, as the Prime Minister himself has said in the past, you really need to get it in writing from this Prime Minister before you can have too much faith that the commitment is going to be kept.

So let us turn to the Real Solutions policy pamphlet, a policy pamphlet that dare not speak its name amongst those opposite. Page 41 of Real Solutions tells us that an Abbott government would 'ensure the continuation of the current arrangements of university funding'. So we have got him on TV and we have got him in writing: no cuts and no changes to university funding.

Unlike many other coalition promises, this one seemed to survive the transition from opposition to government. Two months after the federal election, in November 2013, the Minister for Education was asked on Sky News whether he was considering raising university fees. His answer was unambiguous. The minister remarked:

… I am not even considering it—

that is, raising university fees—

because we promised that we wouldn't and Tony Abbott made it very clear before the election that we would keep our promises.

Well, we have all seen the footage, and we have read the transcripts.

In stark contrast to these promises is the bill before the House today. It is just as unpopular and unfair as the Abbott government is itself. It is quite clear to the majority of Australians that these cuts to higher education are an affront to the dignity of our egalitarian society. This bill is really about promoting elitism and exclusion rather than equity and equality of opportunity. However, more than its ideological extremism, this bill best illustrates this government's ham-fisted approach to reform.

There has been a lot of talk from conservatives in recent time about the implications of recent election results and the challenge to the Prime Minister's leadership—the fastest challenge of a sitting Prime Minister since Federation—and many are suggesting that our democracy is somehow broken. The Australian's economics correspondent, Adam Creighton, has written that Australian democracy is 'probably not sustainable'. Melbourne radio host Neil Mitchell stated that the recent election result in Queensland showed that Australia had become:

… ungovernable. Nobody will be willing to make tough decisions

Another radio presenter in Melbourne, Tom Elliott, went so far as to say on 3AW:

We need a benign dictatorship, we need a committee of proven, talented people, give them 5 years

Instead of blaming the voters, conservatives need to look in the mirror to understand why reform has stalled under this government and under the state Liberal governments.

This government has thrown the reform book out the window. The OECD's Making Reform Happen project, a long-term, multicountry study of the effective ingredients of successful reform processes in developed countries, offers a tool kit for effective reformers. It is one that the Abbott government could learn a thing or two from. The major findings from this report process were:

It is important to have an electoral mandate for reform.

Now, as I have already outlined to the House, the Abbott government has failed on this measure comprehensively with respect to these higher education reforms. It is no way to make the biggest changes to our higher education system in 25 years by dropping them on both the Australian public and the sector in two lines in a budget speech after promising at the previous election that there would be no changes.

The next recommendation of the OECD is:

Effective communication is essential.

No, the OECD did not mean a taxpayer funded advertising campaign, as has been recently launched by the education minister—another direct broken promise of Tony Abbott's, who said that there would be no government funded advertising program of any initiative in the budget. What is required is an articulation of the need for reform. As I say, this government has confected a crisis in our university system—a university system that is regarded by international observers, particularly in the United States, as a model worthy of imitation.

The next recommendation from the OECD is:

Policy design must be underpinned by solid research and analysis.

The chorus of opposition to these reforms from academics and experts in education policy really tells the story here. Professor Bruce Chapman, the architect of the original HEC Scheme, has made it very clear that this government is taking the principles of HECS into uncharted waters and that there could be very serious consequences for the equity provisions of this policy system. Joseph Stiglitz has similarly praised the enormous contribution that Australia's higher education system makes to combating the progress of inequality in this country.

The OECD has also said that 'leadership is critical' to the delivery of reform. On this point I will let the Prime Minister's 68 per cent public disapproval rating speak for itself. The next recommendation from the OECD is that:

Successful reforms often take several attempts.

On this one I will give it to Christopher Pyne—he is continuing to try in the face of defeat. The final recommendation from the OECD is that:

It usually pays to engage opponents of reform rather than simply trying to override their opposition.

Now the education minister's ability to build consensus in this chamber is legendary. However, unfortunately, on this bill his efforts to engage his opponents have consisted more of the harassment of Senate crossbenchers by a flood of text messages than any sense to gain a sense of common purpose.

Democracy is not broken in Australia. Reform is not dead. We are not in the last days of the Roman republic. What is needed is a change of leadership. What is needed is grown-up, adult government. Rather than providing the grown-up, adult government, as promised by the Prime Minister in opposition, watching this government try to implement reform in this country in recent times has been like watching a two-year-old trying to eat spaghetti with their fingers. They are getting it all over themselves. It is just a mess.

Instead of attempting to build consensus in the parliament and in the community, seeking compromise or consulting with those affected, the minister has chosen to continue the combative approach to policymaking that has characterised his party's chaotic tactics. When he meets opposition from students, the Senate, the community, families, vice-chancellors, the minister for education simply puts his hands over his ears and tries another advertising campaign. He failed attempts to push through radical changes to higher education funding last year, then immediately jumped onto 7.30 to inform us that he planned to come back with his unfair changes as soon as parliament resumed in 2015. Today, in the first sitting week of the year, there has been no change; there have been no lessons learnt; and we are back where we started. It is indicative of a government ravaged by internal fracturing and poisoned by stubborn ideological zeal.

As I said earlier, the Prime Minister promised before the election that there would be no cuts to education funding. In the first Abbott budget, the first Hockey budget, the government cut federal funding of tertiary education by 20 per cent. If that were not enough, the Liberals then used their own savage cuts to education funding to justify pushing through the deregulation of university fees we see in the bill before us today. In a move that can only be considered masochistic, the government is trying to create an environment that would necessitate these awful policy changes. All of the analysis, from the Group of Eight to the National Tertiary Education Union, says that, as a result of these cuts to base university funding, fees for students will need to go up by around 30 per cent just to make up for this base funding cut.

This legislation would see a further slashing of funding for Commonwealth supported places in undergraduate degrees by an average of 20 per cent, and up to 37 per cent for some. The legislation does not stop there, instead proposing a complete deregulation of student fees from 2016, allowing universities to charge whatever they like, truly bringing the prospect of common $100,000 degrees into the frame.

The education minister wants to take us down the American road of higher education, where your ability to attend a university depends on your parents' bank account, not your industry or intelligence. This is not the Australia that I know. The United States is also suffering from the burden of deregulation in the form of student debt. The United States now has more student debt than credit card debt. Is this really this kind of society that we want to live in?

Likewise, if the US system does not serve as a perfect example of the negative effects of deregulation on universities, attempts at deregulation of universities in the United Kingdom have had similar debilitating results. The UK Higher Education Commission has released scathing reports of the impact that deregulation has had on English universities. Three years after its implementation, deregulation has raised doubts over the sector's quality and reputation as well as its financial sustainability going forward.

Without a white paper, community consultation, an electoral mandate or any sense of common purpose across this parliament, how can this government continue to try and frantically and chaotically force this legislation through? The irony is not lost on me that the only thing that we can now really trust this government to do is to follow through on its broken promises. The Liberal Party went to the last election with a list of promises—promises that quite obviously meant nothing to either the Prime Minister or his minister for education. In fact the minister for education had the gall, late last year, to claim that the coalition did not even have a higher education policy at the last election. That is taking it to whole other level: not only breaking a promise but denying the existence of the promise in the first place.

When they are criticised for cutting funding to universities, the government's media minders tell them to talk about the range of new scholarships on offer. We have heard it from members opposite talking about this bill. They say it as if we had not been inundated with their taxpayer funded ads on television—ads about changes to higher education for a proposed bill that has not yet passed the parliament. This scholarship fund, 'the biggest Commonwealth scholarship fund in Australia's history', as the education minister likes to remind us, will be funded exclusively by other students. This Commonwealth fund is not made up of Commonwealth funding; rather, it is funded by charging students more to go to university. One dollar in every $5 raised by deregulating university fees will go to this fund. This is a direct impost on future students.

Like so much of this proposed bill, the Commonwealth scholarship fund is clouded in a haze of technocratic jargon, misinformation and deception, designed to disguise an extreme ideological agenda. This comedy of errors would be amusing if it were not so destructive and dangerous. It is utterly unsurprising in this context that the Prime Minister's disapproval rating now sits at 68 per cent, and as Leigh Sales said on 7.30 this week to a stuttering Prime Minister hanging by a thread:

Clearly the public is not buying what you're saying there.

Indeed, the Liberal Party itself has not been this unpopular since the Minister for Communications, the white knight who will supposedly save the Liberal-National government, was leading the Liberal Party in 2009. Sadly, while all of this week's news will undoubtedly focus on the fracturing and disunity of the government leading this country down the garden path, effective governance makes way for petty politics. But what we do in this House matters, particularly the contents of this bill. I know that members of my electorate are very concerned about the consequences of this bill for their future and their children's future—for their ability to see a different and better life for their children.

Labor will not support this bill. We will vote against any attempt to cut university funding. We will not support greater inequality and reduced access as a result of higher fees and bigger debts. Finally, we will never tell Australian students that their ability to undertake transformative education depends on the size of their parents' bank account. The Prime Minister said— (Time expired)

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