Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

Since the budget we have seen quite clearly that it is not only Labor that opposes the government's unfair, short-sighted higher education package. In fact, Australians across the country opposed the measures in the previous bill and also those in this Higher Education and Research Reform Bill 2014. I would indicate that, based on the Prime Minister's assessment, since the election there has been a period of fairly poor government—so bad that they had to consider restarting and having a new opportunity to get good government right at the beginning of this week. I would suggest that one way to achieve that might just be to pull this bill, because it is not well supported and it should be opposed.

We see that Australians in particular are concerned about the public funding cut to undergraduate courses of up to 37 per cent. We see the Australian public in particular oppose the potential for $100,000 degrees that are the result of combining both cuts and fee deregulation. We know that all Australians want to have the right to pursue their education at Australia's best universities without facing a crippling, lifetime debt.

As many speakers have said, in this world of constant change and rapid industry transformation many people will need to return to higher education. So we are not only talking about school leavers seeking their first qualifications; we are talking about many Australians who may already have a university qualification and need to upgrade it or to change it and we are talking about people who may have gone through vocational training and who seek to get higher qualifications. In a modern world a lifetime of education and training faces us. And so this is a matter for all Australians

Our universities and the education they provide are a national asset—they are a national investment. While this provides an individual benefit to the students it also significant in providing a contribution to the public good of the nation, both economically and socially.    Our universities are deeply engaged in significant and important research; particularly, it is very much a global endeavour. I just want to give the House an example from my own backyard: the University of Wollongong's Global Challenges Program.

If you go to their website you can see a description of it and understand how significant and contemporary it is. That particular program is described on that website:

OVERVIEW

Over the coming decades we will face many challenges and transformations in the way we live. The UOW Global Challenges Program recognises the interconnected nature of these transformations. The Program is designed to encourage and develop creative and community-engaged research that will help drive social, economic and cultural change in our region, and will be translatable across the globe.

The Program will initially focus on three Global Challenges - Living Well, Longer, Manufacturing Innovation, and Sustaining Coastal and Marine Zones. These are united by an overall research goal: Transforming Lives and Regions. Each Global Challenge involves collaboration between UOW researchers and business, government, community and other research organisations. Global Challenges will articulate and pursue innovative solutions to major challenges, with a clear focus on the delivery and adoption of research outputs that have maximum impact in key areas of social, economic and community need.

And that is only one example of the important work that my own university is doing. And I know that those who have universities in their electorates across the country can see the same thing.

Australians understand that both the research and the teaching that happen in our universities are important. Yet Minister Pyne continues to hold hostage the funding for research and Future Fellowships for mid-career researchers, and he continues to ransom vital funding for research infrastructure.

So what do we have before us in the legislation mark 2? We have another proposal that is still wrong for the nation, still wrong for students and still wrong for families. The government has given up $3.5 billion of its $3.9 billion of savings, but it has not fixed the inequity that was at the heart of the original bill and which caused our major worry. The bill still contains    $1.9 billion in cuts to Australian universities. It still contains $100,000 degrees for undergraduate students. It still contains $171 million in cuts to equity programs. It still contains $200 million in cuts to indexation of grant programs. It also contains $170 million in cuts to research training. It introduces fees for PhD students for the first time ever and it includes $80 million in cuts to the Australian Research Council. The massive cuts to universities remain. The new fee imposts for students remain. Nothing of substance has changed, and Labor's position remains unchanged in opposition to it.

Despite speculation in recent weeks that the government would give up its budget savings in order to achieve its ideological goals, this bill still includes the massive funding cuts that were proposed in the budget. It slashes funding for Commonwealth supported places in undergraduate degrees by an average 20 per cent, and, for some courses, by up to 37 per cent. It cuts indexation for university funding, costing universities $202 million over the forward estimates period.

These are all matters that were not considered or discussed with the community before the election. In fact, the minister, then the shadow minister, said exactly the opposite. Before the election, he indicated to the Australian people that there were no proposed changes to the way universities were funded under consideration by them, if they took government. This underpins why the package is in so much trouble with the community. There was no discussion. Before the election, there was no consideration of why these sorts of changes might have been required, how they might have been achieved and what the general population thought about them. There was no mandate for this government to proceed in the direction that it has. Quite rightly, people have had a look at it and said it is unfair, like so much of the budget. The whole reform package is about making those who can least afford it carry the weight of the government's unfair budget.

In particular, this bill now includes a transition fund of $100 million over three years for regional universities. The fact that the government even needs to propose the fund indicates that all the concerns we raised about the impact on regional universities in the first bill were actually real and accurate. There is no need for transition funds when measures are fair and reasonable. Indeed, if the system, and the fees it introduced, were equitable, there would be no need for scholarships. The day the original bill was defeated in the Senate, the minister told Universities Australia that this transition fund would be $300 million. That is still $200 million short of what the universities are seeking, I should point out. So we end up with a measly $100 million in this bill—one fifth of the size the sector itself thinks is needed to allow for adjustment to deregulation.

Last week I attended a forum organised by the member for Indi, Cathy McGowan, where one of the very regions that will be affected gave compelling evidence about how important regional universities are to the broader economic and social wellbeing of their region. These universities are major direct employers and significant providers of education for critical regional sectors, such as health services.

I know this directly and personally through our experiences in the Illawarra region, particularly as we have been undergoing significant structural transformation in recent decades. The role of Wollongong University in supporting the research and education effort to assist that process has been integral to the success of growing new employment and transforming existing industry sectors to sustain jobs. The university is now one of the largest employers. Whereas once BlueScope was the largest employer, it has now been superseded by the university, as a direct employer, and is therefore is a significant direct economic driver in the region.

I would also like to identify that, in this context, the local TAFE institute is a critical partner in this task and has provided important skills and training expertise and service, particularly for many restructured employees. This case was, in particular, outlined in the report of the House of Representatives Education and Employment Committee, TAFE: an Australian asset. I note the government has not yet responded to the committee's report, and I would like to encourage the new minister to look seriously at the work and the bipartisan recommendations of that report. But, in support of this critical public sector work of universities, it seems that a pathetic one-off $100 million over three years is the best the Liberal-National Party can do for regional Australia.

The other persistent issue that causes us to oppose these bills in their new variation is the evidence that there will be $100,000 degrees out of this package. All of the analysis—from the Group of Eight to the National Tertiary Education Union—agrees that student fees would need to go up by around 30 per cent just to make up for the initial funding cut by this government. For some degrees, that figure is 60 per cent. But of course this legislation would implement complete deregulation of student fees, from 1 January 2016—unis can charge whatever they like. The University of Western Australia has already said it will charge all students $16,000 a year, which, overnight, more than doubles the cost of an arts degree.

I could point out to the House that there is nowhere in the world where deregulation has led to price competition and lower fees for students. In the UK, where they were deregulated in 2012, with a cap of £9,000, for the 2015-16 academic year there will be only two universities out of 123 that will not be charging the cap—that is, the maximum amount that they can charge.

It should be pointed out that in the Australian context the current student contribution rate is already a maximum rate. It is a maximum rate because the Howard government partially deregulated student contributions to allow universities to charge anything from nought to the maximum—to the cap. No surprises, at the time, that Dr Nelson, as the minister, said:

Some institutions may increase the tuition fees in some disciplines. Some institutions have already indicated they would like to reduce their fees or make no change at all.

What actually happened? None of them have decreased their university fees. The cap—the maximum—is treated as the standard cost. Even without having a 20 per cent funding cut to contend with, every single university put its student contributions up to the maximum almost immediately. So the evidence is there to see, not only internationally, but here in our own history.

I particularly want to finish by talking about my concerns about the entrance of private providers and overseas universities under this legislation's proposal to extend access to per-student subsidies at 70 per cent of the rate for public universities. I think we need to be really conscious that there is a very real danger of poor-quality and low-cost providers aggressively entering the sector to take financial advantage of the new market. While of course many private providers have a long and quality record in the sector, and clearly not all private providers or overseas institutions would go down the cheap-and-nasty path, enough doing so will replicate the real and serious issues that have emerged in the vocational education sector. As the reports before the parliament propose, the parliament should note the increasing evidence of dodgy providers entering our vocational education system and taking advantage of vulnerable students by signing them up to inappropriate courses which they never complete, but they still end up with a VET FEE-HELP debt.

Along with shadow minister Kim Carr, I am pleased that our request to the Auditor-General to investigate potential abuses of VET FEE-HELP has been accepted. But, until many of these very real issues in the vocational sector are fully understood and effective responses are put in place, we should not take the risk with the quality of our higher education system, our fourth largest export earner.

Finally, we have to indicate that the bill before us, while amended, has not actually addressed the underlying unfairness, the underlying danger to participation and the economic capacity of our universities in particular to deliver for our regions. On that basis, it should be rejected, and the government should start good government today by pulling it from the list.

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