Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Higher Education and Research Reform Bill 2014 and the associated amendments. I note that this bill has been in the House before but in a different form. It has been to the other place and, with significant negotiations with the crossbenchers, has come back with some improvements. It is a shame that the major party in the Senate would not engage in the same manner. In fact, we have just heard from the member for Cunningham, who says the bill should be thrown out. She said it is not well supported. It is supported by virtually all of the university sector. It is supported because they know that change needs to happen.

I believe that it is incumbent on governments, it is our responsibility, to inform the public as to why we are suggesting that changes need to be made. I am going to attempt to do that. I preface my remarks by saying that nothing remains the same. The world is constantly changing. Today's perfect solution for any problem has a use-by date, and so it is with higher education. There have been a series of reforms by different governments in the past, but serious reform has not occurred for some time, and it is overdue. We know it is overdue because the sector is progressively declining and facing bigger and bigger problems.

It was in the 1950s, for instance, that Robert Menzies laid the foundations for the modern university sector, establishing Commonwealth scholarships to cover fees and provide a means-tested allowance for capable students from lower socioeconomic groups. His was the first government to truly recognise the value of a strong public university sector and provide a large boost in support under conditions which provided for the autonomy of universities, and a dramatic rise in graduate numbers resulted.

It was the Whitlam government in the seventies which introduced 'free education'. I say 'free' with inverted commas because we all know—we all knew then, as we know now, in fact—that there is no such thing as a free education. Someone must pay. Once again, when the fee-free university was introduced by the Whitlam government, there was a dramatic rise in numbers.

It was the Hawke government and their very competent minister John Dawkins that belled the cat on the issue of 'free education', because, as numbers attending university continued to rise, so did the unsustainable costs to government. That government, a Labor government, introduced HECS fees.

It is a recurring theme in Australia's modern history that a bigger and bigger percentage of people have elected to study at a tertiary institution. The Howard government updated the system in 1996, introducing three different tiers for HECS fees, reflecting the earning capacity of the various professions, and again in 2005, when the HECS-HELP scheme was adopted, which limited lifetime access to subsidised university education to seven years full time.

In 2009 Julia Gillard, as the Minister for Education, removed the cap on places, leading once again to higher numbers of enrolments and bigger implications for the budget. This was quite a watershed moment, I must say: uncapping places basically makes government commitment to education open ended. There are no limits on government spending under that arrangement.

It is obvious to all who take an interest in education—the students, the parents, the universities, their staff and politicians—that governments do not have spare buckets of money to throw at the sector at the moment. It does not matter who is in government or what Labor say now. Should they succeed at the next election, should they gain government at the next election, the Labor Party will be mugged by reality. The update of the intergenerational review is likely to be released in just a couple of weeks. The previous one, the 2010 intergenerational review, tells us that governments do not and will not have the money to meet soaring demand to grow our university sector and research capacity.

Don't listen to the rubbish from the opposite side, Mr Deputy Speaker. They know that it is not possible for government to contribute unlimited funds to the university sector. The member for Fraser, the shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh, knows that there is not an endless stream of money. There are other more pressing priorities for government for the limited finance that we have, like the NDIS, a scheme that has bipartisan support and that we all want introduced. We just cannot have sectors of government having uncapped spending and continue to pour money in endlessly.

So how pressing are these reforms, and why do we need to change now? It was interesting to listen to the member for Hasluck just before. He was speaking about international students and the information revolution. The information age and technology are providing opportunities and challenges for tertiary education that we would never even have imagined twenty years ago. Online education is here—MOOCs; full online courses; instant accessibility to lecturers; in fact, online tutorials are available not just with Australian universities but with virtually any top 500 university in the world. Australian universities will be challenged not only to hang onto Australian students but—very importantly for their financial success and viability—they will be challenged to hang onto their international students. Herein lies one of the great challenges.

As I said earlier at various times, both sides of the political spectrum have asked for savings from the tertiary sector. The previous Labor government was no different: they removed a large line of funding from the tertiary sector. It is right that governments should continue to question all of the projects that they fund. We should ask for efficiency dividends as we go along. And so it is with the university sector: as the way they deliver their platforms, as the technology becomes available, of course they can be more efficient, and we have every reason to ask them to contribute part of that back into the expanding sector.

There was a time when it was paramount for Australia to increase numbers in universities. So we pump-primed them: governments gave them progressively more money to get the university entrance numbers up. It is still important that we raise university participation, but the uncapping of places by the previous government is tempered at the moment by the fact that there are many concerns within the sector now that entrance standards are falling and that the quality of our university students being turned out in Australia may not be as high as it has been before.

The one thing that makes the Australian higher education sector very powerful and a strong economic contributor to the Australian community is that we are seen as a deliverer of quality education. We must guard this ferociously. It is not the time to be talking about the standards of university entrance, but it is one of those issues that is associated, and I am sure I will have an opportunity at another time to expand further on it.

To come directly to what is the most contentious part of what is a complete reorganisation of the funding mechanisms that govern our universities, the package of incentives to the industry, is of course the uncapping of fees—the ability of universities to charge whatever they should wish for a degree.

I talked a little before about the international market. Universities have increasingly turned to the international market, full-fee-paying students, to provide a new income stream for the sector. It has been highly successful. We have a world-class university sector, an enviable reputation and provided a new export industry for Australia worth $16.3 billion per annum. That is the income stream that underwrites the quality of Australian universities and, as a result, the way we can educate Australian students.

What would happen if we lost those international students? I can tell you what would happen: our universities would be in a state of ever-declining capacity and quality. Most of our international students are coming out of Asia. However, competition is getting hotter every day. Huge investment is turning mediocre universities into world-class universities. With the online phenomenon, which I touched on before, the question we must ask ourselves is: why would a student living in Mumbai or in Chengdu enrol in an online degree at ANU or Adelaide University when in fact they could enrol at Princeton, Oxford or Harvard?

If we do not keep up the quality of our universities, we will lose these enrolments and the income stream underwriting Australian Universities. If we do not continue to rate in the top 100, rightly or wrongly, we will lose those students. Universities, whether we like it or not, are judged by their research achievements—by how many papers they get published in the scientific journals. We will not stay at the current ratings unless there is significant new investment. I have already established that it is unlikely investment is going to come from government, whether it be a Liberal or Labor government, given the current economic challenges facing Australian government. Both sides of politics know that.

If we do not address this issue now, more shame on us. If we just allow the status quo to continue, more shame on us as a parliament. If the taxpayer is not able to meet the challenge, it is inevitable that we will have to ask students to shoulder a bit more of the burden and, under what has been the most keenly contested part of Minister Pyne's reform, of course universities will be able to set their own fees, uncapped.

The cries of outrage from the other side of this House, saying, '$100,000 degrees'—'$200,000 degrees', I have heard. Of course they would say that. It is straight out of the Grimms' fairytales. In fact they have no idea. They have no way of justifying those figures. Like Grimms' fairytales, they are just made up. The $200,000 degree has come from where the sun does not shine—it is just made up.

We know, and you know, Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, that the higher education package, as it sits now, stipulates that universities cannot charge Australian students more than their international students, less the subsidy. We cannot charge them more than we charge international students. If universities ramp up those fees to the internationals, they will not have them. I have already told this House about why we are under intense competition from the rest of the world for those internationals students. If we doubled the fees, we will not have any of them here. If we do not have any of them here, our universities collapse, and the universities know that. That is why Universities Australia supports the package. That is why every university in Australia is behind the package. They know that without change they are in deep trouble. And that is why this bill has come back from the Senate with a raft of amendments, but not one of them has been agreed to by the Australian Labor Party because they refuse to even enter into the debate. They just say, 'No, we will stop the tide, the water will go back and we will all be safe.' It will not happen and it will not happen to our universities.

So while the focus of this bill, the contentious part, has been the uncapping of fees, there are a number of other great things coming from the government—the extension of funding to 48,000 students studying diplomas; 35,000 more starting bachelor degrees outside of universities; and the launching of the Commonwealth scholarships benefiting thousands who would not otherwise be able to access universities, particularly those Commonwealth scholarships that are sponsored directly by the government into my constituency, into lower socioeconomic groups, into universities that have lower socioeconomic groups and people affected by isolation. And we will be providing more support than ever before for those students to attend university, to contest, to apply for their dreams.

The HELP program will be strengthened. Students will be able to borrow every cent, every bit of their commitment and they will not pay a cent back until they reach a $50,000 income. If you have got kids, if you are the primary provider for kids, your interest rate will be paused and that interest-rate will only be CPI. So, in fact, the loans will be interest-free. All in all, it is a great package. It is improved by the negotiation of the crossbench senators. Just imagine what we could achieve if only both sides of the House decided to think about what is good for Australian education. (Time expired)

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