Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes the Government's abject failure in higher education policy, including:

(a) repeated attempts to introduce a United States style, user pays approach to tuition fees which will leave young Australians with $100,000 degrees;

(b) a continued policy to slash 20 per cent from Commonwealth Grants Scheme funding; and

(c) the short-sighted 2016-17 budget decision to remove 40 per cent of funding to the Higher Education Participation Program by 2019-20; and

(2) calls on the Government to:

(a) recognise that two in every three jobs created in the future will require a university degree;

(b) acknowledge that investment in human potential is critical to boosting productivity and driving innovation; and

(c) immediately work to improve access to higher education and stop putting barriers around our universities through massive debt burdens.

We know that a university education makes an enormous difference to the lives of individuals. Many of us in this place were the first in our families to attend university, and we know the difference that has made to our lives and the different paths our lives have taken because of that. What we do not discuss nearly enough is the fact that a university education is not just a private benefit for the individual; it has a public benefit for all of us. We are better and stronger as a nation when we invest in education. In fact, the OECD estimates that the real rate of return to the Australian government from investing in tertiary education is more than 13 per cent, putting us at the higher end of that public benefit if you look across OECD nations. In fact, in 2013, the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency found that every dollar invested in tertiary education would on average grow the economy by $26 within the decade.

I have seen that personal benefit within my own family. My older brothers were able to go to university because of the Whitlam reforms. The reforms that came after, during the Hawke and Keating years and during the Rudd and Gillard years, have built on that fine tradition of ensuring that a university education is accessible to anybody who is prepared to work hard and study hard. We invested in our universities because we wanted to make that difference in people's lives; also because we wanted to make that difference in our economic life as a nation. After years of neglect under the Howard government, Labor boosted investment in universities from $8 billion in 2007 to $14 billion in 2013. We opened up the demand-driven system, which has seen an additional 190,000 Australians go to university. Around one in every four of the 750,000 Australians who are undergraduates in our universities are there because of those reforms.

What is particularly important is that these reforms have meant that people who struggled to go university in the past are now able to attend. Since 2012, we have seen a 26 per cent boost in the number of Indigenous students, a 30 per cent boost in the number of regional students and more than 36,000 extra students from low-income families—most, as I said, the first in their family to go to university. What you see in contrast, since the election of the Abbott and Turnbull governments, is a plan simply to cut university funding. If the Liberals had their way, more than $4.4 billion will be cut from Commonwealth grant schemes over four years. You cannot have the innovative and agile economy that the Prime Minister likes to talk about without investing in higher education. We heard him speaking today about advanced manufacturing replacing the jobs of the car workers. Thousands of them will lose their jobs over coming years because of the neglect of this government.

To have that advanced manufacturing future, we have to not just invest in the capacity of our existing workforce but also ensure that we have the designers, creators and engineers who will lead that advanced manufacturing future. It was fantastic recently to go to Monash University's Woodside Innovation Centre in Clayton, where I met the students and researchers who are working in collaboration with Woodside and their Goodwyn platform, right over the other side of the country off the coast of Western Australia. They lost a lever—a very simple piece of equipment that would have taken weeks to replace if they have been relying on traditional means. But, in collaboration with Monash University, they were able to send 3D imagery to a 3D printer, have their technicians work on it and helicopter this replacement part out to the rig much more quickly than they otherwise would have been able to. Of course that is the future of manufacturing in Australia, but you cannot do it without a partnership with universities.

Our young Australians are already paying the sixth highest fees in the OECD, and the idea that we would ask them now to pay $100,000 university fees is disturbing, to say the least, particularly with the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program cuts that this government plans. A 40 per cent cut is already planned for HEPPP, which is the program that has really supported young Australians who do not come from a background where university education is an easy thing to get into. Labor supports our universities; the Liberals are just about cuts.

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