Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (2016 Measures No. 1) Bill 2016. The first schedule of this bill relates to grants that are available for universities to support their Indigenous students. Previously, there were three separate pooling funds available for support services, grants and other programs, and bursaries for Indigenous students. You can understand why the sector found operating across three separate pools of funds absolutely administratively burdensome and inflexible. So the proposal makes sense. Schedule 1, for example, is for the three existing funds to be pooled together into one. This allows universities to better respond to the needs of individual Indigenous cohorts. This change should be welcomed by the sector.

I am pleased to speak on this bill because Labor has a very strong record when it comes to education and helping students, regardless of background or postcode, to go on to higher education. We know that if you want to better someone's life, if you want to change their world and make it a better place, we can do this through education. Our record was extremely strong, when we were in government, on this particular topic. Labor has opened the doors to our universities to thousands more Australians.

In the Whitlam era we brought in free education for university students. Many thousands of people who would have been unlikely to get an education or a degree at university ended up getting degrees. For some people it was the very first time and, for the majority, it was the first in their family's history. Prior to the early seventies it was the circumstances that people were born in that determined whether they went to university. We have Gough Whitlam to thank for that. I am sure all my colleagues, on this side, are very proud of one of the greatest achievements that Labor has ever come up with.

Today there are 750,000 undergraduate students at Australian universities, and one in every four of them is there because of the policies we put in when last in government. We put 190,000 more students on campus. We boosted Indigenous student numbers by 26 per cent. We boosted regional student numbers by 30 per cent. We now have more than 36,000 extra students from low-income families in universities compared to 2007. This is in contrast to the current government, who have the wrong plan for Australia's education system. Prior to the election we heard the debate about introducing $100,000 degrees, which put debt walls around universities, making it very hard for people to go to university and pay their debts. The government's policies would see us fall behind, committing us to lower standards of living and lower incomes.

Since the last election, in 2016, the Labor Party has wanted to reset the relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians in a renewed push to close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage. One way of doing that is through education and higher education. Education plays a very important role. It was Labor that created the close the gap framework and only Labor has a clear plan for meeting the ambitious targets—that we designed, when last in government.

Addressing Indigenous disadvantage will not happen in one term. We know it is a long road ahead, and we know that it will not happen in one term of government. So what have we seen after three and a bit years? We have seen the Liberals sidelining the voices of Aboriginal people, slashing funding for community controlled services and neglecting the closing the gap framework. We need to put forward a series of positive policies to help close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage. We on this side are committed to improving early childhood outcomes, health outcomes and education and employment outcomes, as we drive a new agenda for tackling the outrageously high levels of Indigenous incarceration and victimisation. Most importantly, unlike the government, Labor is committed to working in a meaningful partnership with Indigenous Australians to close the gap and improve those outcomes for Indigenous Australians.

Investing in education is the single most important thing that we can do to maintain Australia's prosperity and secure the jobs of the future. It is no good talking about the jobs of the future and talking about the cutting-edge jobs that will be developed in the future; if you do not get the foundations right and provide the funding, those jobs will never come. That is what we have to do. Labor has always been committed to opening access to higher education for more Australians and supporting universities as critical drivers of innovation across the economy. We are committed to this not just because it is the fair thing to do but also because our future prosperity depends on it. Two in every three jobs created in the future will require some form of higher education degree. So we need to be building the workforce of the future today—and that starts today. The role of a government should be to improve access and to make it easier for people to gain higher education, not to put walls around our universities through massive debt burdens.

As I said earlier, Labor is the party of education and expanding opportunity to higher education. This additional investment will ensure that students are encouraged rather than deterred from studying at university, improving the productive capacity of our economy to provide certainty and confidence to a sector that is vital to maintaining Australia's prosperity. We want to legislate the student funding guarantee and index the value of the investment to ensure the value of the contribution is not eroded over time. Again, only Labor is committed to investing in higher education to create and sustain those jobs of the future.

The previous Labor government opened access to universities. As I said, 190,000 more students are at university today as a result of our reforms. Access will always matter to Labor and we will continue to support the demand-driven system, but our next wave of university reform will focus on completion and quality. We want Australian students who start university to finish university with a degree. Department of Education figures show that 23 per cent of people who started a degree as full-time students in 2006 had not completed it after eight years. So you can see that there needs to be a real focus on ensuring that people complete those degrees. There is evidence that attrition rates have been getting worse in recent years, meaning even more students are likely to leave university with a huge debt but no degree.

With the Commonwealth investing $14 billion of taxpayers' money in universities every year, Australians are right to expect outcomes that benefit the entire community, with young Australians graduating as teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers and scientists enhancing our society and our economy. We have set an ambitious goal to increase the number of students completing their study by 20,000 graduates per year from 2020. Labor will also work with the university sector to ensure that incentives within the demand-driven system are introduced to achieve this goal. Investing in education is the single most important thing that we can do to maintain Australia's prosperity and secure the jobs of the future. Labor has always been committed to opening access to higher education to more Australians and supporting universities as critical drivers of innovation across the economy.

The second part of the schedule amends various pieces of legislation and this proposed change would make data exchange of individuals using VET FEE-HELP consistent with other aspects of the HELP program. We welcome this change. However, it is not enough to make up for the government's neglect of the VET sector and of TAFE. Over the last three years the Liberal government have shown they simply do not care about technical and vocational education.

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