Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition supports the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (2016 Measures No. 1) Bill 2016. This bill contains proposals for two changes to the Higher Education Support Act and related acts. The first set of changes is contained in schedule 1, which relates to Indigenous students. Schedule 1 will make changes to the allocation and administration of grants for universities and higher education providers that support Indigenous students. If enacted, the bill will have the effect that three existing funds will be pooled into one. The three funds provide for support services, grants and other programs and bursaries for Indigenous students. By pooling the funds, the money can be used more flexibly and in a more streamlined manner. Making this change will relieve some of the administrative burden imposed on universities.

I am informed that the government has conducted consultation in relation to this streamlining and pooling of funds. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Consortium, which is an advocacy group for Indigenous higher education, has also gone on the record giving support to the proposed change. It is a change that we believe will be welcomed by the sector because the more streamlined and flexible approach will better allow grants to support Indigenous students and better allow universities to meet those students' needs.

The second schedule of the bill goes to VET FEE-HELP information sharing. Schedule 2 will amend various pieces of legislation to allow the Department of Education and Training to have access to tax file numbers for VET FEE-HELP debtors. This will ensure that data about students who utilise VET FEE-HELP can readily be shared between the Department of Education and Training on the one hand and the Australian Taxation Office on the other. This change will assist in bringing the VET FEE-HELP scheme into line with other loans under the HELP, including HECS-HELP, and it will assist in ensuring that the individual identifiers in the form of tax file numbers will be able to be used to better assist with information sharing between those two departments.

Insofar as this bill relates to Indigenous students, it deals with an issue that has long been a hallmark of Labor's work in this place. For many decades, we have been the party that has sought to promote access to and participation in higher education, including for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. You only need to go back as far as the Second World War to see that it was Labor that was involved in ensuring that there were scholarships for returning servicemen. More recently, in the 1970s, Gough Whitlam made it possible for kids like me and many, many others to go to university. I have said many times before that I am the first in my family to go to university, and there are so many people in this country who, even now, are the first in their family to go to university and who have been able to do so because of Labor's legacy of reforming higher education.

More recently, again it was Labor that opened the doors of our universities to thousands more Australians. Today there are 750,000 undergraduate students at Australian universities, and one in every four of them is there because of what Labor did when last in government. We put 190,000 more students on campus. Labor has boosted Indigenous students by 26 per cent. We also boosted regional students by 30 per cent, and 36,000 extra students from low-income families are now there, compared with 2007.

The moves we have made over many years to increase participation stand in pretty stark contrast to the higher education policy of this government, since it was elected in 2013. In fact, notoriously, this government budgeted to fully deregulate fees, which of course would have led to the $100,000 degrees that were so unpopular with the public. In their discussion paper that must released this year there is still a move to deregulate some university course fees, which we of course have opposed. This comes at the same time as the government has a 20 per cent cut to Commonwealth Grants Scheme funding for higher education still in the budget papers, even though it has been unsuccessful in getting that cut supported through this parliament.

The coalition government is unfortunately not supporting the university sector, and that is a very great shame for a number of reasons. It is a very great shame because, of course, higher education forms part of our international education exports. International education exports and tourism together account for almost as much trade as iron ore. Those two sectors are symbiotic—international education tends to drive tourism and vice versa. So it is great shame from that perspective.

It is also very great shame, from the perspective of the future workforce and skills needs of this country, that the coalition is taking such a regrettable approach to higher education funding. Universities are needed because, as we move into the future, more and more occupations are going to require university-level qualifications. And it is a very great shame for the students and potential students of this country that the coalition has taken such an adverse approach to education funding, because of the growing inequality in this country. We have inequality at its highest level in 70 years and it is continuing to grow. It is an important reason why we need to focus more on investing in education and not less. We need to find forces to countervail against the forces that are making us a less-equal society. As you would be aware, one of the greatest forces for conversions—for bringing people together and for reducing extreme inequality—is education, and that includes higher education.

That is important for a range of reasons also: opportunity for the individual people who benefit from higher education in a private sense; the opportunity they get to go into higher paying jobs; and the opportunity for the country to have people working in those higher skilled occupations. But, from a broader perspective, it certainly is very broadly acknowledged that extreme inequality is a drag on growth. It is a drag on our ability to grow our economy. It obviously makes it more difficult for people to share in the benefits of the growth that we have in our economy.

So the difference between the coalition and Labor in relation to higher education and all forms of education is a very important one for the future of our nation and just what sort of country we want to be. Do we want to be the sort of country where your postcode is not your destiny, where your circumstances at birth do not determine the success or otherwise that you will have in life? Or do we want have a society where division is entrenched and where higher education more and more becomes the province of the more wealthy and those with higher incomes? Of course not. Of course we want the former. So we are very proud of our record on higher education as a force for countering the forces that push towards greater inequality in our society, and as a force for opening up opportunities for people of all backgrounds so that you do not have to be in a situation where your destiny is determined by the circumstances of your birth.

I was thinking about this the other day, because I found my grade 11 yearbook when we moved house recently. I opened my grade 11 yearbook and it had a list of what all the previous year's grade 12s had been up to—where they had gone. I counted about five who had gone to university. I grew up in a regional town in Queensland, and of all of the grade 12s in a very big school I counted about five who had gone off to university. It is not because they are not as smart. It is not because they are not as talented. It is for a few structural reasons. One of them is the absence of aspiration, because university does not even seem to be an option. It is not even something on the horizon. It is not on the radar. For the creation of aspiration in the minds of students who are outside the cities—who are outside the types of families where it is common, over many generations, to go to university—those types of students need to see, role models need to see, the opportunity for universities. That is why equity programs are really important: they build that aspiration. They make universities seem normal and make it seem normal to go to university after high school.

That is one of the reasons I have been so worried about the cut of $152 million to the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program. It has already been booked in the budget, even though the review into that scheme is still underway. It is the reason that so many universities are concerned about the cut to that scheme. It is not just a scheme that grows aspiration—but, of course, that is crucial—it is also a scheme that supports students from those more disadvantaged backgrounds, once they get to university, to help with participation, to help with graduation and to help with success.

These are not new issues. In fact, for a lot of different groups of people who have not traditionally been from families that go to university, Labor has been working on building equity and participation for a long time. I mentioned Gough Whitlam's reforms in the 1970s earlier, but it is also timely to remember that in 1990 Bob Hawke released the landmark paper A fair chance for all. This explicitly talked about the imperative to build involvement in higher education, and graduation from higher education, amongst groups that had not previously had those opportunities. That paper has been the subject of a recent book reflecting on progress in the 25 years that have passed since it was announced and released. It was a really important paper for putting onto the policy agenda the building of aspirations and participation and success in higher education. That was a very salient and landmark paper. Change did happen. Improvements did occur. You did see the increase in those equity groups' representation in higher education.

Fast forward to the last Labor government. By that time, around 2011, we were still in a situation where a lot had been done but more needed to be done. So the then education minister, the member for Lalor, Julia Gillard, commissioned the Bradley review to look at what had to be done in relation to higher education. That review found that Indigenous students continued to be vastly underrepresented in higher education, and that is a challenge we still have to contend with today. Another review, the Behrendt review, which was specifically in relation to education access and outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, conducted in 2011 and 2012, recommended—among many other things—the pooling together of some of the programs, as we are seeing here this bill today.

The reason I am setting out those things is to talk about the fact that there has been a lot of work done over many decades to seek to improve representation by Indigenous students in higher education. But there is still more that needs to be done. At the moment, access rates for Indigenous students are around the 1.88 per cent mark compared with a population of about 2.9 per cent. So you can see that there is an underrepresentation of Indigenous students in higher education. Those are access rates. When you look at retention and graduation, the rates are even lower. The 2014 figures for retention are 0.89 per cent for Indigenous students. The 2014 figures for success are 0.84 per cent for Indigenous students.

It is very important that we continue to maintain a close eye on equity programs aimed at increasing Indigenous students' representation so that we are in a position to continue to build on those figures, to continue to improve representation, participation, retention and success. So we are very pleased to support this bill today. It is an improvement. But we are also very concerned about the more general propositions that the government has been putting forward in terms of participation in higher education: the increase in fees, which in my view is a barrier to participation; the prospect of massive public funding cuts for universities; and the prospect of the $152 million cut for the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program. These are all very concerning for all the reasons that I have articulated before—the trade reasons, the economic reasons, the participation reasons and the opportunity reasons. We are very worried about where those things might lead if the coalition government is allowed to continue to attempt to take the axe to higher education funding.

I ought to finish by saying, in relation to the VET elements of this bill, that we understand that there have been consultations with key stakeholders and they are supportive. That includes ACPET, the AEU and the TAFE directors' association. On that basis, and on the basis that the sharing of tax file numbers should assist in reducing administrative errors by providing that unique signifier, as I mentioned before, allowing that information sharing to occur, we are of the view that this bill is non-controversial in respect of vocational education and training as well. On that basis Labor supports the bill. I commend the bill to the House.

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