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

I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the House declines to give the bill a second reading because this bill:

(1) cuts university funding by nearly $4 billion;

(2) hits students with higher fees;

(3) saddles students with bigger debts which they will have to pay back at the same time as they are trying to buy a house or start a family;

(4) compromises teaching and learning, and undermines research; and

(5) slashes investment in universities at a time when the Government should be investing in both universities and TAFEs in order to guarantee a strong and productive economy".

I rise to speak on the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (A More Sustainable, Responsive and Transparent Higher Education System) Bill 2017. This is an unfair bill which would rip billions of dollars from our universities, increase fees for students and saddle them with a greater debt. It would mean Australian students have to repay more, sooner, for a poorer quality education. At a time when we should be investing in our universities and TAFEs, this bill locks in nearly $4 billion of cuts over five years. This comes on top of an attempt by the government to abolish the $3.7 billion Education Investment Fund. Teaching, student programs and university facilities will all suffer. The cuts also damage Australia's research effort. Labor will oppose this unfair, economically irresponsible legislation.

Labor opposes this bill because there is no more important investment a government can make than in education. A strong education system is both a contributing factor to economic growth and a dividend from it. At a time when Australia's economy is transitioning from the resources boom to a more diverse, knowledge based economy, we must ensure that young Australians have the skills they need to compete in the global economy. Whilst so many countries around the world are increasing their investment in the skills of their people to ensure they are well-placed to compete, this government is doing the exact opposite. Research tells us that, by 2020, two out of every three jobs created in our country will require a diploma or higher qualification. We need more Australians with post-school qualifications. We should be encouraging participation in university and TAFE, not putting up barriers with higher fees and higher debts.

Children who started school this year will enter the tertiary education system in 2030. Will our post-secondary system provide them with the best opportunity to get the skills they will need in a vastly more globalised, more technology driven world? By that time, we'll be almost a third of the way through this Asian century. We should be preparing right now to seize the opportunities that that brings. A clever approach would have us investing in our people. But this bill is anything but clever, and it certainly doesn't invest in our future. In fact, it puts additional burdens and additional barriers in the way of our people. You can't ensure that we're set up for the challenges and opportunities of the future through cuts and cost shifting. That's not reform. We've now waited 2½ years for a government bill on higher education. We were waiting for something better than the cuts of the Abbott-Pyne era. Sadly, we've just got cuts again. That's what we've come to expect from this government when it comes to higher education.

As I said back in February in a matter of public importance debate, the one job the new education minister has been given is to find $3 billion worth of cuts in the university sector. I said it then and I stand by that now. The education minister has overperformed in only one area of his portfolio, and that's the cuts that he's managed to find. He has managed nearly $4 billion of cuts—$3.8 billion over five years. Of course, you can add in the $3.7 billion he's trying to cut with the abolition of the Education Investment Fund. So we're talking about a total cut of almost $8 billion from tertiary education alone.

Before the 2013 election the former Prime Minister told universities they would experience what he called a period of 'benign neglect'. He got the neglect part right, but it has been anything but benign. The Liberals have talked a lot. You wouldn't believe it, but there have been 29 reviews into higher education—reviews, inquiries, talkfests. That has cost the taxpayer more than $4.7 million. With almost $5 million invested in these talkfests, you would think we'd get something a little more nuanced in this bill. What we've got are the same old cuts. We know the government could not quite convince the Senate to allow fee deregulation—widespread $100,000 degrees or a 20 per cent cut to university operating grants. So this minister—the heir to 'the Fixer,' the heir to the member for Sturt, the 'son of Sturt' as we're calling him—was told to find a way to get cuts and fee increases through a parliament that generally values education. It's a shame that he has squibbed the opportunity for real reform and instead presented a package of measures that are just a series of cuts dressed up with minor tinkering around the edges. He's calling that a reform package. It's simply a return to the Liberals' only idea for universities, which is to cut funding for operating expenses and charge students more.

It's what happened in the Howard years. It started with Amanda Vanstone's devastating cuts to universities in the horror 1996 budget. That's when we first saw full-fee degrees. That was, in fact, the first $100,000 degree that we saw in the Australian market. We saw, of course, at that time as well the introduction of differential HECS when the Liberals hiked fees from $2,442 per year to $5½ thousand per year. After Amanda Vanstone, we saw Brendan Nelson jack up student fees again when he had the education portfolio. This is all part of a pattern. What we've seen is a minister who is heir to the tradition who is, in fact, claiming the exact opposite. He's claiming that there is an increase to resources for universities when we know what we're seeing is a real funding cut.

The chief of Universities Australia said just today that there is, in fact, a real funding cut to our universities, not an increase as the minister claims. But, to give credit where credit is due, at least the current education minister has managed to do one thing that the former education minister, the member for Sturt, couldn't do: he has managed to unify the university sector. He's managed to get institutions that are sometimes not on a unity ticket when it comes to university funding unified for the first time in many a year in opposition to his legislation. I note that Universities Australia on 16 May said:

An overwhelming majority of Vice-Chancellors agreed they could not recommend that the Senate crossbench pass the legislative package.

The Group of Eight said:

The Go8 is committed to an economically sustainable Higher Education System for Australia, but this package, for which we were not consulted, is fatally flawed in multiple ways, and will severely harm Australia's highly successful University system.

Many vice-chancellors have written to me directly, voicing their concerns about this legislation. Here are a few examples. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, Professor Dawn Freshwater, says: 'I'm also concerned that the changes to the HELP fees and repayment thresholds may discourage students, particularly from rural, remote and low-SES parts of our community, from attending university.' You would think that the Nationals had a thing or two to say about that. Apparently not. Martin Bean, the Vice-Chancellor of RMIT, said: 'We believe Australia must have a strong, sustainable and affordable tertiary education system that is accessible to all regardless of background and circumstance.' He continues, 'I do not agree with funding cuts to universities or an increased cost-burden on students. Universities and their students make a vital contribution to Australia's economy and play a critical role in the delivery of innovation and productivity.' Dr Michael Spence, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, has warned about the impact of cuts to our economy. He said: 'Negative economic and related impacts in Sydney and New South Wales will be unavoidable given the important role universities play in their local economies and communities.'

Of course, it's not just limited to vice-chancellors. This month, the Times Higher Education world-ranking director, Phil Batty, also commented. I should perhaps explain to members opposite who don't understand. This comment is like getting a negative warning from a credit rating agency. He said:

… funding cuts proposed by the government could seriously harm the country's institutions in future editions of the rankings … Australia's leading institutions are already falling behind peers in mainland China and Hong Kong, which receive high and sustained levels of state funding.

The people who compile the rankings of the world's best universities are saying to us that, as Australians, if we want to stay in those rankings of the world's best universities, these cuts are exactly the wrong thing to do. If we don't heed this warning, we are nuts.

This bill deals with more than 12 measures from the government's higher education package which it released in May. But I think it's very unreasonable to call this, as the government does, a 'reform' package, because reform is generally meant to improve things. It's about investing in our people; it's about nation-building. This bill isn't reform; it is a wasted opportunity.

This bill will cut university operating grants, the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, by 2½ per cent over the years 2018 and 2019. It hikes up fees for Australian students by 7½ per cent over four years. It also requires students to pay off their larger debts sooner, with new repayment thresholds starting at $42,000 and changes in the way these rates are indexed. It forces New Zealand citizens and permanent residents off Commonwealth-supported places, and requires them to pay full fees just like any other international student from any other country. It cuts the number of Commonwealth-supported postgraduate places by 3,000. It forces students in enabling courses to pay fees for the first time, and threatens universities with existing funding for enabling courses by putting these places out to tender.

This bill will see, for the first time in Australia's higher education system, the introduction of a voucher system for the allocation of postgraduate places, and it will hand the distribution of those places, around 34,000 of them, over to someone. We're not really sure who—some unnamed entity. This mystery body could be, potentially, pretty much anyone. It could be one of the existing organisations. It could be a new organisation. It could potentially be a private company. Voucher systems in education—honestly, this is not reform.

We've been provided with a perfunctory amount of detail in this bill about these very substantial changes as well as a range of other measures. The government's glossy brochure, distributed to representatives of universities and the media, contains little enough comment on some of the details of this. We thought that individual measures would be more thoroughly outlined in the budget. They weren't. In fact, the entire package rated only two lines in the budget. The one thing the government has admitted is the magnitude of the savings, and that's $3.8 billion over five years. But it took until July for the minister to outline how much each measure would cost or save.

Last year, the same universities that had been struggling along with this uncertainty since the election of those opposite were forced onto one-year funding agreements, to accommodate the government's policy inertia in this area. They're now, once again, struggling to scramble to work out how they can deal with these cuts, including the performance payment cuts that there is scant detail of now.

Students, of course, are the real victims of all of this. It's students who are wondering whether they will be able to afford to go to university. This bill leaves us with as many questions as it answers. One vice-chancellor said to me: 'This is not reform; it's merely a series of thought bubbles wrapped around a funding cut.' It is a perfect description.

To look at some of those measures that I mentioned in a little bit more detail: this bill reserves 7½ per cent of Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding for a yet-to-be-determined performance-based funding system. All we know about the operation of this funding system is what we heard from the Assistant Minister for Vocational Education and Skills in her second reading speech: that next year the funding will flow to universities based on whether they provide certain data—details to come later. It's really like the government saying to the university: 'Sign here; we'll send you the bill afterwards. Give us your credit card, sign here and we'll send you the bill some other time.' In the meantime, 7½ per cent of the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, around $500 million a year, will be taken from the universities, held back by the government and handed to the minister to distribute as he sees fit.

It is an extraordinary thing to create a $500 million slush fund for the minister in such uncertain circumstances. The proposal doesn't meet the most basic standards of good governance and completely lacks transparency. Moreover, this sort of uncertainty, being at the mercy of ministerial fiat, does not provide the kind of certainty that this sector needs to plan for staffing, building and student numbers, and all of the things that they need to project years into the future. Universities cannot assume, for budgetary purposes, that they'll ever receive that 7½ per cent of funding that they're actually entitled to under existing legislation. So how is any organisation, particularly one of the size and complexity of a university, supposed to budget with that kind of uncertainty? And then if you put that on top of the 2½ per cent efficiency dividend you could see university grants cut by up to 10 per cent. That would be devastating.

Swinburne University of Technology said that the cuts to the CGS would mean a loss of $31 million for them alone. If you factor in the performance-funding changes, this could mean potential revenue loss of around $82 million over five years. Imagine an institution coping with that scale of uncertainty in their budget? The University of Sydney said that the CGS cut would mean a loss for them of more than $50 million. La Trobe University said that the cumulative impact of these measures in the bill could impact their budget by up to $126 million over the next four years. Deakin University said that the cuts will dampen their appetite for risk, especially in the areas of innovation, acceleration, and product incubation. Honestly, if you were trying to design a package that discouraged universities from taking the risks that will make them fit for purpose in 10, 20 and 30 years' time so that they're preparing their students in this incredibly rapidly changing world, you couldn't design something that was more guaranteed to dampen enthusiasm for actually innovating in our university sector.

The bill brings in a voucher system for almost 34,000 post-graduate Commonwealth supported places. There are about 100,000 Australians studying in post-graduate coursework programs in Australia at the moment. It means that students wishing to take a post-graduate coursework program in the future would have to apply to some yet-to-be determined body for the chance of a Commonwealth supported place. To make it look prettier, the government is going to call this a scholarship program, because scholarships sound nice, don't they?

Rebadging Commonwealth-supported places as 'scholarships' is just spin. Alarmingly, before a body is set up to administer this new voucher system this bill would hand the power to allocate those places to the minister: another blank cheque for another thought bubble. Of course, we don't support this kind of uncertainty. While we believe that there should be reform to what is admittedly an irrational system of allocating postgraduate Commonwealth supported places, this approach is so light on detail and so at the behest of the minister that it is impossible to support it.

I want to talk very briefly about enabling courses, because one of the meanest parts of this bill is the proposal to introduce for the first time fees for enabling courses and to put these courses out to tender. Enabling courses are actually designed to get people who missed out the first time round—who had troubles in high school or who had a job in a sector which is rapidly changing, lost their job and want to retrain and go to university. These enabling courses are programs that are designed to prepare students, including some of our most disadvantaged students, for university study. These courses have been targeted in this bill.

Incidentally, students taking these courses don't actually end up with a formal qualification; it's just a pathway into university. It is a test to the student themselves; 'Do I like this environment? I'll get a little taste of what this university has to offer. Will I fit in here? Am I interested in this university and what it has to offer? Do I know how to write an essay and do the research that's required of me?' The students don't get a qualification; they get a taste of university. And, from next year, this government expects them to pay up to $3,200 for that. I've visited a lot of universities that have brought some of their best and brightest students in through the front door because of these enabling courses. Many of those students are from disadvantaged backgrounds; if they had been told they had to pay thousands of dollars to have a taste of universities, they would not be there. Those students told me that themselves.

And, to add further insult to this injury, these enabling courses are taught by such a passionate group of educators—people who see the best in the student in front of them, who invest so much in getting that student comfortable with the research and essay writing and group work that university requires—and those committed, passionate educators won't necessarily be offering these courses in the future. They'll all be put out to tender. They will be put out to the lowest cost. So there's no guarantee that students will get the same sort of high standards that they're getting now. It will be devastating for a significant number of universities, particularly those in the regions.

In July, for example, I visited the University of Newcastle's Ourimbah campus on the Central Coast with my colleagues who are here today. At the Ourimbah campus, I met just a few of the 800 or so students that are undertaking enabling courses at that campus, and those students told me exactly the difference that these enabling courses have made in their lives. They told me about how it is giving them a chance of a university qualification. They're building the skills and confidence in those students. They're helping those students overcome some of the difficulties that they had in high school. They're getting a second chance, and it's a second chance that many of them thought they would never have. But, to a one, every single one of the students I spoke to, when I asked them, 'Would you have paid $3,200 for the opportunity to do this?' said, 'No, I would not have had the confidence in myself to risk that sort of money.' And a number of them said: 'I just flat-out would not have committed to that debt. I couldn't have done it to myself.' So we've got people who are studying so they can better support themselves and their families being turned away because of these new fees. None of these students would have had the confidence in themselves to risk that sort of debt for an enabling course that doesn't even count as a qualification; it's just a pathway.

The member for Newcastle and the member for Dobell have been particularly taking up the case for these enabling courses, because the University of Newcastle really is outstanding when it comes to delivering these courses. I know that they'll speak more about this in their remarks later on. We won't support attacking these students and we won't support putting these enabling courses out to tender to the lowest bidder.

On New Zealand citizens and permanent residents, I want to say that hitting this group of people, seeing them forced off Commonwealth-supported places and on to full-fee international places, is particularly troubling, given that many of these students have been here for years. They've gone to Australian schools, they speak with Australian accents, they or their families have chosen to call Australia home and they'll be here for years to come. Wouldn't it be a good idea if they could actually get a decent job and contribute to the tax system?

They're contributing to our society, they're contributing to our economy, and this higher education opportunity gives them the opportunity of contributing in an even greater way—perhaps for the rest of their working lives. Many of them just want to have the same opportunities that their classmates have got, kids that they've gone to school with in Australian schools, so it's particularly troubling that the government is making these changes at the same time that it's created so much uncertainty around the pathway to citizenship. We won't stand by and make these students pay more for their courses. We know that New Zealanders who live and study here are likely to make an even greater contribution to Australia's economy and society.

We do support some of the measures in this bill. We support the additional funding for VET, science and dentistry units. We cautiously welcome the announcement of regional student hubs, although, again, details are scant. Where will they be? How will the sites be selected? Of course we are very supportive of seeing the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program legislated. It is a policy legacy of Labor. We're sorry that so much money has already been cut from it. During its years of operation, HEPPP, along with the uncapping of student numbers, helped boost Indigenous student numbers by 26 per cent, increased regional student numbers by 30 per cent and helped more than 36,000 additional students from low-income families into university. We are proud of that legacy. We are very sorry that in the 2014 budget HEPPP was cut by $51 million and then, in last year's budget, was cut by $152 million. But, yes, we would like to see what the government has left of HEPPP being protected by legislation.

We also support the expansion of sub-bachelor places—it's another recommendation of the Bradley review—but we have to make sure this is not at the expense of TAFE. We need a strong university system and a strong TAFE system working together in partnership to give our young people the best possible opportunity of getting a great job and to give Australians who are training and retraining to lift their skills the best possible opportunity to do so. We have seen $2.8 billion cut from TAFE, so we don't want to see an expansion of sub-bachelor places at the expense of TAFE.

We have a very proud record in higher education, and we will continue to fight to make sure that all Australian students have the opportunity of getting a terrific post-secondary-school education, because that's what our modern economy demands of them. It's good for them as individuals, and it's a great investment for us as a nation.

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