Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm grateful to the member for Griffith for the opportunity to set the record straight on university funding as well as to tell the chamber about the exceptional university which I have in the electorate of Fisher and what it is achieving with the support of the Turnbull government. What marks out the University of the Sunshine Coast, in particular, is its relentless pursuit of innovation. Under the leadership of its dynamic vice-chancellor, Greg Hill, USC is continuously looking for new ways to grow and lead. The member for Griffith will have seen some of this when she visited USC's panoramic three-dimensional visualisation and virtual reality site, CAVE, just last year. Unfortunately, she's left us now.

The team at USC founded the University of the Sunshine Coast innovation centre which has become the heart of a fast-growing commercial innovation community. In part due to this facility, the Sunshine Coast has been awarded Google eTown status, and has been named a Smart21 community in three of the past four years.

I'm delighted to say that I have been able to play my part in supporting USC's growth and innovation with funding from the Turnbull government. Last year, we delivered $5 million for the Thompson Institute at USC. This funding went to treatment and research into suicide prevention, dementia and youth mental health, and will ensure that the Sunshine Coast remains at the cutting edge of these fields for years to come. I'm continuing to work with USC and the Thompson Institute to explore funding opportunities for groundbreaking research into PTSD suffered by veterans and emergency service workers.

I have also worked closely with USC to take advantage of the government's $200 billion defence capability investment. Not only have USC already won a $2.85 million contract to conduct research into runway pavements for the Department of Defence but they have worked closely with me as part of the Fisher Defence Industry Initiative to look at ways in which they can win more and collaborate with our growing local defence industry sector.

USC is growing fast and servicing new regional areas. The Turnbull government has also lent a hand here as well, with a $120 million concessional loan to build a new, 10,000-student campus in Petrie. However, none of this would have been possible without the Turnbull government's ongoing commitment to tertiary education and the record levels of funding we have provided to universities. Right now, the Turnbull government is providing record total funding for universities—that is, $17.2 billion in 2017. Labor, with its typical disregard for the truth, is suggesting in this motion and elsewhere that in the future the Turnbull government will cut this funding. You can only cry wolf so many times. This is simply not true. Between 2017 and 2021, direct funding for teaching and research will grow by eight per cent, from $10.7 billion this year to $11.5 billion. This is yet another iteration of Labor's disgraceful and untruthful 'Mediscare' campaign. If universities maintain their current enrolment rates, health expenditure will go up from $6.4 billion to $7.4 billion, meaning total funding will increase by 11 per cent.

The Turnbull government is particularly committed to regional universities. We've invested more than half a billion dollars in the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program to help regional students access university. We've allocated a further $24 million to support regional students to undertake STEM degrees, as well as $285 million in regional loading and $15 million for eight new regional university hubs.

This motion also falsely suggests that students will face additional uncertainty. The truth is quite the opposite. Under the government's reforms, students will now have certainty that their student fees will not rise. They will have certainty that the Commonwealth will continue to pay for more than half of the cost of their degrees, as well as providing generous loan terms to pay for the rest. These reforms give young people the certainty that university funding is sustainable and that they will not need to pay one dollar up-front for a university education in the years to come. In all reform processes, there are individual complexities that arise; in the case of USC's large-scale and ongoing regional expansion, I know that constructive discussions are taking place to ensure that the reforms have their intended effect. However, what we've seen today is that on university funding, as on schools funding and Medicare, Labor time and again are distorting the truth for their own political ends.

The University of the Sunshine Coast is a fantastic university and this government will continue to support it.

See this speech in context