Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Bruce for his contribution. It gives me time to address a part of our budget that I haven't addressed until this stage, and that's our record investment in higher education. I commend all members on this debate. Once again, if I could just highlight that what we've seen demonstrated by the government through this debate is our record funding across all sectors for education, and in particular higher education—over $17 billion, and the sector will continue to grow. One of the things I've been very closely working on with the sector is performance based funding. That will see a further $230 million provided to universities in 2023. That will be focused on making sure that we have employment-ready graduates. The sector has worked cooperatively with the government on this. I think it's an incredibly important initiative.

I would say to the member for Bruce that one thing that he forgot to mention, and it's quite a sizable outcome from the budget, is the $93.7 million over four years, from 2019-20, to establish a new scholarship program, Destination Australia, to increase the number of domestic and international students studying in regional locations, to provide students with opportunities to live and study in a regional community and help share the economic and other benefits of Australia's tertiary education sector among more regional communities. It's an important initiative, because one of the things we have to do is make sure that we're spreading the economic benefit that Australia gets from international education.

The member for Bruce is right. This is an incredibly important sector to our nation. It's why it's been a key focus of the government not only in the Destination Australia program but also on what we're ensuring to do to make sure that it continues to be sustainable into the future.

The commitments that we're looking to embark on, especially in making sure that we have students coming from all round the globe, are to look at other markets to make sure we're getting the balance right. India is one of the key priority markets that we're looking at in that regard. But we do have to make sure that we are getting students from overseas and that they are going to all parts of Australia and we're seeing the benefits of that.

This isn't a budget initiative, but another initiative that I worked on very closely with the minister for immigration is around work rights and extending an extra year of work rights for those who go and study in regional and rural areas. We're already seeing a benefit from that change to work rights. We will continue to push other changes which make sure that we spread that over $35 billion record that we're getting from international education right across the nation.

I want to briefly mention a couple of other things in winding up. As part of the government's commitment to Closing the Gap, the government will remit higher education loan, HELP, debts for teachers in very remote areas of Australia. The member for Curtin was right to acknowledge this incredibly important program. This recognises the geographic, social, cultural and economic challenges that are unique to delivering education in such locations, as well as the much higher level of relative need. This program will make a huge difference in making sure that we're getting teachers into remote areas and that they're staying there.

Another thing that we are doing is increasing the combined HELP loan limit to $150,000 for students undertaking eligible aviation courses at a VET student loan approved provider, or a higher education provider, from 1 January 2020. This increase will improve the accessibility to courses to better support students and the commercial aviation sector.

And $5 million over two years, from 2018-19, will go to the University of Melbourne to commence construction of the Stawell underground physics laboratory. As the only such facility in the Southern Hemisphere, the Stawell laboratory will be part of a global research effort to try and discover what the DNA of dark matter is—an incredibly important initiative which will put us at the forefront of global research. I finish by thanking everyone for their contribution to this debate.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

See this speech in context