Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019, a bill that seeks to amend the Student Identifiers Act 2014 to enable the extension of the Unique Student Identifier, the USI, from vocational education and training students to higher educational students. Since 2015, students enrolling in a nationally recognised VET course have been assigned a randomly generated alphanumeric code, the Unique Student Identifier. That code is used by the student each time they enrol in a VET course. Since 2017, persons who have a USI have been able to access, view and download their authenticated VET transcripts via the USI transcript service. The bill before the chamber extends the USI framework to higher education students. It will enable the USI to record a student's entire tertiary education. The bill proposes that, from 2021, new domestic and onshore overseas higher education students can apply for a student identifier and, from 2023, registered higher education providers will not be permitted to confer a regulated higher education award on an individual unless the individual has been assigned a student identifier or has an exemption for some reason.

Labor developed a proposal for a national USI scheme almost a decade ago. In 2009 a COAG communique stated:

Improving data collections for all education sectors is of critical importance to Australia. A national student identifier could track students as they progress through education and training and would further support a seamless schooling, VET and higher education experience for students.

A USI for the VET sector was introduced by Labor in the 43rd Parliament but was not voted on before lapsing when parliament was prorogued. It was reintroduced by the coalition government in 2014 and then passed into law. The coalition government has neglected the education sector by wasting time when they could have been extending this important scheme to include higher ed and by failing to extend the scheme to all education sectors.

The coalition government's failure has disadvantaged students and the education sector as a whole. The March 2018 Gonski review—the Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schoolsrecommended:

Accelerate the introduction of a national Unique Student Identifier for all students to be used throughout schooling.

The report contends:

The absence of a national, persistent USI is a barrier to creating national education data sets that would assist in developing a comprehensive understanding of the impact of policy or partnership efforts. Without the USI, the numerous existing data sets are disconnected and analysis of these can only provide limited insight. This has particular implications for areas such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy, where there are calls to increase the relative priority of specific skills and subjects but the impact of previous and future policy changes are uncertain.

Labor understands the importance of evidence based policy. Labor took a $280 million commitment to the 2019 election to establish a national evidence institute to evaluate what works and what doesn't work in Australian schools. The institute would commission new research, help educators stay up to date, save money, lift standards and help schools that are already doing excellent work to share those successes with other schools. Labor believe that to give students the best education, we need to put an end to decades of ideological battles about school education. Education policy based on credible research along with data collection through a national USI scheme would improve outcomes for all students.

The bill seeks to enable a single student identifier to record a student's entire tertiary education journey by decommissioning the Commonwealth higher education student support number and expanding the USI to higher education. However, for school students and for their parents and carers this bill does nothing to alleviate the problem of a school student's educational history and being left behind when the student moves from school to school, or from state to state. The 2018 Gonski review said this was an important problem that needs addressing. A USI that included all school students would facilitate a smooth transition to a new school for students and would result in less impact on their learning development. It is important that the national rollout of the USI to school students is accelerated, as recommended by the 2018 Gonski review. The benefits for students, employers and the education sector would be enormous. It will be important to ensure the new system is protected by adequate security safeguards and that the information is used only for the purposes for which it was collected.

Sadly, Australia's economic growth is slowing. It's the slowest it's been since the global financial crisis, and one of the reasons for this can be traced back to the fact we have a coalition government in its seventh year. Let's look at the economic landscape: we've got stagnant wages; household debt has sky rocketed; almost two million Australians are looking for work or more work, and unemployment is higher than it should be; business investment is at the lowest levels since the 1990s recession; productivity, a great measure of whether the engine of society is working, is going backwards; living standards are going backwards for many people. A decline in educational outcomes and a skills crisis are contributing to these dire circumstances, and we see the results in our electorates every day. We see it translate to people coping with record low wages growth and crashing productivity, business investment at its lowest level since the 1990s recession, as I said. It's dampening consumer and business confidence. You just need to go to retail shops and talk to retailers to find out what's happening. Business is down 10, 20 or 30 per cent, and some are even down 50 per cent; no-one is pulling money out of their wallets. Obviously those opposite will say, 'You're talking down the economy,' but I'm telling the facts as reported to me by businesses in my electorate.

The Australian Industry Group says that 75 per cent of businesses surveyed are struggling to find the qualified workers they need. A great education can be the ticket to a lifetime of opportunity for the individuals who obtain that education. And it's the ticket to a wealthier and more productive nation. A university education transforms the lives of individuals and is one of the best investments any government can make in its citizens.

The coalition government has the power to close the gap in just one generation and provide all the spill-on effects to the whole community. Put simply, investing in and maintaining our world-class universities is good for all Australians. The value that university education has added to Australia's productive capacity is estimated at $140 billion in GDP. We know that Australia will require an additional 3.8 million university qualifications by 2025—additional, that is—yet, when it comes to our higher education system, let's look at what the coalition government's priorities have been. You can sum it up in three words: cut, cut, cut. That history is important, especially in the current context, where university vice-chancellors are telling us about the impacts of the coronavirus right now—damage that could be rolling out for months, perhaps even years, if people don't turn up to universities and, instead, go to those countries where the borders aren't closed.

Before the coronavirus came along, let's look at what the coalition had done. They'd capped university places, cutting $2.2 billion from the system and locking more than 200,000 students out of the opportunity of a university qualification; and they'd cut $328.5 million from university research. The minister himself said to the National Press Club that productivity improvements in the higher education sector can deliver $2.7 billion to Australia's GDP per annum. How are these cuts going to improve productivity?

Universities are also economic powerhouses within the community, particularly the universities in our regions. They provide jobs, train regional workers and prepare our young people for the future challenges our country will face. Research has found that seven in 10 regional university graduates take up work outside of metropolitan areas and that those universities and students reinvest more than $2 billion a year back into those regional communities with university campuses. I'm talking about the great contribution the universities of Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Cairns, Townsville and the like make. I would have thought that National Party MPs would understand this and would be in there championing these universities. Instead, we hear from vice-chancellors that they are flat out getting a meeting with regional representatives in the Morrison government.

During the last campaign Labor took a different approach. We committed $12.3 million to establish the national institute for flood resilience at Southern Cross University in northern New South Wales. I give these examples because these are policies that could be taken off the Labor shelf by the National Party or the Liberal Party and used to stimulate a sector that is reeling at the moment. The Northern Rivers is one of the most active flood plains in Australia, so locals know firsthand the devastating impact these natural disasters can have. That's why we took the idea of a national institute for flood resilience to the election. It is estimated that floods cost the Australian economy $18.2 billion per year. The knowledge that would have been developed in a regional centre like Lismore could have been shared across our nation and the world. Labor also committed to build an emergency response and innovation centre in Townsville at James Cook. The centre would have used state-of-the-art augmented reality technology to create realistic simulations to support vital research and training. In the summer we've just experienced, the black summer, we've seen our country at its most hostile. We've seen communities at their most vulnerable. These are just some of the examples of the nation-leading and nation-building research that can occur right here in Australia, particularly in regional universities, and lead to real emergency mitigation.

In government what do Labor do? We continue that great tradition of ensuring that university education never remains out of reach for our brightest people. In order to achieve this goal we invested in universities. After years of neglect under the 12 long years of the previous Howard government, Labor boosted investment in universities from $8 billion when we came to government in 2007 up to $14 billion in 2013. We also opened up the system with demand-driven funding in 2012, which has seen an additional 190,000 Australians able to obtain a place in university. We also wanted to ensure that the opportunity to go to university was made available to all Australians, particularly those who have had to overcome structural disadvantages. And what happened? Well, it worked. Labor's policies saw an extra 220,000 Australians get the opportunity. Financially disadvantaged student enrolments increased by 66 per cent; Indigenous undergraduate student enrolments increased by 105 per cent; undergraduate students with a disability grew by 123 per cent; and students from regional and remote areas, those areas represented by the National Party particularly, increased by 50 per cent.

Labor supports this bill and the member for Sydney's sensible amendment. We support the extension of the USI to higher education students, but we need this framework to be completed by extending it through to school students so that everyone can gain the maximum benefits of a unique student identifier, as envisaged by the Labor scheme developed over a decade ago.

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