Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Labor won't oppose the Education Legislation Amendment (2020 Measures No. 1) Bill 2020. The bill amends the Higher Education Support Act and makes a number of changes to the legislation around higher education funding. While a lot of these are technical in nature, the bill does include a more substantive provision which waives the 25 per cent loan fee usually paid by full-fee-paying university students. It waives that fee for six months from April.

The bill also gives the Secretary of the Department of Education, Skills and Employment the power to determine certain students who due to an administrative error in the student identification system have exceeded their HELP loan limit. The secretary will be able to allow these students to repay the excess amount through the tax system. In light of the fact that an error has been made, this is a sensible way of dealing with that error. Labor has sought and received from the minister a commitment that each of the 475 students who fall into this category who've been affected by this overpayment anomaly will be contacted directly by the department and advised of the changes, how those changes will affect them and any relief or redress that is available to those students.

The bill also extends the Unique Student Identifier regime to all higher education students, requiring that all students commencing from January 2021 and all students from January 2023 have a unique identifier in order to be eligible for Commonwealth assistance. We have long supported the expansion of the Unique Student Identifier across higher education. We know that this should reduce the likelihood of future overpayment anomalies.

And of course Labor welcomes any relief a six-month loan waiver will provide to full-fee-paying undergraduate students, even if this relief only applies to a small group of students—it's better than nothing. Even if the relief is meagre and piecemeal of course we won't oppose it. It does amaze me, though, that in the context of this generational crisis facing our higher education sector that this is what the government is presenting to the parliament: a bill with the minimum possible assistance to students mixed in with technical changes and administrative clean-ups. It's a bill that doesn't even begin to acknowledge the enormous financial challenges facing our university sector, nor do anything—take any steps—towards addressing them.

It's not like the government is unaware of these problems. Universities Australia has been saying for many weeks now that 21,000 jobs are at risk in our higher education sector. For months Labor has been urging those opposite to support jobs in higher education, to keep the universities afloat and to keep Australians working. We're open to what that assistance might look like, but we are very clear that assistance is necessary. Sadly for those who are working or studying at university, and for every Australian who benefits from our universities—from their teaching and their research—the government has chosen to ignore these problems. It's chosen to let our fourth-biggest export earner fend for itself. In fact, the Prime Minister has gone out of his way to exclude universities from the assistance available to other businesses and other sectors during the COVID-19 crisis.

The government has repeatedly changed the rules to make sure that universities are not eligible for any assistance and to make sure that university staff, uniquely, are blocked from accessing wage subsidies. And we've seen those terrible forecasts playing out now. What we see before us is a slow-burning catastrophe, with universities shedding jobs, closing campuses and shutting courses. Some of the worst consequences of course are being felt in regional Australia. We've already learned that hundreds of jobs are going in Geelong and Warrnambool. Deakin is losing 400 jobs—so far. Central Queensland University has announced 280 job losses and three campus closures: Sunshine Coast, Yeppoon and Biloela, and jobs—hundreds of jobs—are at risk in Rockhampton as well.

Across Melbourne and Bendigo, La Trobe University is shedding jobs and, unfortunately, this is just the beginning of what will be a rolling crisis in coming months. The impact of these losses in regional communities is devastating. If we're talking about a small town or even a large regional centre, if we take out a few dozen jobs from, say, Rockhampton, people will feel that. They'll feel it right across that local community and that local economy.

Universities support 14,000 jobs in regional Australia and help to underpin the local economy in countless towns. Across the board, we're looking at tens of thousands of livelihoods being destroyed. We're talking about academics, tutors, administrative staff, librarians, catering staff, grounds staff, cleaners, security guards and many, many others. All of them have bills to pay and families to support. It is incomprehensible that the government has gone out of its way to exclude these workers, and it has continued to change the rules to make sure that these workers will not be covered by JobKeeper.

It is beyond me why the Prime Minister is so determined to abandon these workers. At this point it's hard to view this inaction as anything other than a deliberate attack on Australia's higher education system and at a time when we are relying on our brilliant university researchers to help us cope with the COVID-19 health crisis. We're relying on these researchers to help us find a vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, yet the same people we're relying on can't rely on their Prime Minister to help them keep a job. The Prime Minister's $60 billion stuff-up with JobKeeper means that there is absolutely no excuse not to support people in the higher education system. University jobs can be saved, but only if the government comes to the table, sits down with universities and treats university staff with the same respect with which it would treat people in other sectors. If I were in government right now, I wouldn't want to look back in coming months and think about the thousands of jobs I could have saved but chose not to.

This bill also has some measures that relate to our vocational education and training sector. Again, these are generally sensible changes, but they really only work around the margins of the system. And of course our vocational education system is absolutely critical to our economic success as a nation. Vocational education is more critical now than ever, as we enter the first recession in three decades. Minor adjustments, as we find in this bill, are just not going to achieve what we need in the sector, and there certainly needs to be a much more genuine commitment to proper resourcing for vocational education. You cannot rip money out of vocational education year after year and expect vocational education to improve in the face of that. You can't systematically underfund vocational education and then ask vocational educators to meet the complex and evolving skills challenge that a sophisticated economy like Australia's has.

But this is exactly what this government has been doing. It has spent seven years cutting TAFE and training budgets while also, on top of the cuts, underspending the money that has been allocated for vocational education. Since coming to office in 2013, those opposite have cut $3 billion from TAFE and training. And, as we learned earlier this year, on top of that $3 billion that was cut, almost $1 billion that had been set aside for vocational education and training has not been spent—$3 billion cut and $1 billion underspent. You cannot remove that sort of funding from a sector and expect it to thrive. You can't remove that sort of funding and not expect standards to fall.

This was happening already, before COVID-19 made this crisis even worse. In fact, according to a survey by the Australian Industry Group, three-quarters of Australian businesses were already struggling to find the skilled workers they needed to expand and grow. That was three-quarters of businesses that wanted to employ Australians but could not find the qualified workers they needed in order to expand their operations. What a tragedy that is: before COVID-19 we had almost two million people unemployed or underemployed, yet three-quarters of businesses said they couldn't find the skilled staff they needed in order to expand.

We're in a recession now, and what was a serious problem before has become a crisis. Nowhere is this more serious than in the collapse of apprenticeship numbers. Even before COVID-19, Australia had lost 140,000 apprenticeships and traineeships since those opposite came to government. And, according to new modelling from the National Australian Apprenticeships Association, we're set to lose another 100,000 by December. We are talking about losing 2,000 apprentices and trainees every week for the rest of this year. That is 2,000 Australians, most of them young Australians, who will not get the opportunity of getting the skills they need to have a secure, decent job that can put a roof over their head, that can support a family in years to come. But it's also 2,000 skilled workers that we are taking out of our economy as it begins to recover, as we hope it will in the not-too-distant future. We cannot afford the loss of these skilled workers if we want to repair our economy.

If the Prime Minister does nothing about this crisis and lets the training pipeline collapse without support, we could lose a generation of apprentices and trainees. It's already beginning to happen. Between January and April this year we saw a 73 per cent decline in apprentice job ads. We know from past recessions that a five per cent increase in unemployment results in a 30 per cent decrease in apprenticeship commencements. That would be a disaster for young Australians and it would reverberate through our economy for decades to come. It's all very well to talk about renovations and construction projects, but you actually need the tradies and the apprentices to build them.

So what is the Prime Minister's response to this crisis? Well, we heard it at the National Press Club last month and, sadly, it's just another exercise in marketing and spin. The Prime Minister's so-called JobMaker scheme involves no new funding, no time line and no new detail at all. In fact, the speech involved pretty much no new substance at all. Like other recent policies from the Prime Minister, it is a shallow response to a serious problem. It is a marketing-led recovery that he is relying on. It is certainly not enough to address the crisis in apprenticeship numbers or to revive our TAFE system.

We on this side are happy to support sensible legislative change in this area, but we need to go much, much further than the tweaks that this legislation proposes. We need to offer our universities and our TAFE and vocational education systems much more than is proposed in these bills because this country is confronting its most serious economic crisis in a generation and education will be a critical feature of repairing our economy. We are, as all of us know, experiencing the greatest economic transformation of our lifetime. We need a well-resourced training system, offering meaningful skills and development to meet this future head-on. Unfortunately, after seven years of this government, the coalition seems very little interested in building the system that will help us respond to this crisis. We won't oppose these changes but, with the scale of our challenges, we need much, much more.

Consequently, I move:

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

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes that the Government has damaged the quality of Australia's world-class post-secondary education system by:

(1) cutting billions from universities, slashing research funding and locking students out of tertiary education;

(2) cutting billions from TAFEs and training, presiding over a dramatic decline in students undertaking vocational education; and

(3) failing to develop a long-term policy for the Australian post-secondary education system".

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