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

I rise to speak on the Education Legislation Amendment (Up-front Payments Tuition Protection) Bill 2020 and the Higher Education (Up-front Payments Tuition Protection Levy) Bill 2020. These two bills expand the tuition protection scheme arrangements to include protection arrangements for domestic upfront-fee-paying students. Labor supported bills last year to expand the scheme to cover students accessing VET student loans, FEE-HELP and HECS-HELP assistance at private education providers. Labor was concerned when those bills were introduced that domestic upfront-fee-paying students were excluded from the scheme. The shadow minister for education and training wrote to the Minister for Education requesting that he consider expanding the system to all domestic fee-paying students. I am pleased that, although it took 10 months, the government finally tied up the loose ends in this scheme. These bills will see that domestic upfront-fee-paying students are included in the scheme and so Labor won't oppose these bills.

These bills will expand the scheme to give all students confidence they will not be left in debt and without a qualification if their training facility fails before they have finished their course. Sadly, both in my time as a politician and in a former job I have seen that happen and how it wrecks young peoples' lives. Australia has seen it happen too often. Dodgy providers overloaded with students, merely for a quick profit, go belly up, leaving those students out of pocket and without the qualification they need to get a job.

While I welcome this tweak of the tuition protection scheme so that all students are covered, I am still concerned about this government's treatment of the university sector more generally. Unfortunately, the Morrison government has done nothing but attack the higher education system in Australia. I don't know what happened to the Prime Minister when he was at university, but it must have been a traumatic experience—whether he was rejected by his peers, attacked by a tutor or snubbed by a professor. I am not sure what happened, but he really needs to go and see a therapist rather than roll out his rage on the universities of Australia.

It's as if those opposite fundamentally don't care about or don't understand higher education. I know that there are members there that have a strong history of being involved in universities, but, sadly, we've got some people in charge of portfolios who must be losing battles in the cabinet room. Some of the decisions that they're making are reckless and short-sighted. They say they care about jobs, but universities support an enormous range of jobs, not just academics and tutors, but the admin staff, the library staff, the catering staff, the ground staff, the cleaners and the security staff. These jobs have been disappearing under this government. What have we seen? More than 12,000 jobs lost across the country already and, sadly, thousands more are predicted to go before the end of the year.

In particular, it will have ramifications for regional areas as we come up to Christmas. The Morrison government went out of their way to exclude public universities from JobKeeper. They changed the rules three times to ensure that our public universities didn't qualify. This government could have stopped the job losses but they deliberately chose not to. They chose not to in a sector that is Australia's fourth largest export industry. It is the regional universities, as I said, that are going to be hit the hardest—universities that support 14,000 jobs in regional Australia, in places like the Sunshine Coast. And this is at a time when we are relying on universities to support our brilliant researchers who are working on a vaccine for COVID-19, yet the government are doing this. Could this luddite government's priorities be any more skewed?

Recovering from this pernicious Morrison recession will take vision and it will take planning, neither of which has been evident in this government. We know that by 2025 Australia will require an additional 3.8 million university qualifications. We need our universities to be skilling up students for the jobs of the future. They need support, not constant cuts. The Morrison government's job-ready graduates legislation cuts funds from universities and makes it harder and more expensive to go to university. Basically, overall, Australian universities will receive less funding to teach students. Imagine that: in 2020, being a government that will provide less funding to universities to teach students. The university sector faces a funding cut of around $1 billion a year. That cut is on top of the $16 billion projected revenue drop from international students being locked out and the $2.2 billion in cuts already made to university funding by the Liberal and National Party government.

This coalition government is nothing if not consistent in its betrayal of higher education, making short-term political decisions that are betraying our nation's future. Not only are universities like Griffith University in Moreton or the universities that I attended such as QUT and the University of Queensland being attacked but students will individually be paying more for their degrees—on average, seven per cent more. Forty per cent of students will be paying more than double for the same qualification before the Morrison government touched the process. Fees will be increasing to $14,500 per year, and we're not talking about medical degrees here. The degrees that will double in cost are degrees in the humanities, commerce and communications. These are degrees that this government thinks produce graduates that are less employable. But there is no evidence that this is true.

I am pretty sure there are a few graduates of those disciplines occupying the government benches in this parliament. In fact, the job prospects of humanities graduates are very healthy. Recent research suggests that people with humanities degrees have higher employment rates than science or maths graduates. So this Morrison government is cutting billions from the university sector, while doing nothing to help young people get into the high-priority courses and jobs. The Morrison government wants to encourage enrolment in maths, science and engineering—and I say up-front that these are noble and strategic aims—but what the government's legislation actually does is reduce the money that universities will receive to provide those courses.

Consequently, there will be a disincentive for universities to provide more places in these courses, or perhaps even to provide those courses at all. Thus, the government is shooting itself in the foot—or shooting the nation's future in the foot, if I could mangle metaphors. Under the government's plan, universities will receive 32 per cent less to teach medical scientists.

They will receive 17 per cent less to teach maths students, 15 per cent less to teach clinical psychology, 10 per cent less to teach agricultural students and eight per cent less to teach nurses—this at a time when their budgets are being hammered. How short-sighted is this? This is a bad policy from those opposite. When you cut funding support for engineering and science courses, there can only be two possible outcomes: you will get courses of a lesser standard or you will get fewer scientists and fewer engineers.

The Morrison government claims that its policy will create 39,000 places over three years, but, even if it does, that would be woefully inadequate when it comes to meeting demand. There is nothing in the Morrison government policy to account for the expected increased demand due to the recession or for the increased enrolments due to the so-called Costello babies now reaching university age.

So this is a disaster for young Australians that is being rolled out by those opposite while we're in the depths of a deepening Morrison recession. We see youth unemployment that has risen by more than 90,000 in recent months. With thousands of young people out of work, getting them into study rather than on the dole queue should be a priority for the Morrison government, but obviously it is not. The poor students who are in year 12 right now are the ones who will be most disadvantaged by this policy, and that's after they have had the year from hell. The seniors of 2020 have had such a tough, uncertain year already. Arguably no other year 12 cohort has had to endure a final year of schooling quite like they have: online classes, less face-to-face time with their mates, curtailed sports and cultural activities, no schoolies and now the Prime Minister making it harder and more expensive for them to go to university—the cherry on top of a rancid cake.

I want the class of 2020 to feel the excitement that I did when I completed school: the promise of learning in an environment that fostered ideas and promised a future paved with opportunity. I don't want to see them worrying about debt before they have even walked on campus. I understand the importance of education, as so many on this side do, both as a student and as a former teacher of English. Labor has always valued education. It is the great transformational social policy, where lives are changed, lives are saved, lives are improved.

When in government Labor ensured that a university education was never out of reach for our best and brightest. This nation needs them. Labor invested in universities, boosting university investment from $8 billion in 2007 to $14 billion in 2013. From 2012 we opened up the system with demand-driven funding. An additional 190,000 smart Australians were able to go to university, and we ensured that structural disadvantage did not preclude a university education, something of particular benefit to those electorates represented by National Party people in this parliament. An extra 220,000 Australians were given the opportunity of a university education under Labor's policies, and I'm proud of that. That included financially disadvantaged students, whose enrolments increased by 66 per cent; Indigenous undergraduate students, whose enrolments increased by 105 per cent; undergraduate students with a disability, whose enrolments increased by 123 per cent; and students from the bush, from the regional and remote areas, whose enrolments increased by 50 per cent. Labor knows that, if you lock kids out of an education, you lock them out of employment. This government fundamentally doesn't understand that or is ignoring that fact.

Investing in Australian universities is good for all of us. Labor will not oppose the bills currently before the house, but I urge the Minister for Education and Training to give universities the support they need now and to rethink his legislative agenda that perhaps was motivated by some cruel things that happened to the member for Cook. He needs to rethink his legislative agenda and all of those things that make it harder and more expensive for students to obtain a degree.

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