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

Labor opposes this attempt to add another cost to Australian universities. After the year that our universities have just experienced with huge losses of revenue, thousands of jobs cut across the country and shamefully little support from the government, now is the very worst time to be adding greater costs to higher education, particularly through legislation like this, with all of the detail in regulations still to be released and with little transparency or legislative accountability.

These bills would establish a new charge to recover costs associated with the monitoring and oversight of higher education providers. The Tertiary Education Quality Standards Authority, TEQSA, is Australia's quality assurance and regulatory body for higher education providers. They do important work. They make sure providers meet the very high standards we expect from them. They make sure that we offer an education that all students, local or international, can trust.

This legislation would give TEQSA the capacity to collect a new provider charge. It would move its operations from a partial to an almost full cost-recovery model with a new annual levy for higher education providers, as well as increased application charges. Importantly, the key details of this change will be established in regulations, including the charging guidelines. As such, this will be a new cost of universities and higher education providers with little transparency about what will be involved in practice.

Labor opposes this legislation because, frankly, universities have copped enough over the last 18 months. Every time this government has a chance to chip away at universities, it seems to cherish that opportunity—another levy here, doubling of student fees there, cutting the government's share of the cost of educating students. When the sector needed support in the middle of a recession—a deafening silence. You can see why people in our universities feel abandoned—that is, the students and the staff. The government is spraying money around to fix the political problems of its own making but can't bring itself to give universities a scrap of help; instead, this Prime Minister wants to burden them with new costs. The legislation would make things harder for operators in every corner of the country. For big public universities, the annual levy system would mean that the lowest risk providers would still carry the greatest cost burden. This goes against the regulator's existing principle of variable risk based charging. For private providers, the increased application fees, which in some case are estimated to rise by 700 per cent, could threaten their financial viability entirely. For smaller organisations, this could be ruinous.

The decision to make these changes now, when the challenges facing universities are well known, symbolises this government's attitude towards higher education. Whenever there's a choice between helping universities and making life harder, they put they boot in. Look at the record over recent years. In last year's recession, no other industry of this size was treated with the contempt that universities were shown by the Prime Minister. This is an industry that employs 260,000 people, and it has been left for to fend for itself. When the government was stepping in to help other industries keep workers in their jobs, it deliberately excluded higher education. Public universities were carved out of JobKeeper subsidies, and just to make it clear this wasn't an accident—

Mr Tudge interjecting—

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