Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

The minister just said that this budget delivers on their election commitments. As you can see, there weren't many election commitments in the Education portfolio from the Labor Party. They only had nine years to work them up. They came up with four—no disrespect to this minister, who came in very late and was a bit of a surprise package announced by Prime Minister Albanese, putting aside Tanya Plibersek, who was the responsible shadow minister for so many years. There were four, and he has just outlined those four.

I would like to focus on just one or two of them, but before doing so, could I raise a very pressing matter I have written to the education minister about. The reason it is so pressing is that it concerns our universities being clear and transparent to students about what sort of course they are going to get when they enrol at university next year. Is it going to be online? Is it going to be face to face? What proportions and how many hours are there likely to be of each? We all know that during the COVID period everybody shifted to online. Fair enough; we understand that. Some people prefer online. But students ought to know what they are going to get when they enrol in a course so they can make a proper selection. I've written to the minister in relation to this because the universities themselves aren't taking responsibility and providing that information to year 12 graduates. I would like to see the minister himself put that pressure on the universities for them to deliver upon it, because his response says it will just be dealt with by the accord, which is frankly too late. Year 12s are making decisions now, and I would like to see action taken in relation to that.

I want to raise the issue of the 20,000 places, which the minister mentioned in his remarks and is indeed mentioned in the budget papers. The language in the budget papers was changed from '20,000' places to 'up to 20,000' places. My concern is that many of these 20,000 spots will, in fact, be the re-use of the 100,000 new places the coalition government put in place. My question to the minister is: can you guarantee that these are 20,000 new places on top of the 100,000 places the former government set aside and announced? As I said, the language in the budget papers has changed. I think he should be transparent because 'up to 20,000' places could, in fact, be only 10,000 places or only 5,000 places. They promised 20,000 places, and we want to make sure that they deliver on their promise.

The 20,000 places, which the minister says that he has announced in the budget, are geared towards lower SES students and Indigenous students because they are unrepresented in the tertiary sector. It's a fine ambition to have more low SES people and Indigenous people in the tertiary sector, an ambition shared across the parliament and certainly shared by the coalition. My concern is that it's one thing to get people through the door; it's another to get people to stick and actually graduate. We know there have been problems with high dropout rates, which are higher amongst low SES and Indigenous students than there are on average. We don't want to see people coming through the door and getting a high HECS debt but not getting the qualification. So they end up with HECS debt with no qualification, which doesn't necessarily help anyone. My question is: will he commit to putting more money into the Indigenous Regional Low SES Attainment Fund, which is a fund specifically geared towards helping those students get through their studies and having the best chance of graduating and getting that degree or certificate at the end of the day? That would be a good initiative.

Finally, I want to say that the teacher initiatives that were announced in the budget are strongly supported by the coalition. They did indeed come out of the work of the initial teacher education review, which I commissioned when I was minister. There are some very good recommendations coming out of that. I'm pleased that the government is taking them up, and I hope they'll see them fall through.

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