Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry from being required to:

(a)

confirm that the existing voluntary code of conduct has failed to protect fruit and vegetable growers from exploitation in the marketplace.

(b)

confirm that in December 1999 a Joint Select Committee of this Parliament chaired by the Member for Cook recommended a mandatory code of conduct. 

(c)

confirm that in 2003 the Government commissioned Mr Neil Buck to review the operation of the existing voluntary code, and that in December 2003 he recommended a mandatory code.

(d)

confirm that on the 1st of October 2004 the Government promised Australian fruit and vegetable growers a mandatory code of conduct for their industry.

(e)

Confirm that on the 10th of November 2005 the Minister told this house that, and I quote, “Before very much longer the government will be announcing the mandatory horticulture code of conduct.”

(f)

apologise to all fruit and vegetable growers for his failure to deliver the mandatory code of conduct as promised.

This is a betrayal of fruit and vegetable growers of this nation. I cannot believe the deceit.

Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Corio will resume his seat. The motion is not in order. It does not relate to the question before the House. The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the Deputy Leader of the Opposition has moved as an amendment that all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second my colleague’s motion. The failure of this government to give farmers any recourse to what they have been seeking and what this government promised them at the last election—

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Lyons will resume his seat. The motion cannot be debated, moved or seconded at this stage whilst we are on the business of the House. I call the member for McMillan.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 because of the importance of its provisions in addressing an issue of growing concern in the electorate of McMillan. Mr Deputy Speaker Haase, knowing that you serve one of the largest electorates in Australia, what I am about to say will be a matter of importance not only to you and your electors in the seat of Kalgoorlie but also to those electors in outer metropolitan parts of capital cities and in rural Australia—in your case, remote rural Australia—and particularly those in Tasmania.

The bill, as we heard from the Minister for Education, Science and Training in her second reading speech, implements commitments made in the 2006 federal budget to provide a major boost to the provision of health related university places. As I said in my opening remarks, this is an issue of growing concern particularly in rural and remote areas of this nation. Rural communities in McMillan and, I am sure, in outer metropolitan and non-metropolitan electorates are facing a critical shortage of general practitioners, nurses and allied health practitioners. This, I know, would also be close to the heart of the member for Hotham, for he was previously the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy. I remember, when I was a backbench opposition member, his support for rural Australia, the issues that affected rural Australia at the time, the decline in small communities and the leadership program that he had in place. To my memory, he was personally involved in that leadership program, which made a big difference to rural communities. I do not forget the member for Hotham’s work at that time, so he would be aware of this issue, even that long ago, and it is an issue that this nation has to again address today, of the shortage of health practitioners in rural Australia.

Issues such as population growth, the ageing of our population—including the ageing of the health service practitioners themselves—and the changing workforce patterns have all contributed to the problem we face. Recognising this, the Howard government, in partnership with states, last year commissioned a study by the Productivity Commission to examine all aspects of Australia’s health workforce. In its report, released earlier this year, the commission acknowledged that Australia was experiencing workforce shortages across a number of health professions. It said:

The shortages are even more acute in rural and remote areas ...

The report went on to say:

Though precise quantification is difficult, there are evident shortages in workforce supply—particularly in general practice, various medical specialty areas, dentistry, nursing and some key allied health areas.

In the overview of its study of Australia’s health workforce, the Productivity Commission said that Australia’s broad health outcomes compared favourably with those of other developed countries, with total spending on health care being around 10 per cent of GDP. The commission gave credit in no small measure to:

... the expertise and commitment of the health workforce and to the efforts of the health and education and training sectors more generally.

At the same time, the commission acknowledged:

... there continue to be poor health outcomes in particular regions and for particular groups.

I have just met with the AIDS task force regarding diseases within Indigenous communities and how we might address them. That is why I was reminded of the member for Hotham’s leadership program before, because we need that same leadership program at a local level with regard to Indigenous health and the health of young people, particularly with regard to sexually transmitted diseases.

The observations by the Productivity Commission reflect the reality in McMillan and other rural electorates. The McMillan electorate covers some 8,300 square kilometres, from the Great Dividing Range, or Mount Baw Baw, in the north to Wilsons Promontory in the south, and from the eastern outskirts of Melbourne, at Pakenham, to the heart of the Latrobe Valley in the east. The whole area is served by four main hospitals at Warragul, Wonthaggi, Foster and Leongatha and by smaller hospitals at Neerim South and Mirboo North. These hospitals are, in turn, supported by 16 medical practices, with around 90 GPs at any given time. More than a quarter of these are solo practices, which means that a whole community can be affected by the loss of a single doctor. As I mentioned earlier, the ageing of the population places greater demands on our health professionals.

I should explain to people who are listening that the electorate of McMillan covers from outer Melbourne to the east. It is now right on the cusp of the metropolitan growth area, which is from Berwick to Beaconsfield out to Pakenham. It also spreads out into quite small country townships, then into regional towns such as Warragul, Leongatha, Korumburra and Moe. They are the bigger centres, but we still have our Bunyips, Tynongs and Nar Nar Goons and all of those smaller places like Neerim South.

In the McMillan electorate, 15.4 per cent of the population is in the 65-years-and-over age bracket. That is higher than the average for Victorian rural electorates. Within McMillan itself, the figure varies widely, with the highest proportion of the 65-plus age group being in the South Gippsland region, where the proportion is over 16 per cent. As I mentioned earlier in my address, GPs themselves are not immune to the ageing process, and a significant proportion are in the over-55 age group and are looking to cut back on their working hours.

All of this means that these small communities are competing for a dwindling pool of GPs, nurses and other health professionals to replace doctors or nurses who retire or leave the area. In recent years, this competition has increased in intensity. These communities not only have to compete with incentive schemes being offered by governments in other states but also have to compete with outer metropolitan areas of Melbourne, which are also facing a critical shortage of doctors. All too often, this means that practices in small communities find themselves devoting far too much of their valuable time to being virtual recruiting agents, trying to find replacements for their services.

I recently received correspondence from the Foster and Toora medical centres, both of which are in my electorate. At the present time, these medical centres are facing a critical shortage of GPs. To maintain the level of cover their communities require, they need the services of nine full-time doctors. At the moment, they are down to 7½ equivalent full-time GPs. This number is expected to decline further at the end of the year to only six equivalent full-time doctors. So these rural practices are facing the prospect of trying to deliver services with a third less than the number of doctors they require. This, of course, does not include provision of sick leave, holiday leave or professional development leave, and at the Foster and Toora medical centres access to a locum service is simply nonexistent. For some time now, these practices have relied heavily on the recruitment of overseas doctors, who are required, under various schemes, to spend a number of years in rural practices. This avenue of recruitment is also becoming more and more competitive, as Australia finds itself competing on the international scene with other developed countries facing similar shortages of health professionals. All of this underlines the importance of the legislation before us.

We in McMillan are beginning to see the long-term light at the end of the tunnel in this year’s budget. The Minister for Health and Ageing outlined the government’s strategy to develop a health workforce to meet community needs. In particular, it addresses issues aimed at improving access to health services in rural and remote communities across the nation. I know there will be some members who question the description of ‘remote’ of communities in an electorate that abuts the outer fringe of metropolitan Melbourne. I would not even think to claim that any part of my electorate is remote in comparison with the electorate of the member sitting in the Speaker’s chair, the member for Kalgoorlie. He understands what ‘remote’ is all about. However, the issues can be very similar across our country electorates—certainly the feelings of our people are very similar. The lack of public transport and the time taken and the distances one needs to travel to access basic health services are very real to people in communities such as Foster, Toora and other similar communities in South Gippsland.

I was pleased to receive the news this week that the Howard government will provide $300,000 to assist the Monash Centre for Multi-Disciplinary Studies in Rural Health to become part of the university’s department of rural health program. The centre, which will be known as the Monash University Department of Rural and Indigenous Health, will be based in Moe, a robust and exciting community in my electorate of McMillan.

I also welcome the Howard government’s commitment to 600 new medical places and more than 1,000 new nursing places. Forty of those medical places will be used to establish further rural links with Gippsland with a new branch of Monash University’s medical school at the Gippsland campus. These two initiatives for Gippsland mean more students of medicine, nursing and allied health disciplines will be able to study and experience rural health practice, and it is hoped that many of them will remain in the area when they eventually enter practice. It is hoped that the Gippsland branch of Monash’s medical school and Monash Gippsland’s plans to deliver some of its nursing and teaching program at Leongatha will also help improve the take-up of tertiary education among school leavers in South Gippsland.

For many reasons that I do not have time to go into today, the group of young people coming through this year has the lowest take-up of tertiary education of any part of Victoria. I know this is an issue everywhere in remote Australia, but in Gippsland we are going to try to address that. We have some ideas that will be released later on, but at present this area has one of the lowest school leaver retention rates in Australia. Yes, it is about access, but it is also about attitude, what the school leavers’ parents did, the lead that students are given and whether they have an association with a tertiary facility prior to leaving school. So we have the standard group going off to the city to pursue their tertiary education, but they tend not to come back. They tend to meet partners and change their lifestyles to the point that they do not come back to rural areas. We have to make a bridge that goes from secondary education to tertiary education, and that is exactly what we are working on at the moment.

This is a timely piece of legislation in light of the current shortage of GPs, particularly in rural and regional areas. A white paper produced by a group of organisations involved in the recruiting and training of healthcare workers estimates Australia is short some 1,300 GPs. It estimates that, by 2013, we will need to have between 1,100 and 1,200 trained doctors entering the workforce each year. At present we have 700 Australian GP trainees and overseas trained doctors entering the workforce each year. You can see that we are going backwards a long way every year, year after year. This is a serious challenge for the Howard government, but it is one we are prepared to address.

Since 2000, the number of publicly funded students commencing medicine in Australian universities has increased by more than 30 per cent. The health minister and the cabinet have been prepared to put their money where their mouth is and address the issue of the lack of doctors in the nation, whether we are recruiting them from overseas or training them here—and I know there is a program for more mature Australians to go into medicine at a later age—

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There’s hope for us yet!

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, there is hope for you yet. In the last two years—

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Crean interjecting

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, he is a very young member of parliament. In the last two years, 14 rural clinical schools have opened around the country, and new medical schools were opened at Griffith University and at the Fremantle campus of Notre Dame. New medical schools will open next year at the University of Western Sydney and the University of Wollongong.

In my home state of Victoria—and I am sorry that the member for Corangamite has left the room—2008 will see Deakin University’s Geelong campus as the home of Victoria’s first rural and regional medical training school. Mind you, being in Geelong it only just made being classified as rural and regional, didn’t it!

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am sure he is interested; he would have had a lot to do with putting that together, there is no doubt about that. You heard the dryness of his speech before, taking his lead in dry politics from the member for Hotham, but I am sure with regard to education the member for Corangamite is dedicated to growing tertiary education throughout that area. We had representatives of Deakin University in the parliament only a few days ago; they were very proud of what they are doing at Deakin uni. My daughter was trained and did her degree at Deakin University at Geelong, so we have an association with that area even though I am from the other side of Victoria.

The training school will produce an additional 120 new doctors annually for country Victoria. The Australian government will be funding the 120 places at Deakin University and will also provide $18 million for capital infrastructure costs. A key element of Deakin’s medical school is that it will be focused on meeting the health needs of rural and regional Australians. The opening of these new medical schools and the provision of more places in this measure demonstrate the government’s commitment to meeting this challenge.

As I said before, 40 new places recently went to Monash University in Gippsland. Monash University is now just outside my electorate, but, because of my previous stint in McMillan, when the electorate used to go all the way to Traralgon and include Monash University, I still have a close association with the people at Monash and their endeavours to spread the tentacles of education to places like Leongatha and to reach out to people and students to give them an association through that Monash stream—even those doing a bridging course that can bring them to a point where they can enter tertiary education. There are some very good ideas out there. Recently 40 places for training, particularly in nursing and medical areas, were announced for Monash in Gippsland. It is in the electorate of Gippsland, Peter McGauran’s seat. However, those 40 places are just the beginning. There are a number of other places in the medical area and nursing field that we as a community can bid for as well. I am hoping that it will not just be 40 places out at Monash but that many more will be trained in that area.

To recap, no member of this House can walk away from the fact that we do not have enough GPs in this country. We have allowed a situation to arise over many years where we are asking more of them. We are asking them to do more. We are asking them to be on top of every new drug that comes along. At the same time, they are ageing and we are coming to a time when they are over 55 in great numbers—and we are asking them to stay on and do more. We need to train more doctors. We need to do all we can to support the existing services that we have. They need to be strengthened by allied services, whether in disability services or aged care. I believe that the government in the overall package is doing that very well.

We are addressing ageing in the home and, therefore, taking pressure off GPs as much as we possibly can by increasing those services. However, it is an Australian cultural phenomenon that, the first time there is a sniffle, we go straight to the doctor. We are building support services and nursing programs that can be of greater support to GPs. We are doing all we can. If there are new ideas on how we can further help GPs in country areas, I will be the first one to take those ideas to the minister. I commend this bill to the House.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I compliment the member for McMillan on a number of the comments he made in his address, obviously recognising that we do have some concerns, particularly in regional parts of Australia, about doctor numbers and allied professionals. I also compliment him for his comments on medical schools. One comment I did pick up on that I think is quite pertinent was in relation to the nursing community and the role which they can play—and I know there are a number of moves afoot—in assisting and taking the pressure off some of our general practitioners, because they are under extreme pressure in many of our communities.

I support the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget Measures) Bill 2006. I would like to compliment the minister and the government on a number of initiatives that have come forward in and are dealt with by this bill in a small way. It is a multifaceted piece of legislation. I guess we can always find some part of every piece of legislation that there is some fault in. We can always do better, and we can demand more and more in terms of health care et cetera—it is a never-ending journey—but no government will ever deliver the ultimate for all of us. There are a number of very positive things that this bill does address. The member for McMillan touched on a few of them, but I would like to mention a few if I could.

The initiative that the minister announced for medical schools is a very positive initiative. In one case, it has an impact on the electorate of New England. The University of New England is a great university, of which I happen to be an ex-student—probably not its greatest ex-student, but nonetheless I was an attendee—and I am very proud to have been part of that university. One of my children also attended that university. The University of New England is one of those country universities that were granted, in partnership with the University of Newcastle, the Tamworth Base Hospital and the Armidale Base Hospital in particular, 80 university places in the formation of a medical school.

I would like to particularly congratulate Professor Peter Jones, who has headed up the University Department of Rural Health which has been based in Tamworth for quite a few years now. It is his and his team’s very hard work, in my view, that has actually established that part of the world as being at the forefront of educating country students, as well as other students, in medicine. Professor Jones is originally from the University of Newcastle. The partnership between the University of Newcastle, which also has a medical school—on the coast, of course—and the University of New England, in conjunction with what used to be the New England Area Health Service and is now Hunter New England Area Health, is working.

The Minister for Health and Ageing, Tony Abbott, was in the electorate about 15 or 18 months ago to formally open some extensions to the University Department of Rural Health at the Tamworth Base Hospital. He saw the progress and enthusiasm, the results on the ground. It is obvious to all that, if you educate country students in the country—or city students in the country—they are more likely to carry out their general practice work or other work, such as hospital work, in the country, because a whole range of the fears that they may have about working in the country are removed and a lot of their social contacts are established in the country. They can see the absolute benefits of working in the country in terms of their own lifestyles and the positive interactions they have with country people.

It was a natural progression from the University Department of Rural Health’s work in Tamworth to the establishment of a full-blown medical school, which will be based on a similar model and work in conjunction with the University of Newcastle.

I also congratulate the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of New England, Alan Pettigrew, for his work and the way in which he has taken to the task of administering the university—particularly taking it to this new level, where medical and nursing places are going to be filled. It is a really positive story of addressing a problem. We can all say that it should have been addressed some years ago. It did not happen, but it is happening now, and the government needs to be congratulated for moving now—and, hopefully, moving in a similar direction in other parts of Australia as well.

The formula works. It may be running slightly against the economic rationalist thought that major centralised universities on the coast are a more cost-effective way of delivering more doctors into the community. In theory that works, but in practice it has not got doctors out into country areas. This is a positive way of bringing students through a country process to achieve their degrees, with a greater likelihood of their actually working in the country after that.

Another issue that the bill embraces is the mental health arrangements that were put in place at the Council of Australian Governments meeting earlier in the year. I congratulated the Prime Minister at the time, and I still do, for the leadership role he took on that issue. The state Labor premiers, particularly the Premier of New South Wales at the time, had also been fairly proactive. We all realise that at all levels of government not enough had been done in the mental health area. The leadership taken by the Prime Minister and the premiers on this issue could make significant differences into the future.

Let us hope that this issue does not fade as the months and years go past—that the bureaucracies and the various Commonwealth and state departments do not filter the original intent away. Mental health is an enormous problem for all of us. Most people are touched by relatives or friends who have had some degree of mental health problems as part of their lives. Mental health issues are part of our modern community and should be recognised as such. It is pleasing to see that at a government level that is happening.

At a local level, too, it is happening. In the electorate of New England the Billabong Clubhouse was the first such centre to be located in a regional part of Australia. It does a tremendous job. People with varying degrees of mental illness do not just get well overnight. It is a slow process. It does need professional people and caring people within the community to be able to stay the course with those people.

I am sure that from time to time all members of parliament have dealt in their offices with people who have had significant problems. A lot of the time they are coming to us just to talk to someone. That caring ear is very important—probably as important as being able to refer people to services in the community. Billabong Clubhouse does an extraordinary job of bringing people who have suffered a degree of illness back into the community at a pace that they feel comfortable with and with some professional backup.

Another initiative that has been undertaken in the electorate of New England in recent months is the Suicide Safety Network that has been established under the chairmanship of Mr Darren Greentree. I congratulate his committee for the work that they have done. The network is the brainchild—and the Central Coast members of this parliament would particularly know this—of a Mr Eric Trezise. Eric was very instrumental in establishing a similar network on the New South Wales Central Coast. I know he has had assistance from members of parliament from that part of the world. Eric has brought that model to our area, and under the chairmanship of Darren Greentree we are trying to re-create the successes that Eric has had on the Central Coast.

The bill does not actually deal with dental health, but it is a significant problem and most members have been fairly wide ranging in their speeches in this debate, so I hope the Deputy Speaker will allow me to talk for a moment about it. The member for McMillan spoke about the lack of doctors and the problem that we have in all of our communities. The lack of dental health and dentists—the numbers of people that we are training at our universities and the incapacity to encourage some of those who are being trained to come into country communities—is an enormous problem now and potentially a bigger problem than the lack of doctors and ancillary staff. I want to read from a letter from a Dr Christopher Cole, who is based in Armidale in my electorate and who is a dentist. He has despaired about the situation in dentistry. He said:

The number of dentists graduating 30 years ago was approximately 100 per year in NSW.

I think the proportions are similar in other states. He continued:

Now and for recent years it has been around 45-50 per year.

The population has doubled and with many more people now retaining their natural teeth into older age the workload has multiplied.

The public dental health system is in a completely dilapidated state with waiting lists of over 200,000 and still counting ...

                        …                   …                   …

The country dental workforce is feeling the brunt of this in both public and private sectors. In the New England/North West over the last five years or so at least six dentists have closed their doors when they have retired. They have not even been able to give away their practices to ongoing dentists.

This has happened in Tenterfield, Scone, Bourke, Narrabri, Gunnedah, Coonamble ...

Those communities are located in the electorates of New England and what is currently Gwydir. He continued:

Narrabri for example now has one dentist for four days a week to serve approximately 13,000 people. We are supposed to be on an ideal ratio of one dentist per 2,300 people.

I will read out some of the suggestions that Chris Cole makes, because I think it is important that we recognise the problem and look to the profession to try and assist with the solution. In his letter he stated:

I suggest that we should:

• Utilise the university staff in the theory and preclinical training
• Utilise the vast knowledge of the dentists in large regional areas such as Armidale, Albury, Dubbo, Tamworth, Wagga Wagga, Wollongong, Coffs Harbour etc for the practical clinical training of the undergraduates. This could be done as type of “intern” situation where the undergraduate students would be rostered to one of these regional areas and work under the supervision of the private practitioner on the non urgent Public Patient waiting lists. This is what happens in the major teaching hospital where the undergraduates do the fillings etc on the public patients under supervision.

This would allow for:

• More students to be enrolled in the Faculty of Dentistry.
• Utilisation of undergraduates to help alleviate the growing backlog of public patients on the public lists.
• Expose more undergraduates to country areas of NSW and to the real workings of general practice. This also gives them more clinical time in which they can learn their profession
• Give local practitioners a closer connection with ongoing education activities. One of the greatest problems of country practice is the mentoring with fellow colleagues and this set up would give the country Dentists more exposure to education with the added stimulation of this expansion of the profession.
• As a side outcome I feel a lot of the country Dentists may get a little extra lease of their professional life because of this interaction and potentially stay longer in the profession.

That is a very important point. He continued:

This can’t be a bad thing for the economy because it keeps the workforce there and they also would be adding to their retirement security with added superannuation savings.

Dr Cole went on to say a number of other things. I seek leave to table the document.

Leave granted.

I have one more issue to raise in terms of dental care. I ask the government to look seriously at the way in which Medicare treats dental care. I am fully aware that the health minister partly addressed that issue some time ago, in that people with health problems related to identifiable dental health issues can seek a rebate from Medicare. That does not embrace the vast majority of people who have dental health problems. It is time that we moved away from the state-Commonwealth responsibility debate in terms of dental care. Dental care, under any definition, is part of health care and should come under the Medicare umbrella in a greater fashion than is currently the case.

There is interplay on a whole range of these issues between state and Commonwealth governments. I have been complimentary of the government today, so I may as well continue in that vein; tomorrow is another day! Real success has been achieved—and I am sure this has occurred in other parts of Australia as well—under the multipurpose service model. The member for McMillan spoke a while ago about the ageing community and people’s health generally, and particularly older people. For those who do not know about it, multipurpose services—it is a dreadful name; they are called MPSs—are a partnership between the state and the Commonwealth, with the Commonwealth providing the aged care and the state providing what we would all think of as basic hospital care. Certain economies of scale are derived through the cooperative approach of the two bodies, as there are co-location and shared staff issues.

In the smaller and medium sized communities, these have been very successful. I am told the electorate of New England has more of these, either built or currently under construction, than any other electorate in Australia. Communities are welcoming them. I know that in the Guyra community, for instance, their MPS has just been opened. The Walcha community are turning the first sods for theirs. The Bundarra community have a slightly different variation of the theme but, nonetheless, it provides the same outcomes of aged care and health care. The Emmaville community were one of the first. In fact, I believe a few women in that community changed the face of health policy in small towns by the stance that they took some years ago and the fact that both at a Commonwealth and a state level—the state minister at that time was one Craig Knowles—they were able to change the agenda from centralising health and aged care in bigger centres to a decentralised approach in smaller centres. I congratulate the government for being part of that. (Time expired)

Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Some time ago I gave a commitment to my community in Townsville. I gave them a commitment that the number of medical school places at James Cook University would be significantly increased. Today I deliver on that commitment. James Cook University has had about 100 medical school places funded by the Commonwealth. It turned out its first graduates last year. The medical school at James Cook is recognised as one of the top four in Australia, not by the government but by the medical profession itself. That is a terrific feather in the cap for a regional university. Under the leadership of the executive dean, Professor Ian Wronski, the medical school and allied health precinct, the veterinary school, trop ag science and so on in that area have really gone very well indeed. The medical school, being a new medical school, is a new model. It is an undergraduate model but it works very well indeed. That is why it is important that the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006, which is before parliament this morning, delivers on my commitment and on the government’s commitment in relation to new medical school places across the Commonwealth.

Today the bill delivers 605 new medical places. It also delivers new nursing places and new mental health nursing places. I am also securing through the passage of this bill today another 10 mental health nursing places that will be a very valuable addition to North Queensland. The increase at James Cook is the biggest boost to medical school places ever at the northern university. That is a great thing for a local member to achieve. (Quorum formed) I thank the Chief Opposition Whip for calling the quorum. Colleagues, don’t go. It gives me the opportunity to tell you this bill is delivering 50 new medical school places for James Cook University. It is a great win and a great commitment that I have been able to deliver today.

We are going to see James Cook develop as the leading tropical science and innovation research university in the world. That is a great thing to see. I draw the House’s attention to the fact that we are building the Australian tropical science and innovation precinct, and some of the funds for it will come out of funding in this bill before parliament today. That is a $34 million development, and it will be a partnership between James Cook, the CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Marine and Tropical Science Research Facility and the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries. JCU and CSIRO are putting $10 million each into the development and the Queensland government today is putting in $14 million. The precinct is to be housed in a purpose built, top-class facility. It will create a world-leading grouping of tropically focused researchers to advance sustainable living in tropical environments.

I would like to advise the parliament what others have said about this particular new facility. The Chief of CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Dr Andrew Johnson, has said that the precinct will be the leading tropical science and innovation facility in the southern hemisphere. That is a great claim. Indeed, Dr Johnson went on to say that:

There is no other facility in the world today that will be directly comparable.

He welcomed the Queensland government’s generous support and the federal government’s support for this exciting initiative. The Vice-Chancellor of James Cook University noted that JCU was already recognised as Australia’s leading tropical research university and one of the world’s leading tropical research centres. Professor Moulden went on to say:

With this development, JCU will now become the tropical research, innovation and development headquarters for Queensland and Australia.

The precinct will accommodate more than 220 researchers and support staff, with the principal partners being JCU and CSIRO. The funding for this is being provided in this bill, and there is also the possibility of JCU having access to the increased Capital Development Pool, which is also being provided in this bill. This is very exciting indeed.

I also draw the House’s attention to other areas where James Cook University is doing very exciting and innovative things. One that is being announced today is an ARC linkage grant valued at $92,000, funded out of this portfolio. It will fund a project to investigate new ways of engaging students in learning and really getting them back into the classroom. It is quite extraordinary, and I am pleased to see the member for Kennedy come into the chamber at the moment because a number of his constituents and their children are involved in what I am about to say.

A very significant number of students, after they finish primary school, disappear into the system and are never seen again; they do not get a secondary school education. This is particularly so in relation to Indigenous students and to males. About two-thirds of the youngsters who disappear are, in fact, males. This new research at James Cook, being conducted under the leadership of Dr David Lake from the JCU School of Education, aims to understand how science can be used to entice back students who have become disillusioned with the education system. These are young people with low literacy, who have been turned off by school and are fed up with being told how to live their lives. This project will aim to re-engage with them and to give them some science that is relevant in the way it is taught so that it becomes useful and much more appealing to them. Congratulations to Dr David Lake and his collaborative staff at JCU School of Education.

The House may also be interested to know that there has been further recognition of JCU internationally. For example, JCU will become the first university outside Europe to receive international recognition for its degrees in marine science. That is a fabulous achievement. James Cook University academics are the most highly cited university researchers in the field of environment and ecology in Australia, according to the latest rankings by the international ISI Web of Knowledge. On the world stage there are 402 institutions ranked by the ISI in this field. From Australia the CSIRO appears at No. 7 in the world with only JCU, followed by ANU and the University of Queensland, also making the top 100. JCU academics either authored or co-authored 25 per cent of the top 20 most cited Australian papers in this field. This is a great outcome for James Cook University, a regional university which is doing wonderful things and will ultimately lead the world in tropical science, research and innovation.

I congratulate the government on the provisions of this particular piece of legislation. It is good news, and it is good news for the higher education system. I am disappointed to see the very negative amendments that have been moved by the Australian Labor Party in relation to higher education. There is no doubt that as the years have gone by under the coalition government higher education has blossomed and prospered, and there are wonderful things being done. Our country is taking its place in the world in relation to our responsibilities to the teaching, training and equipping of young Australians to face what is ahead of them in their lives. I commend the bill to the House.

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am happy to participate in this debate on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006. It is a very important one. I am also very happy to support the series of amendments, all seven of them, that the shadow minister for education has moved. Like the shadow minister, and like everyone else in this place, we have had one week to prepare for this. We have an explanatory memorandum but, as with so many other bills in this place, there is no Bills Digest from the library because they have been engulfed with work on the other bills in the education area that they have had to deal with.

The library does a magnificent job under immense pressure to assist all members and senators in their preparation for speeches in this House and the Senate. It provides another point of view, which is useful, from people who are expert in the field. But it is indicative of the approach the government have taken with this particular piece of legislation, which has some very significant provisions in it, that they have rushed it through in the way that they have. That point was made by the shadow minister well and tellingly, and it is an indication of the respect the government have for the other side in this place—given that there is some assistance to their members in preparing for debate in this House. That is point number one.

Point number two is that that will not stop us dealing with this, even at short notice. I will start with our amendment and then relate it to this bill. The amendment is that we will give this bill a second reading but we will condemn the government for two things to begin with. The first is:

(1)

jeopardising Australia’s future prosperity by reducing public investment in tertiary education, as the rest of the world increases their investment ...

We have seen that Australia alone amongst the developed countries in the OECD has effectively reduced its education spending on higher education in both the university and TAFE areas by seven per cent. At the same time we have seen, as the shadow minister pointed out in her speech, the OECD’s Education at a glance 2006, a 454-page in-depth analysis of education across the world, which shows that those other countries have increased their investment in public education by 48 per cent. Simple mathematics shows that there is a 55 per cent differential between what is happening in Australia and what is happening elsewhere. Every vice-chancellor in Australia knows the impact of the reforms Dr Nelson put in place, the amount of red tape and bureaucracy and the significant detriment that all universities face because of immense funding pressure.

Another indication of that is in the provisions in this legislation for indexation. We know that the government does not believe in full indexation of costs for universities. If you look at the particularities of it you get a pretty clear and stark message. The reason this is so serious is that the rate of indexation is lower than their costs in terms of what they are paying their staff. The differential is in the order of $500 million. I quote the shadow minister:

The rate of indexation being applied to university operating grants this year means that they will increase by just two per cent. By comparison, average weekly earnings rose by an average of 4½ per cent annually between 1998 and 2004. As salary costs are the largest component of university operating expenses, ranging between 45 per cent and 70 per cent, this gap between indexation and wage costs continues to rise.

She talks about the increase being in the order of $500 million. She notes the increased funding cap for the Australian Research Council in schedule 9 of this bill, and we are supportive of that. But we underline the fact that if you continue to take this approach to indexation, our tertiary institutions cannot but fail to meet their commitments. We do not have a ‘McDonald’s-ised’ education system where they can run out and get all that extra funding from the private sector. The fundamentals that they have to undertake are very great.

One of the other provisions in this legislation which we support is the allowance for what are termed winter schools. We already have summer schools operating in Australia where universities undertake a range of different academic activities, some involving intensive courses, to allow students to catch up or to move ahead. There is a proposal here to have winter schools as well. That means you do more with your existing staff. The staff are required to undertake that work during those periods. Where you have a situation of inadequate indexation it is a significant problem and a significant burden, and a lot of our best people have, over a number of years, been attracted overseas because of the continuing problem. All universities are suffering this.

I know that the impact on the University of Western Sydney has been particularly great. A series of cutbacks has been made, including cancelling future courses in osteopathy. That course has been very successful but they have had to abandon it. The current students going through will be the last. The provision of highly skilled people in osteopathy from the University of Western Sydney was concordant with its general foundation as a teaching institution producing high-quality teachers, nurses and associated professionals. They cannot do it because the funding pressure has been too great. And that is a university that has had a very wide span in Sydney from the south-west through to the north-west, and also in terms of its different activities and the institutions that made it up in the first place.

The second thing we condemn the government for is:

(2)

failing to invest in education, training, distribution and retention measures to ensure that all of Australia has enough doctors, nurses and other health care professionals to meet current and future health care needs ...

The point made by the shadow minister, the point that I am making and the point that has been made by other members of the opposition is that the lack of investment in these particular areas, when those in the university sector called for greater provision and saw that there was going to be a future problem of great significance, over a 10-year time lag relates directly to the problem we have in this area.

This bill finally takes that up in concert with the deal done at COAG regarding the health workforce and mental health package to provide new medical general nursing, mental health nursing and clinical psychology places and increased funding for nurse clinical training. There is provision in the bill for that. We have 605 new commencing medical places, 1,036 new commencing nursing places, that extra funding for nurse clinical training, 431 mental health nursing places, 210 new clinical psychology places and 40 new places for a centre for excellence in Islamic studies. This is an omnibus bill, and you will find all sorts of bits and pieces, not just in the medical area but across a range of different approaches.

There is also money for a commercialisation training scheme for new postgraduate research places in science and innovation. That is a very welcome measure because historically we have had a fundamental problem in turning innovative ideas and products into commercial reality. Translating the great ideas and inventions that we have into something that Australia can really make something of is our one continuing fundamental underperformance. In some areas the reason has simply been scale and the fact that Australia does not have the market depth to develop these onshore. In some cases you have to get the big providers. This was the case with Ralph Sarich’s orbital engine, despite, during our time in government, $500 million plus of support and the support of BHP for that work. In the end, to get it up and running, support had to come from major companies such as the Ford Motor Company.

We do not have one of the great strengths of the United States system—an intersection, an interweaving, of the academic areas with business so that people can move readily from one area to the other. We do not have the interfaces they have that allow them to better commercialise their products because there is that flow, that understanding and that experience. I am highly supportive of that approach. It is extremely welcome. We need to do a great deal more of it, as we need to develop our technology parks—and I will come to that a little bit later—and the interaction that they have with our universities.

I will cover the third and fourth objection briefly, given the amount of time I have. Our third objection is to the massive increase in the cost of HECS, forcing students to pay up to $30,000 more for their degree. The fourth is to the creation of an American style higher education system where students pay more and more, with some full-fee degrees costing more than $200,000 and nearly 100 full-fee degrees costing more than $100,000.

The weight has entirely shifted. The burden of this on Australian students is now in the order of $18 billion. There is a massive disincentive built into this, which is why our fifth objection is to that massive increase in the debt burden on students. Total HECS-HELP debt is now over $13 billion and projected to rise to $18.8 billion in 2009. You cut out a lot of people who see that as a problem and either do not go into the higher education system at TAFE or university because they do not want to burden themselves with that debt or else they do not take on higher degrees because of all the other pressures they have on them in terms of mortgages, the increase in interest rates and so on.

There are lost opportunities in a number of different areas. That is one of the reasons we have such an underprovision of the skill sets that we should have in Australia. There is a fundamental skills crisis in this country because not enough people have been trained. We needed the increase in places for doctors and clinical places for nurses that are provided in this bill well before now, and we need a great deal more.

What is the government currently doing to fill the hole? It is bringing in people from overseas utilising the 457 visa, which was originally for companies like IBM or Xerox to bring in executives or accounting specialists—people they could not otherwise get—as part of their multinational structure. They would bring them here for up to four years and fill those niches. The number of those visas has dramatically expanded into the hundreds of thousands. We need to train young Australians. We need to train them first and we need to train them now. We have needed to do that over the last 10 years and it has not been done. Finally they are making at least some movement in this regard. But the system is under immense pressure because of the indexing changes the government have made and it has less capacity to provide for our needs.

The last two objections are the failure to address serious concerns about standards and quality in the higher education system, putting at risk Australia’s high educational reputation and our fourth-largest industry, and an inadequate and incoherent policy response to the needs of the university system to diversify, innovate and meet Australia’s higher education needs. It is our fourth-largest industry. We earn something in the order of $7 billion a year from bringing students in from overseas. We do that because Labor in government initiated the process of opening our education system up to the world and encouraging students to come to Australia. The reason they came was because we could provide a world-class education system. That world-class education system is not as strong as it should be and it has failed in a number of areas simply because of a lack of government commitment to expanding it and nurturing it in the way that it should.

What is Labor going to do about that? In the white paper Australia’s universities: building a future in the world, Labor set out a significant set of reforms for the next Labor government in the education area. The second last of those amendments that we moved goes to the question of quality. We propose to set up the Australian higher education quality agency and give it real teeth to enhance degree standards and protect quality teaching and research. This is immensely important because our standing in the world governs the income that we will get from students continuing to come here rather than choosing to go to the other two big educational providers—the United States, which has 32 per cent of the international English based education market, and the United Kingdom, with 15 per cent of that market. We currently have seven per cent, and we should be able to grow that significantly if we have the right approach to this.

A series of reports have indicated concerns of international students about our standards being high enough and being maintained. The quality assurance is not there. Those concerns are there, are apparent and need to be addressed, and that is why one of the fundamental keystones of our reforms will be to provide for that. To encourage improvements in quality, we will make sure that there is extra funding for adequate indexation. We simply say to the universities and to the TAFEs: improve what you are doing with the extra funding that we give you—the funding that I talked about at the start. The rate of indexation at the moment is two per cent. What is the rate of wage growth? Four and a half per cent. What is the deficit? Two and a half. Over the years we have seen the impact Australia wide of paring and cutting back the ability of institutions to maintain themselves and to maintain their quality levels. We are fully committed to a full indexation rate. It should not have been changed by the government. You can materially see what changes have been made and the effect that they have had. That is another fundamental step.

We will also scrap full-fee degrees for Australian undergraduate students at public universities, which we have argued since the government introduced them. Further, we will expand associate degrees to address the national shortage of technical skills. As I have argued previously, this is one of our fundamental problems and difficulties. We do not have appropriate technical skills. We have massively imported people from overseas. They are only a stopgap, but they will become a permanent stopgap unless there is a commitment from Australian governments to train our own people to adequate levels.

Ten years ago, when this government came in, Dr Kemp launched new apprenticeships in Australia, which were traineeships that basically took the original apprenticeships and pared them down and cut them back. In the past 10 years, people who have been through those new traineeships and come out the other end and industries that have utilised the skills that have been developed know that there has been a fundamental funnelling and narrowing in the capacity and skills of the people the program has produced. Why? If you do not have a broad enough base and a deep enough set of experiences in apprenticeship training, you end up with people just doing the thing a particular employer needs at a certain time and, over the period of the traineeship, getting experience in that and little else.

If we do a comparison with our previous apprenticeship systems, where people had a broad experience in a number of different areas, we see that they developed their ability, their craft and proven trade skills that were broad enough and deep enough. We have to re-create that situation and not only train more people but train them much better than has been done in the last 10 years. At the end of our period in government we were in a position to launch Australia’s trade skills into the region and send our companies full of tradies into the region to make a lot of money for Australia and for themselves. Instead of that, we have had utterly the reverse— (Time expired)

Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise today to support the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006. The bill, as we know, will amend three acts: the Higher Education Support Act 2003, the Higher Education Funding Act 1988 and the Australian Research Council Act 2001—one that I am particularly impressed with and that I would like to make particular mention of today. It gives me an opportunity to inform the House of the progress and success of Charles Sturt University over its years of operation.

Charles Sturt University has its home in Wagga Wagga, in the electorate of Riverina, and is continuing to provide students who undertake courses there with many choices. The latest designs and technology in the facilities and exceptional standards in teaching with experienced lecturers and other staff are all part of the delivery of the Charles Sturt University program for creating inland professionals. I think it is one of the only universities in Australia that has an absolute focus on delivering inland professionals and bolstering and supporting inland Australia.

Charles Sturt University is one of the leading Australian universities for graduate employment. A survey conducted by the Graduate Careers Council of Australia in 2004 found that 83 per cent of graduates were in full-time employment at the end of their studies at CSU. I think that is a very relevant factor. About 36,000 students undertake courses at CSU either at one of the campuses or from home, the workplace or other places around the world.

In my electorate, Wagga Wagga campus continues to provide excellent training and education to prepare these inland professionals, and I am very proud of the work that they do. As a member of parliament, it is certainly not hard to represent Charles Sturt University, because it is an extremely fine university with fine values and fantastic objectives.

Just last month, I welcomed our fabulous, committed and dedicated Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon. Julie Bishop, to Wagga Wagga to officially open the new veterinary pre-clinical centre. Veterinary science was very difficult to secure for Charles Sturt University, but they knew they wanted to fill an area of need in rural and regional Australia. That area of need was in veterinary science, particularly of heavy animals. The Frawley review recommended against a further increase in veterinary science outlets and to just increase the numbers at the existing sites providing the course. Charles Sturt University and I worked formidably together to overcome those recommendations in the Frawley report. Charles Sturt University reallocated funding and the way in which they presented their courses in order to provide this very costly veterinary course—it is costly for the university because they had to pay the professionals to deliver the course—and they successfully did this. We eventually got the approval of the former Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, and the former Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the Hon. Warren Truss, and we were able to introduce the veterinary science course.

We launched that program in 2004. It was the first veterinary course to be offered outside of a metropolitan area in Australia. And when you think about it, having one outside of a metropolitan area makes absolute sense. If you are going to have veterinary science graduates or students practising with heavy animals, it is ideal to have them accessible to the students. The CSU veterinary science degree commenced in 2005 with its first 45 students. This new program was extremely successful. In the first veterinary science degree to be established in Australia since the 1970s, the course had 53 new students enrolled in 2006—with 223 applicants indicating the CSU veterinary science course as their first choice, making the course one of the most popular within the university this year. It was a fantastic day for the CSU when the minister opened the veterinary science pre-clinical building because up to that point they had been funding this program themselves.

This commitment of $4.7 million announced last year as part of the higher education Capital Development Pool program was just brilliant. That is why I am so enthusiastic that the increased capital development funding for 2007 will assist universities with their infrastructure projects. The 2006-07 budget provided an increase of $95.5 million for the CDP program. Do I have a deal for this program! Having commenced the veterinary science degree—and very successfully training inland professionals—we recognised that the six-year degree has a very strong focus on livestock health and production, equine and companion animal medicine and surgery, and wildlife health. Most of this year’s students are from regional Australia, particularly inland New South Wales and Victoria as well as South Australia and Queensland. What we need now is another facility. Because we have been so successful in introducing this program and this degree, we now need a diagnostic laboratory.

We need a veterinary diagnostic laboratory to be constructed at Charles Sturt University to ensure the existence of heavy-animal vets right across Australia—in fact, having them living and working in regional Australia, which is what Charles Sturt University is so good at. The function of a veterinary diagnostic laboratory will be to meet undergraduate teaching needs. But, teaching in veterinary science is research led, so it is intended that the facility will have a substantial research capacity as well as an important diagnostic function. It will offer things such as pathology services to livestock producers and carers of native wildlife—such as those in the WIRES program—and diagnostic services for owners of companion and racing animals. It will cover New South Wales, northern Victoria and the ACT through their own veterinarians. When the service is developed and completed, it will facilitate the safe movement of livestock and livestock products interstate and overseas by carrying out certification testing. It is a protection for these industries in regional New South Wales, the ACT and Victoria against outbreaks of exotic animal diseases. It will promptly recognise and investigate unusual occurrences of disease and it will also enable critical surveillance information to be supplied to our relevant authorities.

It is with great pleasure that I congratulate the government on enhancing and expanding this program. As you can tell, there are some fantastic opportunities available for people to apply for funding to deliver essential and critical services to Australian industries, particularly rural and regional industries and export industries.

As part of the COAG agreement, this bill will also mean that the Wagga Wagga CSU campus will be able to take advantage of an extra 10 new clinical psychology places from next year. We find this extraordinarily welcome news. There is significant focus on mental health issues by both the Commonwealth government and the state government, but we need to go a long way in delivering services and professionals to be able to cope with the need, particularly in rural and regional areas. So I really welcome and applaud the united front being displayed by the federal government and the states to address the crisis of limited access to services that we have in rural areas.

We have had an ongoing and devastating drought for five years and it has been extraordinarily difficult for many of the families right across Riverina to manage. It creates an enormous amount of stress which may not exist in the lives of our residents under normal circumstances. We desperately need trained professional people to be able to take up positions in rural Australia. CSU has an absolute dedication to the provision of inland professionals. As I said, I am pleased that Wagga Wagga is included from 2007 in the decision to support post-graduate clinical psychology masters degree places and we certainly need them.

The bill will also give higher education providers increased flexibility to set student contributions and tuition fees. Student contributions will remain subject to the maximum amounts and tuition fees to the minimum amounts specified in the Higher Education Support Act 2003. The flexibility will enable fees and contributions to reflect the differing costs involved in providing the same courses to different types of students, such as those at different campuses or studying via different methods of delivery.

In my electorate, the CSU Wagga Wagga campus is providing many courses to regional students and excellence in tuition with further courses like the Bachelor of Applied Science (Food Science) and the Associate Degree of Applied Science (Food Processing). The university is committed to the food industry in Australia—the largest Australian manufacturing industry with a value of $40 billion per annum. The Wagga Wagga campus is an ideal location for food science courses, situated as it is in the heart of the Riverina which is known as ‘the food bowl of Australia’.

I come now to the National Wine and Grape Industry Centre, which boasts some of the most innovative research being undertaken in the Australian wine industry. Its research is diverse and includes areas of interest identified by extensive and inclusive industry consultation. Through a network of trained professionals, the National Wine and Grape Industry Centre, situated at Charles Sturt University’s Wagga Wagga campus, aims to keep the industry informed of the best management practices for plant protection, grape and wine quality, vine improvement, quality assurance, crop forecasting and vineyard establishment and expansion. We have a strong process in R&D with our wine science centre.

Charles Sturt University is a valuable opportunity for the Australian wine industry. The industry is an outstanding national success story of a small and domestically focused industry turning itself into a major exporter and a source of regional employment. It has a present value of $5.5 billion and the current value of exports in Australia is around $3 billion. Casella Wines in Riverina, with their valuable Yellowtail brand, is the exporter of the year and makes up an enormous amount of that export in wine.

Charles Sturt University, with its emphasis on research and development, is again seeking to commit to research and needs to have a significant centre. We have a vision at Charles Sturt University that our Ron Potter Centre—named after a wonderful man who has devoted his life to regional pursuits of excellence—will, by 2011, become Australia’s signature wine research community, providing leading edge, internationally recognised research outcomes for the economic benefit of the entire Australian wine industry. I think that is a valuable vision and one that we should be very proud of.

We also have at CSU a Bachelor of Pharmacy course. It is the first ever pharmacy degree in Australia to be offered outside a metropolitan area. Pharmacists represent the major component of continuing health care for many of the communities right across my electorate, where we have seen GPs depart and a lack of willingness by GPs to come and practice in isolated areas, and pharmacists are playing an even greater role. Members of my constituency have to travel to access GP services and as a result they continually rely on their pharmacist for emergency advice and management of their treatment.

It is important that we have pharmacists who want to set up and practice in rural and regional Australia. Charles Sturt University’s Bachelor of Pharmacy degree incorporates activities such as community or hospital pharmacy, dispensing, medication management and health counselling to equip these young graduates with skills for immediate employment, again fulfilling its role, aims and objectives to provide professionals to inland Australia. If you are undertaking the Bachelor of Pharmacy degree at Charles Sturt University you will also study biomedical and applied sciences, develop knowledge and skills in health promotion, learn treatment of minor ailments and become fluent in communication and health information management as a pharmacist—all of the prerequisites to establishing yourself in a rural and regional inland community.

As I said, it is essential that we have universities, such as Charles Sturt University, committed to this outcome. Opportunities for employment always exist for successful graduates as there is a recognised demand for skilled practitioners, particularly in our rural and remote inland areas. The students of Charles Sturt University are always encouraged to study in regional areas to meet the strong demand for these professionals.

Previous to Charles Sturt University commencing their CSU Bachelor of Pharmacy course, you had an average of about three pharmacists coming outside the sandstone curtain into inland rural and regional areas when they finished their sandstone university degrees. The success of the Charles Sturt Bachelor of Pharmacy course is such that 39 out of the 42 students who first undertook the Charles Sturt pharmacy course are practising and living in rural and regional inland areas. Such is the success of this university.

I am very proud to be the representative of Charles Sturt University and its commitment to the delivery of equity of services for rural and regional inland Australia. I believe that the staff, the vice-chancellor, the chancellor and the board of Charles Sturt University have dedicated their programs and finances to fulfilling the requirements and needs of inland Australia in the development and delivery of inland professionals to those people in Australia, who deserve to have practising in their areas people with the same credentials as people enjoy in the city. I applaud the minister for providing the opportunity for universities like Charles Sturt University to be able to continue this great path of providing inland professionals to the Australian people, and I applaud the minister for the way in which she delivers this portfolio. She is the best minister. (Time expired)

Steve Gibbons (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor firmly believes that higher education is the cornerstone of our nation’s social and economic prosperity and an appropriately funded and resourced higher education sector is the best investment a nation can make in its own future. Whilst this Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 goes some way to addressing some problem areas in the sector, there is much more that is needed to be done if we are to have a higher education sector that is truly responsive to the needs of the nation.

Schedule 1 of this bill funds commitments made by the government arising from the Council of Australian Governments health workforce and mental health packages. This means new medical, general nursing, mental health nursing and clinical psychology places and increased funding for nurse clinical training. The package includes 605 new commencing medical places, 1,036 new commencing nursing places, extra funding for nurse clinical training, 431 new mental health nursing places, 210 new clinical psychology places and 40 new places for a centre for excellence in Islamic studies.

Schedule 2 increases the FEE-HELP limit to $80,000 and $100,000 for medical, dental and veterinary science students, as announced in the budget, and clarifies that a person who has had FEE-HELP recredited does not have their future entitlement to FEE-HELP reduced by that amount of recredited FEE-HELP. The changes to FEE-HELP are significant, increasing the amount available to students. There are now almost 100 full-fee degrees in Australia costing more than $100,000, so it is obvious these increases are not sufficient to meet the real cost of these degrees.

A person can only receive a certain amount of FEE-HELP from the government. The available balance at any particular time is the amount by which the sum of all previous assistance, repaid or outstanding, is less than the limit. In certain circumstances, such as a provider ceasing to offer the course or special circumstances beyond the student’s control, the FEE-HELP assistance claimed can be recredited and repaid by the provider to the government. This amendment clarifies that, in these recrediting circumstances, the FEE-HELP balance is not reduced because of the prior FEE-HELP loan taken, and thus in future this amount of FEE-HELP assistance can be claimed again. The clarification regarding the impact of recredited FEE-HELP on FEE-HELP balances is a positive step for students.

Part 1 of schedule 3 allows universities to charge different students in the same unit different amounts of HECS and tuition fees. Part 2 contains saving provisions consequent upon this change. The Howard government has threatened our economic future by neglecting universities by cutting $5 billion in grants. These cuts have impacted severely on La Trobe University in Victoria. It is estimated that these cuts represent around $277 million from La Trobe’s total budget. Australia is now the only OECD nation to actually reduce public investment in tertiary—TAFE and university—education as a percentage of GDP since 1995. Since 1995, there has been an eight per cent decline in expenditure as a proportion of GDP, compared to the OECD average of a 38 per cent increase.

I note that La Trobe University, which has a significant presence in Bendigo and other areas in northern and north-eastern Victoria, has announced yet another review. This is called a review of regional strategy. This follows a review of regional operations in November 2001 and the report of a community working party in January 2004. In 2003, following considerable and protracted public concern about the operation and future prospects of the Bendigo faculty of La Trobe University, I convened a public meeting in Bendigo which was attended by more than 100 people.

After much discussion and debate about the importance of the university to Bendigo and the region, in terms of its educational, cultural, research and economic impact, the meeting empowered then senator Tsebin Tchen, the then mayor of Bendigo and me to establish a working party to examine the role of the university and its relationship with its key stakeholders and the community it serves, and to recommend options for its future that would ensure the provision of high-quality education as well as organisational and funding arrangements to best meet regional needs. Following extensive community consultation, the working party produced its report in January 2004. I want to place on record my appreciation for the excellent work that Richard Clarke, Jan Boynton, Ian MacBean and Andrew Cairns provided in the compiling and preparation of the report.

The executive summary of the report stated:

The Working Party report follows significant community concern about the future of the Bendigo University Campus, and lost opportunities over the past several years.

While prospects for Bendigo and our region look promising, increased competition resulting from globalisation means that businesses must have access to information, knowledge and research in order to remain adaptable, sustainable and competitive.

It has long been acknowledged that universities play a significant role in regional development. While good examples of collaboration between the university and local industry exist, potential exists for a much greater collaboration and contribution to economic social development.

The majority of submissions received by the Working Party highlighted a progressive decline in the relationship between the Bendigo Faculty and the University’s administrative centre, Bundoora, since amalgamation in 1994.

• Integration has failed to deliver increased access. Bendigo has lost funded places in real terms.
• La Trobe University has failed to develop a Regional Strategy. Local planning initiatives have been impeded.

La Trobe University’s “international standing” appears to take precedence over its “regional commitment”.

The Integration Agreement—

developed in 1993 between La Trobe University and La Trobe University College of Northern Victoria in Bendigo—

aimed at ensuring the interests and needs of the Bendigo Faculty were protected, has been progressively disregarded. Future promises and assurances would therefore be viewed with suspicion.

With some notable exceptions, the working relationships between staff at Bendigo and Bundoora are unhelpful and at times unhealthy. This is particularly apparent in relation to budget and finance issues. With many staff at Bendigo believing that several years funding has been withheld or re-directed away from Bendigo.

There is an apparent lack of transparency, consultation, or local input into key decisions made centrally.

The Working Party concluded that the projected benefits of integration have not been realised. This report identifies a long list of negative outcomes. Many are long-standing and remain unresolved. The relationship appears to have deteriorated to a point which, in all likelihood, is beyond repair.

The reforms initiated by the Minister for Education, Science and Training will result in universities seeking increased numbers of full-fee paying students both domestic and international. Commonwealth funding to universities has also decreased in real terms over the past ten (10) years. Universities will be under increasing pressure to be competitive and provide courses that are responsive to demand and community needs.

The Nelson reforms will also place pressure on small universities, which is likely to encourage partnership arrangements in order to remain financially viable.

The concerns raised by the community working party also included: a complete lack of consultation and communication; a lack of transparency regarding budgets and finance; a lack of a strategic plan for regional operations; a lack of responsiveness to local and regional needs; and a failure to develop adequate collaborative partnerships.

The university council resolved in early 2004 that the Faculty for Regional Development, based at Bendigo, should be fully integrated into the university for academic purposes, thereby increasing the centralisation of decision making at La Trobe’s administrative centre in Bundoora. This decision by the university council meant that not only were the concerns and problems identified by the Community Working Party not addressed or resolved but many of them have been made worse. In addition, many new challenges for Bendigo students and staff have been created. No doubt the Bendigo community will be watching very closely and taking a great interest as La Trobe undertakes this latest review of its regional operations.

I note that in her address to the Curtin Institute public policy forum on 24 July 2006 the Minister for Education, Science and Training, in addition to highlighting her studies at the Harvard Business School, said that she has aspirations for Australia’s universities, including ensuring that universities are ‘accountable for their performance, transparent in their operations and efficient in their administration’.

I also note from the minister’s same address that, when extolling the virtues of the United States higher education system, she identified as one of the strengths the fact that their system is highly decentralised. If the minister is able to succeed in persuading La Trobe University of the need to become more accountable, transparent, efficient and decentralised, I will be more than happy to publicly congratulate her on her achievements.

As well as providing educational, cultural and sporting programs and activities, La Trobe University Bendigo is also a vital component of the economy of the central Victorian region. The student population of La Trobe’s facility in Bendigo represents around 24 per cent of the total student enrolment for the whole university. The university is directly responsible for generating approximately 532 jobs—full-time, part-time and casual—in the Bendigo region. When the effects of student expenditure are added, another 344 jobs are generated. Once flow-on effects are taken into consideration, the university is responsible for the generation of 1,359 jobs in the Bendigo region. This amounts to 4.2 per cent of the total regional workforce.

La Trobe University Bendigo is responsible for an initial effect of $62.4 million being placed in Bendigo’s economy each year. The flow-on effect is estimated to be $58.8 million, bringing a total of $120.2 million in output. It generates $120 million in household income. I am indebted to La Trobe University’s Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities, which did the modelling to come up with those figures. Any diminishing of La Trobe Bendigo’s role in the region also potentially diminishes the entire region’s economy.

The facility was placed in Bendigo by past governments to provide central Victoria with the range of educational and other services specifically for the central Victorian region. In 1993 an integration agreement was struck with La Trobe University Victoria and was seen at the time to be the best way forward to secure and develop the facility. Over the past 10 years the federal government’s cuts to universities have cost central Victoria dearly. In addition to these cuts, it has been estimated that La Trobe University Bendigo has lost in excess of $15.5 million as a result of internal transfers between the Bendigo and Bundoora campuses. It seems that previous management at La Trobe Bundoora campus paid little regard to the importance of the Bendigo campus in the region’s economy. The current and future management at La Trobe Victoria must understand that the Bendigo campus is not theirs to do as they like with; it is a vital Bendigo community asset and the Bendigo community takes a strong interest in its future. La Trobe Victoria has a responsibility to ensure it continues to fulfil the tasks it was established to provide. They must be accountable to the future generations that will access the services at La Trobe Bendigo.

The central Victorian community was bitterly disappointed that the La Trobe Bendigo bid to gain medical training school places for Bendigo was not successful. The Melbourne and Monash universities’ bid was successful, and I congratulate them for it and wish them well. However, La Trobe University’s contribution to Bendigo’s economy, education, sport, arts and culture is vastly superior to any other organisation of a similar size and certainly far superior to that of Melbourne and Monash universities.

We have lost an opportunity to gain a purpose-built Bendigo based and operated medical training school that would have helped cement La Trobe University’s future in Bendigo. A purpose-built medical training facility would have complemented the significant investment by La Trobe in existing health related programs like pharmacy and nursing. La Trobe has every right to be angry at the lack of support it received, especially from the Howard government, other organisations and individuals who promised the world and yet delivered nothing.

While the Australian economy needs high-quality graduates to compete with the world, the Howard government has disgracefully made university funding conditional on take-up of its extreme industrial relations ideology, when it should be tied to education standards. Labor will reform Australia’s universities to build a strong economy and a smart future for Australia. A Beazley Labor government will deliver world-class universities, giving Australians the best possible education and training to compete with the rest of the world.

Labor’s white paper, Australia’s universities: building our future in the world, points the way forward: reform of university funding; world-class and world-scale research hubs; the expansion of associate degrees; and a new Australian higher education quality agency. Labor’s nation-building reform will result in real choice and higher quality education and training for Australians. Importantly, all Australians will benefit, because Labor’s much needed reform will also deliver the skills our country needs to compete with the rest of the world. Lifting up all universities is central to a Beazley Labor government’s economic agenda. Building the skills of the next generation is how we will build a prosperous future for all Australians.

Central to a Beazley Labor government’s higher education reforms will be the creation of a standards watchdog—the Australian higher education quality agency—which will have real teeth to enhance degree standards and protect quality teaching and research. The Australian higher education quality agency will be developed, owned and controlled jointly by the Commonwealth, states and territories. It will undertake all higher education accreditation approval and compliance assessments to deliver national standards. The higher education quality agency will have the power to require underperforming institutions to: make changes to the structure and standards of their awards to ensure consistency with the guidelines for the award in the Australian Qualifications Framework; cease admitting new students to a program or range of programs; arrange for the transfer of their current students to other accredited institutions or providers; make changes to information about their offerings; and do all the other things necessary to safeguard the reputation of Australian qualifications. Under a Beazley Labor government, it will be educational standards, not industrial relations ideology, that will determine funding and accreditation.

Labor means quality investment in quality universities. Labor’s plan will also encourage diversity and excellence in our universities. It will cut red tape and reward universities with additional funding in return for a commitment to quality. Labor will introduce a compact with our universities, establishing new funding streams to recognise their different strengths, promote excellence in research and encourage them to diversify, innovate and compete. All universities will be better off under the new funding system. Labor’s plan will release universities from the Howard government’s 2003 straitjacket, which strangled them with red tape through programs such as the enrolment targets system. Labor’s plan includes proposals to stop the massive HECS fee increases, reduce the overall financial burden on students and provide HECS relief for degrees in areas of skills shortage. Labor will link research student places to research quality to foster excellence in specialised areas. Staff from all public universities will be able to do research.

Labor’s plan is for well-funded and high-quality universities to build Australia’s future economy by: ending the ‘one size fits all’ model of university funding; expanding associate degrees to address the national shortage of technical skills; creating extra university funding streams to encourage diversification, innovation and competition; encouraging regional universities to play to their strengths; creating extra university places in areas of skills shortage, particularly technical degrees; improving indexation of university grants in return for a commitment to quality; scrapping full-fee degrees for Australian undergraduate students at public universities; and introducing annual standards reviews, starting with teacher and nursing education and business studies.

Labor has always regarded higher education as the cornerstone of our nation’s social and economic prosperity. We believe an appropriately funded and resourced higher education sector is the best investment a nation can make in its own future. And only Labor has the commitment to ensure our higher education system meets the needs of our nation.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 before the House and also on the amendment moved by the member for Jagajaga. This is an omnibus bill that is amending a series of budget outcomes, particularly the commitment by the Council of Australian Governments to the Higher Education Support Act and the Higher Education Funding Act. It is also recognising additional places through COAG to the health workforce and mental health packages and increasing the capital development pool for universities. The legislation includes increases to the FEE-HELP limits, allowing higher education providers to charge different amounts of HECS and tuition fees to different students in the same units. It also introduces a definition of winter school. Why you would want to be going to university for winter school is beyond me; why anyone would want to do summer school is beyond me as well—but we are introducing a definition into the bill.

I want at the outset to say that this is a very rushed bill—so rushed that the library has not had time to prepare a Bills Digest. I am not sure why there was such a rush to get an omnibus measure such as this into the parliament. I do not want to imply any criticism of the Parliamentary Library, which does a phenomenal job in getting together Bills Digests, but there is actually a lot to digest within this bill. Full comprehension of this bill would have been greatly assisted by a Bills Digest. I am wondering why the minister saw an incredible need to rush something through the parliament at this point.

It also does not allow people the opportunity to go out and consult within their communities to ask about the impact of these bills on their institutions. Within my seat of Chisholm, I have three phenomenal teaching institutions: one of Australia’s largest, Monash University; the city campus of Deakin University; and one of Australia’s leading TAFEs, recognised as such on numerous occasions, Box Hill TAFE. These institutions are all inadvertently impacted by this bill, and I have not had the opportunity to speak to the VCs and other people that I normally would consult with before coming into the House and making comment on a higher education bill. I think there is also a missed opportunity in that.

We have had 10 long years of government neglect of higher education—10 sad years of government neglect. If we needed any reminder, the OECD report issued this week gives the Howard government a complete F in its attitude—a complete fail in its approach to higher education. Public investment in TAFEs and universities in Australia has declined by seven per cent. This is appalling.

In an age when we are trying to innovate, when we need to make changes, when we are talking about such things as the fear of climate change and when we should be putting money into research and higher education, we have actually reduced our funding to TAFEs and universities. At a time when we are facing a severe skill crisis and when we should be assisting TAFEs and universities to skill up individuals in high demand areas, we have decreased funding. This goes against every other OECD nation. Those nations have had not a small average increase but a 48 per cent increase, according the OECD’s Education at a glance 2006 report. In Australia there has been a seven per cent decline; on average across the OECD, there has been a 48 per cent increase.

This has occurred at a time when we have seen spiralling HECS fees and spiralling HECS debt. The report shows how the government’s HECS hikes mean that Australian university students are now paying the second highest fees in the world. Australia used to pride itself on a university system that was open to all and accessible to all on merit. Now we have a university system that is accessible not to all but only to those who can afford to pay.

This is an absolute shame and an indictment of the government’s priorities—or its lack of priorities. In 10 long years we have not had any higher education direction policy or platform. All we have had is increasing red tape. The government keeps saying that it wants to be hands off and let institutions run themselves, but in higher education, year in and year out, the government has imposed ever-increasing red tape. The universities are absolutely drowning under it. It went to the stage where the previous minister had the authority at the end of the day to determine which courses went ahead and which courses did not. I am not sure that he is a higher education expert, but he was the one who got to sign it off. That was causing incredible grief within the higher education sector. The OECD has also sheeted home blame for this increasing spiral to the Howard government by stating:

In Australia, the main reason for this increase in the private share of spending on tertiary institutions between 1995 and 2003 was changes to the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) that took place in 1997.

Student debt under the Howard government is ballooning by $2 billion a year and is projected to blow out to $18.8 billion by 2008-09. I repeat: $18.8 billion. I love the new title ‘Commonwealth assisted places’. I think this is highly entertaining. We often hear the wonderful terms that this government comes up with in titles of bills—terms that are just ridiculous. But a Commonwealth assisted place? A Commonwealth assisted place is where a student gets to pay HECS. That is how the government is assisting people. It is assisting them into massive amounts of debt by increasing HECS debt all the time. I am not sure how it is assisting them in any way, shape, size or form. As I said, as someone with two universities—with Monash University being the biggest in the country—within my electorate, it is something that is glaringly obvious and that is brought to my attention day in and day out.

When my younger brother completed university, he said that he had a HECS debt equivalent to the GDP of a Third World nation—and he completed his university degree many years ago. I think that now we probably have students whose HECS debts are the size of the GDP of some very large nations. That is the case. These young individuals find it incredibly difficult to start out in life, because they are burdened by this HECS debt. They need to pay it off to survive.

Where is the government’s policy? We have seen increased interference but no direction. We have seen a decline in standards—to such an extent that we are losing some of the foreign students coming into our universities. We have seen a much higher increase of staff-student ratios. There is increasing pressure within the academic sector because nowadays you cannot have the same rapport with a lecturer: when you are sitting in a lecture theatre with 500 people, it is difficult to have a one-on-one relationship with your lecturer. We have seen a massive increase in class sizes. We have seen a reduction in tutorials. Nowadays tute groups are almost anathema; they just do not happen. I certainly got to enjoy a lot of tutorials during my university degree and they were of great assistance to my education, but they just do not exist anymore.

We have also seen a plethora of online courses. While that situation has assisted in some areas and is an innovation in teaching, it is also a decrease in the ability for student-lecturer interface and a reduction in student-student interface. Some people like it. Some people use it as a resource. It is a benefit for distance education and for family needs. But it also imposes incredible demands on both the staff and the students.

All of us in this place rue the day that email was invented. It means that people want an answer and they want an answer now. A student online—using email—is just as demanding to lecturers. They want an answer and they want it now. They probably interact more across the keyboard and the screen because they do not have to say something in a class where they might be terrified. So this plethora of online courses is also having a detrimental impact on the ability of students to study effectively and is placing an increased burden on staff in the university sector.

The Howard government is so out of touch that it is letting the public investment in universities and TAFEs fall despite calls from Australian businesses for more engineers, doctors, scientists, plumbers, carpenters, electricians—and the list goes on. We are seeing a spiralling HECS debt and a spiralling, out-of-control system. We are seeing greater pressure on people to privately pay for their university degrees. And we have seen a massive decline in research and development, and in research and development spending, that is causing adverse impacts within our economy across the board.

The Howard government’s massive fee increases are also discouraging some young Australians from going to university. The AVCC’s report on applications for undergraduate courses shows a decline in applications over the last three years from a high of 229,427 in 2003 to 218,529 in 2006. Under the Howard government, young people are graduating from university with ever-increasing levels of debt, making it much harder for them to buy a home, start a family and get ahead. The average HECS fee paid by an Australian student has doubled under the Howard government, discouraging prospective students from taking up places at university. The Howard government fee hikes mean that medical students will pay more than $30,000 extra over the course of their degree, law students over $20,000 and engineering students more than $16,000. And that is for HECS places; that is not even talking about full fee paying places.

In 1999 we had the infamous promise from the Prime Minister that there would be no $100,000 degrees. He obviously was not looking too far into the future because we have seen, according to the Good Universities Guide 2007, an explosion of full fee paying degrees that are in excess of $100,000. At Monash University, which is within my electorate, a medicine-law degree costs $214,600. An engineering-science degree at Deakin University, which is also within my electorate, is $105,000. I am not sure where too many families find $214,600 to send their child to university. I do not know how individuals do that. We are seeing that money is buying places in universities over merit—and that is an outrage to our egalitarian society.

Several years ago a constituent who had received a score of 99.5 came to my office. That score was a pretty good effort. I thought she would get into law at Monash. She had won the Monash University law prize the year before. The cut-off for that year was 99.7—she needed another 0.2. If she had been a full fee paying individual, she would have got in with 91, but she was not. She was the last of nine children from a large Italian Catholic family within my electorate. She had done brilliantly, but she did not get to go and do law at Monash. In fact, she did not do law at all that year; she did a communications degree at the University of Melbourne that she paid for through HECS and by working in numerous casual jobs. She subsequently transferred to the ANU, where she is completing her law degree, much to her parents’ and her satisfaction. But it was cruel and barbaric. If her parents had had the money she could have gone, but they did not. She had done so brilliantly well, and it was just outrageous.

I often say in this place that I am of the first generation within my family that is university educated. There are five of us. We all went to Monash University, and it was the proudest day of my mother’s life when her final child went through and qualified for that university degree. My father was a bank teller. There would have been no way he could have paid for the five of us to go to university if we had had to pay for those sorts of degrees. It never would have happened. But we are going down that path. We are going back to the days that my father-in-law faced, as the son of a tram driver, where he had to repeat his leaving certificate twice so that he could get a fully funded Commonwealth scholarship to go and do medicine at Melbourne University. He went back to university and sat it all again to get the results so that he could get a full Commonwealth scholarship all those years ago—and that is where we are going. We are actually seeing a massive rise in scholarships being offered by universities to attract people to take up places because they simply cannot afford them.

The OECD report said that we are underspending on higher education and we are putting more debt burden on our university students. Another interesting thing in the OECD report is the decline in international students coming into Australia. Education is the fourth largest export earner for Australia. Within my electorate, Monash and Deakin universities rely heavily on international students. They make up an enormous part of their revenue base. But we are seeing a decline in the total intake of foreign students. Why? It is because our degrees have diminished in quality and standard and they are not as attractive to overseas students as they were previously. It is an absolute outrage that this government has allowed this to happen. The other reason is that they are incredibly expensive. They make it incredibly expensive for people to come from overseas to study here. We have the third highest fees for international students, behind the United States and the United Kingdom.

Within this bill there are measures to assist with additional places in medical schools. I welcome that and thank the government for the funding of $18 million to Deakin University for its new medical school in Geelong and for $5 million for Monash University Medical School in Gippsland. At Deakin University, this funding will hopefully see about 120 students going to the Geelong campus by 2008. They are well on track with getting all their accreditations for that, and I congratulate Sally Walker and her team at Deakin for the effort they have put into securing those places. However, I do want to say that I am a little disappointed with Deakin University today. Sadly, Deakin University—while it is a great university and we welcome it within my community—has not been a good neighbour. The campus in my electorate was previously a smaller teachers college in Burwood, and it has morphed into a very large university campus. Every day a new building is going up at Deakin in Burwood. Indeed, it is the largest campus of the entire Deakin University, which is quite entertaining as it is meant to be the city campus of a regional university and not the other way around.

The campus is affecting my electorate’s suburbs. The university, because of lack of funding, cannot provide sufficient car spots. That might seem trivial to some, but with the gridlocks in Burwood, it is making it very difficult for students to find appropriate car parking at Deakin University. Whilst we would welcome other measures such as car pooling and transport into the area, Deakin at Burwood is not sufficiently linked with transport. There is a tram out the front, but I defy anybody who has had to get the tram from Burwood to town or back again to say that it is a great route. I used to have to do it as a child going to school, and it takes forever. So it is not the easiest place to get to. It is within zone 2, so it is also quite expensive in a transport sense. People therefore rely on their cars.

University students also rely more heavily on cars nowadays because they are in and out of the campus and in and out of their part-time jobs. So the lack of car parking at Deakin is having a hugely detrimental impact upon my local residents, so much so that I actually took the university to the VCAT recently. Sadly, today I have discovered that I lost my VCAT hearing. That does not really surprise me, but I thought we would stand up for the local community and say that the university should be a good neighbour. I welcome the university and applaud it being there. It is a great activity centre. But if it is going to be within the suburbs—as it is—it needs to be a good neighbour. It needs to do more about consulting and about providing appropriate car parking.

The decision handed down by VCAT today quite squarely puts the issue of car parking as one to do with economic factors. The university simply cannot afford to pay. We are not only starving our universities of funds to actually educate people; we are starving them of the ability to have appropriate infrastructure so that they are good neighbours within suburban settings. So I am a little disappointed with Deakin University today. I hope that they can be good corporate citizens, regardless of the VCAT decision, and actually agree to put in the thousand places that they had agreed to with Whitehorse City Council. Do something good. I call on the university to behave like good neighbours and, regardless of the VCAT, go ahead and put in the 1,000 places that they had previously agreed with Whitehorse City Council.

There are far more serious issues—although, in my local neck of the woods, Deakin’s effect on the local suburbs is probably one of the largest issues. We have on record the Vice-Chancellor of Monash University, Professor Larkins, bemoaning the lack of spending within the Australian economy on research and development. This is placing a huge burden on the university and its ability to provide appropriate training and appropriate initiatives that an institute of the stature of Monash University should be providing. A recent article in the Age, ‘Australia an R&D “backwater”’, says:

AUSTRALIA is destined to be a science and technology backwater unless business and government lift investment to global levels, according to the head of the country’s largest university.

Monash University was increasingly looking overseas, especially to India and China, for research links as Australia failed to keep up with OECD levels of funding, vice-chancellor Richard Larkins said.

Professor Larkins said multinational companies had failed to take advantage of the quality of research and development in Australia, while the Federal Government had not increased funding to the required level to enable Australia to compete effectively in R&D.

So, instead of going to great companies within our area, instead of going to the government, Monash University has had to go to China and India to get research and development happening. As I said, in a time of ever-increasing change, we need high-tech industries now more than ever. We are losing manufacturing excessively in this country, we are not looking towards other innovations to replace it and we have global warming breathing down our necks. But, instead of investing in research and development, we are forcing Australia’s largest university to go and seek links in India and China. This is an outrage, and this government stands condemned for its complete disregard of the higher education sector.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking to the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 I want to be very lavish today in my praise of the current government. They are very greatly deserving of praise. The previous speaker, I cannot help but comment, spoke about technology—that we should be the technology nation. I cannot help but say there is a little bit of God being an Englishman here. If you think they are all dumb in Asia and that somehow we are the smart blokes and they are all going to come down here so they get smart—

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I did not say that at all!

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No. I do not mean to in any way impugn the previous speaker. She spoke very well and very intelligently. She only made remarks that have been made by every speaker in this place almost every time they speak on these sorts of areas. No, I want to praise the last speaker for everything that she said. I think it was a very good contribution to the House—and I do not give my praise out very generously on these issues. I was not having a go at her, I must emphasise.

But the idea that we can be superior technologically to countries like China—honestly, please! They have 1.3 billion people and they are not exactly dumb. They have a gene pool massively greater than ours. What you do is play to your strengths. This morning I came from a meeting where we were talking about the light metals industry—the aluminium, titanium and magnesium industries. What we can do better than maybe anyone else in the world is the downsteam processing of our quarrying. However, because of the policies of the current government and the last government we cannot downstream process anything, because there is no infrastructure out there to provide and facilitate downstream processing.

Let me be very specific. The area that I represent is the greatest mineral province on earth. It was producing $5,000 million worth and, with metal prices trebling in the last six years, I presume we should be producing close to $15,000 million or maybe $20,000 million worth. We can process what we are producing, but we cannot process any increased production because commercially you can only build a power station to meet current demand. A commercial operator cannot build a power station with excess capacity. They will go broke if they do.

In days past, the giant Gladstone power station was built with no customers at all. It is one of the biggest power stations in Australia. At 1,500 megawatts, I think it may have been the biggest power station in Australia when it was completed. It had no customers at all. But traditionally the great governments of Queensland—the Labor governments prior to the 1950s and the subsequent Country Party governments, later called the National Party; I think when they became National as opposed to Country/National Country they lost their way—had developmentalism built in. To provide that developmentalism we need the technologists in the field of downstream processing.

Let me be very specific here. Metallurgists are needed if you want to convert a quarried material to a completed material. Let me give one example. We mine silicon in Queensland. I am not familiar with the recent figures, but we were selling it to the Japanese at $55 a tonne. The year I did those figures we bought seven tonnes of optical fibre and we paid $3 million a tonne. Do you want to be a quarry and take $55 a tonne or do you want to be a downstream processor and take $3 million a tonne? That is the reason why the Japanese are much wealthier than Australians now. If we cast our mind back to our younger days we would have laughed at anyone who would have considered these people that built little tinplate toys that fell to pieces were going to be richer than Australians. But now they are considerably richer. The last time I looked at the figures they had $32,000 income to our $19,000. We have got to do the downstream processing.

That brings me to the subject of universities, because there is only one university in Australia that provides a metallurgical degree: the University of Western Australia in Perth. We come into this place and talk about technology and the advancement of Australia, but the only thing we are exporting now is metals, and we cannot process them because we have no metallurgists. Thank the good Lord for the Indians; without them, Australia would simply not be able to process any metals at all. Most of our metallurgists are coming from India, and God bless those people.

I wish to speak at some considerable length on the very great achievement of this government, and I want to single out the former Minister for Health and Aged Care, Michael Wooldridge, and the current Minister for Health and Ageing, Tony Abbott. I have dubbed Michael Wooldridge ‘the angel of the bush’. In my second or third year in this place, Aramac-Muttaburra—tiny little twin towns which have 1,500 or 2,000 people at the outside—were without a doctor. Because they are in Central Queensland, I do not think they realised that I was their member of parliament, but anyway, they did not contact me. I found out after about four months that they had been without a doctor, and I took it upon myself to try to find them one. I had a running battle with the state department of health. Each month they told me: ‘We’ve got a doctor now. He’s arriving on such-and-such a date.’ He would not arrive and there would be a subsequent battle.

I have not got the figures that show how many people died or suffered great pain during that period because they had no local doctor, but I will relate a case that occurred during that time. There was a bloke who took a fall in a rodeo, got a kick in the head, and he had a headache. He rang the flying doctor, who said: ‘Take a couple of aspirin and ring us back in a couple of hours. See how you go.’ He got much, much worse, and the doctor said, ‘I’ll have to contemplate going over,’ but, by the time he had decided, the airstrip was out and there was no way that he could get to where the man was. The man subsequently died. The point of the story is: you cannot fly a flying doctor into an area because a bloke has a headache; but you do not know whether the bloke has a headache or a compound fracture of the skull.

If there is no doctor available in a place, the statistics are that you have one death a year that you would not otherwise have. But that is the tip of the iceberg. How many people are in pain or suffering from disease because they have no local doctor? They might be too sick to travel the two or three hours in a car to go to the nearest town where there might be a doctor. They might be in no condition to do that. The doctor most certainly cannot travel to them, and with no local doctor you have a desperate situation.

The Queensland government has failed miserably in this area, and all of Australia is well aware of that. Outside of Brisbane, probably one out of every two of us who go to see a doctor will see a doctor who has difficulties with English. They have difficulties being fluent in a language that is foreign to them. Some of them have mastered English relatively well and some have very great communication difficulties. We love these people and we welcome them to our area. They are considerably better than having no doctor at all, and we thank them for being there. But we have very serious difficulties.

Going back to what I was saying about Aramac-Muttaburra: I decided that, yet again, we should call a meeting to secure a medical school for James Cook University in Townsville. I went to see Michael Wooldridge, and he said that the only real answer for Australia was a medical school at James Cook University. I said: ‘That is wonderful. How about doing it?’ He had a lot of difficulty delivering. Most of the problem is concentrated in Queensland because the population there is very diverse and spread out. That is true to a lesser extent in New South Wales, and the other states have such compressed populations—even Western Australia—that 40 per cent of the problem was in Queensland. Dr Wooldridge said that the problem would be overcome to a large degree by the creation of a medical school, but it was a long and drawn-out battle from there. I wish to thank Mike Horan, the minister in the then Queensland government and in the subsequent Beattie government. I think that Mike Horan did the lion’s share of the work as the minister in Queensland, and then Michael Wooldridge came to the party in Canberra.

I want to track what actually happened with the problem of there being no medical school. They said in the party room that they could not bring all these doctors in because every doctor would vote himself a salary of $300,000 a year and the government could not afford it. I said that I was very pleased that we have acknowledged in the coalition party room that we no longer believe in free trade, and I sat down to roars of laughter from all sides. But of course, my point was profoundly well made, in my opinion. We had free trade in everything except the most important thing of all: the supply of doctors. So the AMA is saying, ‘You can’t have any more doctors coming on stream; they will be a very low class, and you cannot bring them in from overseas because they are substandard to the great teaching institutions that we have in Australia, so we will not have any doctors.’ So we will just die. And for us—we people who live in the bush, outside of the big metropolitan area—that is just too bad for us.

The situation in North Queensland, where there are a million people living now—five per cent of Australia’s population—is that we have only some 800 doctors. We have one doctor per 1,200 people. The figure for Australia is around one doctor per 350 people. We are desperately short of doctors. We are short 2,500 doctors, and even at 150 graduates a year it is going to be a fair while before we catch up to where we want to be. The argument that we are turning out doctors from the University of Queensland does not hold up. If you send a lad or a young lady 2,000 kilometres to a university and have them live there for six years and marry a Brisbane girl or boy, it is foolish to expect them to come back to North Queensland. That ain’t going to happen; it did not and it does not.

They are two great men—and they deserve to be called great men for what they did here. No-one tried harder and did more for us than Michael Wooldridge—the angel of the bush, as I have called him on many occasions. He and Mike Horan were able to bring on stream the first medical school in over 40 years in Australia. It is a disgraceful reflection upon every government in those 40 years that there was no increase in the number of doctors coming on stream. Once the mould was created—once we had that breakthrough at JCU—seven universities have walked through the door that was opened by those two magical people, Michael Wooldridge and Mike Horan.

I want to turn back to North Queensland. I called a meeting, and I could not get a line in the newspaper. One journalist said to me: ‘Hey, Bob, what is this, the 30th committee that has been formed to secure the medical school? We’ve been promised it every election for 28 years and there still ain’t any medical school. Mate, give us news; don’t waste our time.’ So we did not get a line in the press about the meeting. At the meeting, Rhonda Smith, the acting vice-chancellor, appointed probably the greatest living lady in Australia, Lady Pearl Logan—famous for many reasons—to be the chairman of the committee. The enthusiastic supporter of that was a human dynamo called Ian Wronski.

If we have seven medical schools opening up to come to grips with this problem in Australia, then you can thank Ian Ronski; more than anyone else, Wronski is the man to thank. While I do not want to detract from any of these other people whose names I have mentioned, it was Wronski who at times was the human dynamo and the driving force. He had been a doctor in country Australia in the wilds of north-west Western Australia. He had a great passion for looking after people and he saw universities as the places to produce the sorts of people that we need to diminish pain, suffering and death. That is how he sees the university and the university medical school. That human dynamo was in there.

I was there when Lady Pearl Logan confronted then Premier Borbidge. She said, ‘You will announce that medical school now.’ He said, ‘Yes, yes, yes—we’re going to do it.’ And she said: ‘No, you’re not “going to do it”; you’re doing it now. There are the media over there. You will go over there and make the announcement.’ She is a very persistent and forceful lady. That was at a National Party conference, and he was a little bit worried that Lady Logan was going to take the battle up to him in the public arena. So he called Mike Horan over, and they made the announcement. The rest, from the state government point of view, was history. I must say that the incoming Labor government agreed to the proposal. I do not want to leave out praise for the incoming Labor government in Queensland.

Added to this was Professor Bob Porter, a remarkable man. He is dean of a faculty at the University of Melbourne. He came up and gave very generously of his time and his life in spending those years up in Townsville. He put together the dynamics and the mechanics which we did not know or understand how to do. We had not had the experience of creating a medical school—I should not say ‘we’; I should say ‘Ian Wronski and his team’. Professor Bob Porter used his very great influence throughout the teaching institutions of Australia.

Another very great man, Ken McKinnon, was put up there because the university was having a lot of very serious troubles. He was brought in as the vice-chancellor to get us out of our troubles. In spite of all of the difficulties we had in putting that university together, he turned sideways with a great vengeance and a great commitment to deliver to the people of Northern Australia—the over a million of us who live up there—our own teaching institution where we could produce our own doctors.

I remember being the subject of a meeting of 12 politicians in Queensland who were deciding who would be the Deputy Premier. They decided that the criteria should be a person who is able to articulate their beliefs aggressively in the media, a person who has had a good performance in their ministry, and a person who is decent. Those were the three criteria that they put up. Without any false modesty, I must say that they were very wise in their choice at the time. I must also single out someone else for praise. Tony Abbott has taken us from 60 graduates a year to 150 graduates a year. In the scheme of things, when you look at it, what is important and what is not important? We were getting 60 doctors a year. We are chasing 2,500 doctors. I will leave it to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, to work out how long it was going to be before the problem was solved. He has taken us from 60 doctors a year to 150 doctors a year. We wish to deeply thank Tony Abbott as minister. He has also been one of the major driving forces behind seven new medical schools coming on stream throughout Australia to solve the problem across the board.

I do not wish to denigrate the other gender in any way—God bless the female graduates from our medical schools—but they decide to be mothers and they go into part-time practice of medicine. What happened was that we went from virtually 100 per cent male to 50 per cent female, and then a quarter of that 50 per cent became mothers and not full-time doctors. They practice, but for a very small number of hours compared with a full-time practising doctor. God bless them for it; we are not in any way criticising that. But the net result was that the number of doctors that we had dropped through the floor. In places like Northern Australia, we went from about 300,000 people to over one million people and we had absolutely no ability to put doctors on the ground to service those people. We come here today to pay a very deep debt of gratitude to all of those wonderful people whose names that I have mentioned. I must also mention Mary Jane Streeton. (Time expired)

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I imagine that visitors to the gallery would have been somewhat bemused, perhaps entertained, by the member for Kennedy’s remarks. He always does provide us with an extremely unique and interesting perspective on legislation that we are debating. I want to confine my remarks, inasmuch as I can, to the specific legislation that has come before us; of course, following on from the member’s significant history both in this parliament and other parliaments, I will take the opportunity to range a little wider in the course of my remarks about the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 to make commentary about education in general.

One of the nation’s foremost education institutions, the University of New South Wales, sits in the seat of Kingsford Smith. Just as the number of speakers from the Labor Party speaking on this legislation greatly exceeds the number from the government side, so there are a great number of students—and I see them queued up at bus stops night after night on Anzac Parade—at that university, and their struggle is increasing. They have difficulties getting themselves through a tertiary education degree and then on to a career. There is no doubt that the odds are very much against a student’s capacity to do that nowadays.

I have had a number of representations from and discussions with students at UNSW. Their HECS fees continue to go up, their living expenses continue to rise and the provision of student services—many of which have now been cut out as a consequence of the Howard government’s decision on VSU—is reduced. Their parents—or parent, or carer—face increasing squeezes in costs, particularly costs related to mortgages and fuel. A number of these students are trying to study but are doing it in a way that is sailing very close to the wind. Earlier in my time in the parliament I had reason to draw to the attention of the House the fact that many of these students are so exposed and find the cost burdens upon them so high that they need to offer themselves up for purposes of medical experimentations and research of one kind or another, some of which, as has been pointed out by members here and in the Senate, actually prejudice their situation and open them up to situations of risk.

We have not had a great deal of time to consider this legislation. There has not been sufficient opportunity for members present to really dive down into it and get a hold of it. There is no Bills Digest, as far as I am aware. But, importantly, the opposition do support aspects of the legislation and we do support the bill. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition has moved a second reading amendment, which I will speak to in a minute. Overall, though, I think the message has been clearly put in the parliament, and that is: the importance of education notwithstanding, it is a considerable concern both to the community and to us on this side of the House that we continue to spend less than comparable countries do on public investment in education.

After all, it is that investment in education which determines the future prospects of the nation. That is something which is well understood and agreed upon, throughout both the political and the public debate. But Australia spends much less on education than other comparable nations. Our direct public investment is low: the percentage is in the fours—4.3 per cent of GDP—when the average is about five. There is a more recent study I will refer to in a minute. Even with private investment, our average investment is lower than equivalent countries overseas. If we want to be a competitive and successful nation, I think it is very clear that we must significantly invest in education.

The Australian Council of Deans of Education has noted this, the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee has noted this and numerous reports point to it. Mr Blair, early in his term, summed it up very simply—in much the way that President Clinton did when he was seeking election with the slogan, ‘It’s about the economy,’ and so on. Mr Blair simply said: ‘Education, education, education’. But a lack of investment—whether in primary education, secondary education, vocational education and training or, with respect to this bill, tertiary education—and a trend to consistently provide less money out of our budget for education than comparable nations literally imperils our future. We cannot be expected to innovate and to meet the challenges that face us in the coming century unless we invest in people’s capacity to learn.

It is a fact that has been marked in this House, and we note and condemn it: Commonwealth outlay on universities as a percentage of GDP has fallen consistently over the past decade. Australia is 20th out of 28 OECD countries in terms of education attainment in the 25-to-34 age group. There are a number of other statistics relating to where we sit on the comparable country scale in terms of investment and education. Importantly, people need the opportunity to learn and sometimes to relearn. ‘Lifelong learning’ is the expression that is used, and it is an absolute fact. As life expectancy increases, as technological challenge bears down upon us, there is every likelihood that many people listening and many people whom we represent will have to educate themselves in the course of their lives. So it is critically important that the country’s investment in education is substantial.

This bill does contain significant amounts of new money, which Labor has welcomed. It funds the COAG Health Workforce and mental health packages. The changes to FEE-HELP are quite significant and have been noted previously in the House—an increase in the debt that is available to students. There are now almost 100 full fee degrees in Australia which cost more than $100,000. So, even though the changes are significant, the increases will not be sufficient to meet the real cost of the degrees.

The clarification noted with regard to the impact of recredited FEE-HELP on FEE-HELP balances is also a positive step for students. We also note that the new measures allow providers to set different fees for different students in the same unit. There is wide discretion for the provider to set varying fee levels based on any factor they deem appropriate, with only limited scope by the government to determine matters that are not appropriate. It is absolutely right that there should be only limited scope for the government to make those determinations, but we would like to see more detail on the prohibited factors. Where differential fee structures are used to assist students from disadvantaged backgrounds, through targeted fee relief based on location or modes of delivery, the deregulation that results in higher fee levels coming across might be problematic. That is something that needs to be looked at.

According to this year’s Good Universities Guide, we have now reached the situation where five degrees will cost more than $200,000 for full fee paying students and 96 degrees will cost more than $100,000. I think those figures are extraordinary. They represent the transformation of the education system under the Howard government and give us a pretty clear indication of where the education system is likely to go. In the previous year there were some 60 courses that cost over $100,000 and more than a quarter of those were at the University of New South Wales. The University of Sydney and the University of Technology in Sydney each offer about seven of these, but more than a quarter of the 60 courses that cost over $100,000 were in the electorate that I represent. So I am particularly mindful that the Prime Minister had promised in the parliament in 1999:

We have no intention of deregulating university fees.

He went on to say:

The government will not be introducing an American style higher education system.

There is a reasonable amount of anguish—I feel it and I know that members present feel it—about the view the public takes of the promises of politicians, but nothing could be clearer than the words of the Prime Minister:

We have no intention of deregulating university fees. The government will not be introducing an American style higher education system.

He finally went on to say:

There will be no $100,000 university fees under this government.

Let me go through what has happened up until now. In May, figures were released which showed that full fee paying students will have amassed massive debts of up to half a billion dollars a year by 2008. It is an extraordinarily high figure.

I think one factor in this debate that has not been fully explored but that needs to be raised is the consequences students have when they enter the education system and are obliged to pay HECS but do not fully comprehend what the repayment means and how much it is going to be. In July, the VSU legislation came into place and that threatens jobs and services at universities, including 29 staff at the University of New South Wales. It also has meant cuts to volunteer and Students Training Students programs. Those cuts to VSU are particularly important for students who come from moderate or low socioeconomic backgrounds where the income of the household is not as high as it is in other parts of the electorate. This is particularly the case with the services that are provided—for example, the childcare services provided at the University of New South Wales through the original VSU. There was a particularly good childcare centre just off the campus at the University of New South Wales. It provided students, if they had a child, with the opportunity to leave that child at the childcare centre and to get into their study, get into the library, get on with their work confident that their child was being well looked after and that they would be able to concentrate on their study. They are no longer able to do that.

In relation to VSU, I note that there are a number of universities that are already suffering significant losses and where the attacks on staff and the closing down of particular centres have taken place. At the University of Melbourne, for example, the VCE summer school funding is in doubt and orientation week activities have been cut. Some people may say, ‘Well, orientation week activities are just students having a little fun, running around the place and getting ready for uni.’ It is also the time when students are given the opportunity to be properly informed about the services available at the universities—some of which are no longer there—to set themselves up for the coming year. More significantly, at the University of Newcastle 20 staff have gone, the aquatics centre is under threat and the computer centre has been closed. At the University of New South Wales, which I mentioned before, 29 staff have gone. At the University of Western Sydney six staff have gone. At Charles Sturt University, which I know quite well, 10 staff have gone. At Charles Darwin University all seven staff have gone from the on-campus service provider. At the University of Canberra, which you will know well, Mr Deputy Speaker McMullan, nine staff have gone. And at RMIT in Melbourne around 150 full-time, part-time and casual staff are going or have gone and the bookshop has been closed.

There are many other examples. I note that at James Cook University in Northern Queensland six staff will be gone by the end of the year, and at the University of Queensland the $3.5 million sports precinct at the Gatton campus has been shelved and the Schonell Cinema closed. I must make a quick remark about the Schonell Cinema being closed because that particular cinema has significance to that community—significance as a small sized and older building where people can go and see movies, films and documentaries. It is regrettable that the disappearance of small cinemas of this kind around Australia is taking place as a consequence of the decisions of the Howard government in relation to the cuts to VSU.

The question arises as to what Labor would do. In this instance there is absolutely no doubt that Labor has the only strong and positive plan that is being delivered, which addresses some of the issues that have been raised in the House and which Australians are concerned about. The fact that education is universally recognised as the key to our future and that Mr Blair in 1997 said ‘education, education’ means that we have to have a plan that will address the problems faced by the university sector. In this regard I commend the second reading amendment that has been moved by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. I point out that Labor does have a plan. It will introduce a compact with our universities that will establish new funding systems which recognise their different strengths and that will promote excellence in research. It is a plan which releases universities from the Howard government’s approach, which has seen them strangled by red tape and, frankly, blackmailed into undertaking the policy agenda of the Howard government. That is really what we have seen over the past six months.

Labor’s plan will link research student places to research quality. It will foster excellence in specialised areas. Staff from all public universities will be able to do research. Labor’s plan, enumerated in the white paper presented by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Labor leader Kim Beazley earlier this year, by establishing a number of initiatives which address the issues of higher education, will actually reverse the slump in public investment in higher education and, more importantly, will reintroduce the necessary focus and emphasis that we need to have on investing in the future and on investing in building our knowledge base.

After 10 years, Mr Howard has given us a skills crisis. There is a TAFE system which has a parallel system which no-one goes to. Despite some of our material buoyancy, we do not have the doctors, the engineers and the nurses that we need. We do not have the IT workers in some places that we need to have. If you compare our own record with that of equivalent countries in other parts of the world, you will see that we significantly underfund education. In fact, the OECD’s Education at a glance report has shown that OECD countries—that is, the European countries—are increasing their public investment in education and training by nearly 50 per cent. We do not do anything like that, and we should.

Regrettably, nothing will happen until we have a Beazley Labor government. A Beazley Labor government will be profoundly committed to education, and to public education. It will be a government that recognises that the sector is undergoing change and that there need to be new approaches. It will be a government that recognises that you have to reform the Australian university sector in order to build a strong economy and a smarter future for Australia. If we do not invest in our brains, in our capacity and in our intellectual resources, we will not be able to seriously address the challenges of the future. If you create a university system where university education is open to those who have money and denied to those who do not, you are creating a system which I personally do not want to have any part of.

I am very proud to stand here as a Labor member and draw attention to the policies that we will bring to bear on public education and on universities. In particular, I want to spend a moment addressing the innovation blueprint No. 7 which Labor leader Kim Beazley has brought into the public light, and let people know about a number of key and clear initiatives, including the reform of research and development investment arrangements and a commitment to rebuild our primary research institutions, especially the CSIRO. Mr Deputy Speaker, when you consider what the CSIRO has gone through over the past five or six years, and when you also consider the clear hand of political pressure that has been applied to that premier scientific organisation, you get a sense of the way in which this government runs its education and research agenda.

The challenges are immense. They are challenges that do not require us simply to be able to take advantage of our natural advantage in mineral wealth and our natural advantages in agriculture, where they exist. They are challenges that require us to take advantage of our human capacities—the intellect, the innovation and the intelligence of Australians, particularly young Australians; they are the ones who have the most to contribute to this nation’s future, and they are the ones who are most denied by an education system which sees expenses and fees increased at this rate and investment going down. So I commend the Deputy Leader of the Opposition’s second reading amendment to the House.

Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is appropriate that we have a debate in this House on the state of our tertiary education sector. It is very hard to have a debate on this matter under this government. It is a government which is disengaged from the tertiary sector and which appears to have very little interest in it. Recently, there was a reshuffle and a new minister has taken over the education portfolio. In that time, the Minister for Education, Science and Training has probably answered a question during every question time—certainly, almost every question time; she is a very regular answerer of questions from the government side of the House. The answers to those questions are almost exclusively used as an opportunity to score political points against state governments about school funding.

I stand to be corrected—I could be wrong; I have not checked—but I cannot recall one time when the minister for education has come into the House since she took over the portfolio and answered a question from her side about universities. Instead we have a daily diatribe about the failings of state governments on schools. Of course, schools are extraordinarily important and we need to have a debate on schools, but this government is not interested in debating the state of our tertiary education sector.

The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 deals with university funding. It provides increased funding to meet the commitments by the Council of Australian Governments which were reached a few months ago on the health workforce and mental health packages. We support that measure. It creates 605 commencing medical places and 1,036 commencing nursing places. We say it should have been done a long time ago but we support the measure that is before the House today.

But these increases need to be put into context. There is a very frightening figure which we have been aware of for some time but which the OECD confirmed this week—and not only did they confirm it; they confirmed it has gotten worse. In the last 10 years government spending in tertiary education has fallen by seven per cent. We are the only nation in the OECD—the only nation in the developed world—which has had negative growth in the amount of government spending in tertiary education. Every other nation has had an increase, and the average across the OECD is a 48 per cent increase. We have had a seven per cent reduction and the rest of the world has had almost a 50 per cent increase. We are falling behind because of this government’s neglect. If we are to compete in a globalised world, we need to compete on skills; we need to compete on education; we need to compete on innovation. But this government is committed to competing on wages. The government is competing against India and China on wages when we should be competing against the entire world on training and education and innovation.

This government has shamefully—and I use the word advisedly—neglected the tertiary education sector. It is perhaps the most short-sighted aspect of this government’s fiscal policy, and it started at the beginning: in 1996 the government cut funding to higher education by $1.8 billion over four years and it declined to index funding for universities and tertiary education. That reduction in real terms over the past 10 years has had a very real impact. There has been a reduction in real terms in funding because of the government’s failure to index and because of the increases in wages. Since wages make up 45 to 70 per cent of a university’s operating costs in this country, this is something that is out of the control of vice-chancellors—it is not something that they can adjust easily. Wages are the biggest part of their budgets, and average weekly earnings went up 4½ per cent between 1998 and 2004. The failure of funding to keep up with that increase has cost our universities half a billion dollars over the past 10 years. That is half a billion dollars which is not available to educate young people in this country.

This has resulted in two outcomes. First, we see the government getting more of the income to fund our university sector from students and, second, we are seeing fewer resources per student. We now see students paying more through HECS and more through fees. In fact in 1996, when this government came to office, the Commonwealth provided 60 per cent of university funding through their funding mechanisms. On the recent figures, for 2004, it is now 40 per cent. And the contribution from students over that time frame has gone from 11 per cent to 22 per cent. This doubling of the impact on students of revenue raising to run universities can be seen in the HECS debt.

The government allowed HECS debt to rise by 25 per cent. They pretended this was the choice of the universities. But what they really did was squeeze university funding so that no university had a choice; to continue to operate, every single university in this country had to increase their HECS fees by 25 per cent. They left universities so cash-strapped that they did not have a choice. In 1989, when HECS was introduced, the average HECS rate was $1,800 a year. It now ranges from $3,920 to $8,170 a year. In law and medicine, HECS has increased under this government by 350 per cent—27 per cent a year, five times the rate of inflation. We now have, and the OECD confirms this, the second highest university fees in the world, second only to those in the United States, thanks to this government’s increases in HECS.

We can see the results. I had a look at the figures of what people in my electorate owe in HECS. I expected the figure to be high, but I was absolutely astounded. In my electorate, which is in Western Sydney, there is a HECS debt of $60 million owed by people who live in Prospect. Across the country, it is $13 billion. An electorate like mine is not socioeconomically at the top of the scale, it is fair to say, but it has a $60 million debt—and the full impact of the government’s 25 per cent increases are yet to be seen. I had a look at some other electorates and their HECS debts. In Greenway, to my north, it is $56 million; in Lindsay, $47 million; in Macquarie, $49 million. In Flinders—I see the member for Flinders is in the chamber, and I am sure he already know this—it is $29 million. These are extraordinary figures. In your electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker McMullan, there is a very significant HECS debt—which I cannot find at the moment, but I am sure it is very big. We have high HECS debts across the country. As I said, in my electorate the debt is $60 million, a debt which people will have to pay off when they leave university and at a time when they are trying to buy a house and start their lives.

I would not mind so much if this was part of a compact, if the government had said to students across the country: ‘We need to improve our universities. We need to increase the funding. We need to get funding from all sorts of sources and we are going to increase our commitment. We are going to put more money into universities but, by the way, you need to do your bit too—you need to pay more as well. The taxpayer will subsidise more, but you need to put more in.’ I would have a lot less of an objection, I have to say, if we saw a massive increase in funding from two sources: from students and from the government. I would say, ‘Even though I am uncomfortable with it, it is a lot more acceptable that we are seeing a national effort to improve the status of our universities, and everybody has to make a contribution.’ But that is not what we are seeing. What we are seeing is a reduction in government commitment and an increase in commitment from students. Again, you do not have to take our word for it. The OECD says in the report that was recently released:

... many OECD countries with the highest growth in private spending have also shown the highest increase in public funding of education. This indicates that increasing private spending on tertiary education tends to complement, rather than replace, public investment. The main exception to this is Australia, where the shift towards private expenditure at tertiary level has been accompanied both by a fall in the level of public expenditure in real terms ...

Again, we stand out as the worst in the world. What result does this have? It has the result not only of charging students more but of having fewer resources per student. The member for Bass was in here yesterday making a contribution just before question time. He was boasting that Australia now has more university students than at any time in our history, and he is right. Of course, our population is higher than at any time in our history. But, more importantly, we have seen a reduction in funding per student. We have more students and less money, and the result is worse outcomes. The result is that student to staff ratios have gone from 15.6 to one in 1996 to 20.7 to one in 2004—less money per student.

I do not know why the government has done this. Some people suggest it is to emasculate debates. Some people suggest it is because universities are a source of criticism of the government. Some people suggest it is because universities foster debates about where this country is going, and the government does not like it. I do not know if that is the reason. I shudder at the thought that it is. I would prefer to think it is simply incompetence and short-sightedness and that this government does not have a vision for this country. I prefer to think that; I prefer to give the government the benefit of the doubt because I simply cannot bring myself to believe that any government, even this one, could emasculate funding for universities for its own crass political purposes.

I am going to share with the House another quote. It is a quote that I hesitated to bring in. I did think of leaving it out of the debate. I was very tempted not to raise it because I do not like talking down universities. I do not like criticising hardworking people in universities who are doing their best with the very limited resources that this government has given them. But to have a full and proper debate the quote must be shared with the House. It is a quote from one of the government’s own advisory groups. In June 2006 the Asia working group, which was appointed to advise the Prime Minister’s science and innovation council, said:

There is the belief held by the working group that the quality of our university degrees is declining.

As I said, I was reluctant to bring that into the House because university lecturers, students and administrators are all working very hard, and I am sure they do not like to hear that the quality of the degrees being produced is declining. But the fact of the matter is this government’s funding policy—they admit, their own advisory committee admits—is reducing the quality of our degrees. This government’s short-sighted and shameful higher education policies mean that higher education in this country is being underfunded.

In the time left to me I would like to talk about this government’s tendency to micromanage university budgets. As the honourable member for Kingsford Smith so very eloquently referred to it, we have seen this government imposing its workplace relations agenda through the university funding mechanisms. We have seen this government denying, or threatening to deny, universities funding unless they embrace Australian workplace agreements. This government talks about choice and says everyone has a choice whether they go with AWAs or not but says, ‘By the way, we are not going to fund your university unless you operate through Australian workplace agreements.’

We have seen this so many times. We have seen this in the education department in particular: the use of funding as a very blunt instrument for the government to get its own way. The member for Jagajaga, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, referred to it as using funding to cater for the minister’s latest thought bubble—which I think is a particularly appropriate way of putting it. We have seen in this House recently, and it is also referred to in this bill, the spectacle of the Australian Research Council’s independence being emasculated and the board of the Australian Research Council being abolished. The previous minister rejected applications for funding which had been approved by the expert body, and the minister responding to that by giving himself, and now herself, the power to directly appoint the chief executive, bypassing the board.

We see a range of Brezhnevian type controls on university funding. The member for Flinders agrees with me, I think.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Hunt interjecting

Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This government is dedicated to micromanaging our universities and it is useful to look at what universities need approval from the minister and from Canberra to do. They need approval to move students from one campus to another and to move courses from one campus to another. We have many universities now with more than one campus. If a vice-chancellor thinks it is a good idea to offer a course at a particular campus and not another, they have to check and get permission. They need permission to introduce new courses and to change the scheduling of courses from one semester to another. The only thing missing is reference to the politburo. They need approval from the minister to do these things. Why doesn’t this government let the managers manage? Our vice-chancellors are relatively well paid and they are all professional, respected people. Why don’t we let them get on with the job? I suspect it is for political reasons. I suspect this government does not want universities to have the power to close down a course here and open it there because it could be politically embarrassing in certain electorates. That is the only solution that I can think of, but it is a terrible way to run a university system.

Recently I was reading that Harvard University, arguably the best university in the world, certainly in the top three or four—

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Second to Yale.

Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Perhaps it is second to Yale, which I think certain honourable members may have been to, but I am a Harvard fan myself—much to the disappointment of the member for Flinders. Harvard are rewriting their MBA. It certainly has respect as probably the best MBA program in the world but they are rewriting it. They are saying, ‘We need to keep up. We need to go ahead of the pack. We might have the best course in the world but we’re going to do it again. We’re going to make sure that we are always continually improving.’ I wonder whether Harvard needed to check with Washington DC. I wonder whether they needed permission from the Secretary of Education in the United States. I doubt it very much. As I say, we have this government holding back innovation in our tertiary education sector, strangling education, with these controls instead of letting vice-chancellors do their jobs. Instead of letting academics come up with new and innovative ways of managing our university sector, everything has to go through the minister and through the minister’s office.

I have only a couple of minutes left, but I do want to give credit where credit is due. This week I read of a new initiative from the minister that I thought was quite good—the graduate passport, which would explain what goes into Australian courses to people overseas. That sounds like a reasonable approach, so I congratulate the minister on it. It could be improved dramatically, as could the status of our education throughout the world, so that perhaps we would not need a graduate passport, if the government embraced Labor’s approach of the Higher Education Quality Agency. We do have an agency at the moment with very few teeth and, I would argue, limited resources to ensure that the quality of all our universities reaches world’s best practice. We need the Australian Higher Education Quality Agency and we need it to have real teeth.

I congratulate the Deputy Leader of the Opposition for that idea. It came through the white paper that my honourable friend the member for Kingsford Smith referred to. It is one of the best policy documents I have read in a long time, especially considering it was done with the meagre resources of opposition and not the mega resources of the department. The meagre resources of opposition have put together what I think will go down as one of the very significant policy documents in the future of tertiary education in this country. The reforms embraced in it, which will form the basis of the reforms of a Labor government, will in time be compared with the Dawkins reforms of 1988 for their impact on higher education.

Australia will be paying a price for this government’s neglect for many years to come. It will take a long time to catch up after the seven per cent reduction in university funding that we have seen over the last 10 years. It will take a long time to catch up with the rest of the OECD, which has had a 50 per cent increase in tertiary funding over that time. We do not have a long time to wait but I fear we will have to wait for a Labor government to get it.

Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are very few people, I would suggest, who would entertain the notion that education is not the key to individual or national advancement. It is widely accepted that the best way forward for any nation is to invest in its people. The best way forward is to educate people, to invest in human capital and to nurture and develop an environment in which innovation and development is encouraged. There is no doubting that.

The cornerstone of the productivity agenda that this nation needs to pursue to maintain its competitive position within the global economy is, without doubt, education. The productivity agenda that Australia must pursue to provide the best possible opportunity to secure its economic future is education; investing in our people and investing in the educational development of our youth is how we will build a future economic base for this country.

A true productivity agenda, one based on enhancing and advancing the talent of Australia’s labour force, has to be based around education—not around the single-minded productivity agenda pursued by this government, which is tantamount to slashing wages and conditions to produce a short-term economic result. That is not development and not investment in productivity; that is simply a recipe for hindering the further development of our people and at the same time limiting the opportunities that workers in this country have. Labor governments of the past had a very positive position in relation to an education agenda, and a Beazley Labor government will continue this proud tradition. I will return to that and to the comments made by my colleague in relation to Labor’s policy later.

First, I will examine the content of the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006, which we have before us today. I would particularly like to make some comments on the provisions of this bill that extend education and training in the vital area of health, as that is an issue that is dear to the hearts and minds of people in my electorate. The Minister for Education, Science and Training in her second reading speech proudly informed the House:

The measures contained in this bill highlight the government’s commitment to a higher education sector based on quality, sustainability, equity and diversity.

When I first heard this statement I thought that the new minister for education must have driven a complete policy backflip through the cabinet. Alas, I was wrong. When outlining the provisions of the bill that are aimed at addressing the chronic health shortage issues faced in many areas, she went on to say:

...this bill will implement the coalition government’s recent decision to boost training in vital health courses.

That news is welcome to all members. Given the University of Western Sydney is set to be allocated 15 of the additional 600 places, I welcome it, as will the member for Macarthur, I am sure. I welcome it because it could mean an additional 15 doctors into the south-west of Sydney—assuming all the students decide to stay in general practice. That will be a great assistance to the constituents of my electorate, who are deeply concerned about the lack of general practitioners in the area.

While this is welcome news, the fact remains that, even if every single one of these additional training places turns into a general practice position, if the population did not grow and if all these additional GPs practised locally, by the time these doctors graduate it would result in only a slight reduction in the doctor-patient ratio in the south-west of Sydney. Assuming everything remained the same, by the time these students graduate the ratio of GPs to population in the electorate of Werriwa would still be of the order of 20 per cent above that recommended by the Department of Health and Ageing. That is a telling statistic—it reflects this government’s complete dereliction of duty when it comes to higher education and providing for the interests of people, particularly in the south-west of Sydney in my electorate of Werriwa. The government has no commitment to higher education. In the decade that it has been in office, there is no point trying to trick the Australian public—

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 2 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. The debate may be resumed at a later hour and the member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.