Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—Australia’s universities have a critical part to play in making this country smarter, fairer and more prosperous. Universities preserve, create and transmit knowledge. They are havens for reflection and engines of discovery. They produce new ideas and people with the skills to apply those ideas in the real world. If we are serious about the future—if we are serious about modernising the Australian economy, strengthening Australian communities and improving the lives of Australian families—then we have to be serious about lifting the capacity and performance of Australia’s universities.

Last year, the government presented a package of higher education reforms worth more than $5 billion over four years to unlock the potential of the nation’s universities and open the doors of higher education to a new generation of Australians. Now it is time to report on the progress we have already made. Overall, this government will be investing $36 billion in university teaching and learning and more than $9.6 billion in research from 2008-09 to 2011-12, compared with $27.9 billion for teaching and learning over the last four years of the previous government (2004-05 to 2007-08) and around $5.8 billion for research over the same period. Higher education spending will jump from 0.82 per cent of GDP in 2007-08 to one per cent in 2010-11.

This government’s reform agenda places students, and their learning, exactly where they should be—at the centre of the higher education system. It promotes and rewards excellence in teaching and research. It will expand the sector and, through new regulatory arrangements and performance funding, drive improvements in the quality of our institutions. Our goal is to create a system that allows more students from across the community to achieve a higher education qualification and find a rewarding job in the knowledge economy—including jobs in research. These reforms will dramatically strengthen the national innovation system, which is so vital to building productivity, renewing the economy, and meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

Our move towards a student-focused system is already making a difference. In the past, caps have been placed on the number of publicly funded places. Our reforms mean that this year and next year, universities can increase their enrolments by up to 10 percent over their target allocation and receive government support for these new places. And in 2012 we will fund a place for every student who is accepted into a public university. As a government, we have recognised the compelling case for growing our higher education sector in order to meet Australia’s future economic needs and to expand opportunity across the community.

Debate interrupted and progress reported; adjournment proposed and negatived.

Universities have already shown their willingness to respond to student demand. Preliminary estimates show that there will be up to a 7.5 per cent increase in Commonwealth-supported places across the sector in 2010—a potential increase of 45,000 full-time equivalent students since 2008. This means that thousands more students will achieve their dream of going to university this year. It is the first step towards realising our goal that by 2025, 40 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds will hold a bachelor’s qualification or above.

These reforms are vital if Australia is to take full advantage of the economic recovery following the global recession and if we are to build the productive, knowledge-led economy of the future. The reforms are delivering increased enrolments and places in areas such as engineering, science, nursing and health professionals—disciplines of vital importance to Australia’s future prosperity. Achieving this won’t just make Australia better educated and more productive; it will also make it fairer. Most of the growth will have to come from groups that are under-represented today. This is about including Australians who are now excluded. It is about nurturing talent that is now wasted.

The Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program furthers these aims by offering universities a special loading for enrolling students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and by resourcing them to encourage aspiration in disadvantaged school communities. The program is worth $433 million, starting with $56 million in 2010.

It is extremely disappointing that the government’s reforms to student income support—which are so important to our most needy students, including those from the bush—have been blocked by the Liberals and Family First in the Senate. These reforms are critical to ensuring that all young Australians get a fair go in higher education. They have the support of every Independent in the House of Representatives, all university and student peak bodies, all state and territory ministers, the Australian Greens and Senator Xenophon. Only the opposition and Senator Fielding stand in the way.

Until the new legislation passes there will be no new scholarships for over 150,000 students; the current inadequate arrangements for Youth Allowance, Austudy and ABSTUDY will remain in place; and students in their tens of thousands will continue to miss out on much-needed support. The government urges the opposition to reconsider its position and to support our legislation.

As well as helping more students get to university, the government is acting to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education when they get there. The government is using a number of mechanisms to promote excellence in the higher education sector and make universities more accountable for their performance.

The first is the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency—or TEQSA. TEQSA will be established this year as an independent body with powers to regulate university and non-university higher education providers, monitor quality and set standards. It is critical that students can be assured they will receive a high quality qualification at any of our higher education providers. Responsibility for TEQSA will be shared by the Minister for Education and the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research in line with their portfolio responsibilities.

There will also be a focus on giving students clear information about courses, campus facilities, support services and, most importantly, quality of teaching and learning outcomes. Students will be able to use this information to guide their choices, and their choices will in turn drive changes in institutional behaviour. At the same time, the government will reward institutions that work proactively to achieve higher standards in their teaching with performance based funding. This funding will favour universities that deliver quality student engagement and learning outcomes. We are already working with the sector on these performance indicators and guidelines for negotiating institution-specific targets, measuring performance, and allocating funds.

University is about more than just attending class. That is why the government is seeking to improve student engagement by allowing universities to levy an amenities and services fee of up to $250 to fund services such as sporting clubs, child care, legal and counselling services. Unfortunately, the Liberals have blocked our change, despite overwhelming support from students and universities. This means that students right around the country will continue to suffer from inadequate services and support until this legislation is passed.

Another mechanism the government will use to measure and promote quality is Excellence in Research for Australia—or ERA. ERA will evaluate research undertaken at Australian universities against international benchmarks. It will tell us exactly how well we are doing compared to the world’s best. Both universities and the government will be able to use this information to guide the allocation of resources. Australia is an incredibly productive research producer, but the funds we can devote to research are and always will be finite. It is therefore essential that we play to our strengths. ERA was trialled successfully in 2009 and comes into operation this year. It has been developed and will be administered by the Australian Research Council.

If we are to lift the quality of Australian research and compete in a high-tech world, it is essential that we expand our research workforce. That is why the government is more than doubling the number of Australian Postgraduate Awards and why we increased the APA stipend by 10 per cent in last year’s budget—restoring in a single stroke the value that had been eroded over the previous 12 years.

We have also created 100 Super Science Fellowships for young researchers and 1,000 Future Fellowships for mid-career researchers. These fellowships will encourage more gifted young Australian and international scholars to do their research in this country, where it will benefit Australia most. The government is also developing a Research Workforce Strategy to address Australia’s research workforce needs over the decade to 2020. This strategy will ensure that we have the skills in research to meet anticipated demand.

While we plan for the future, we are also repairing the damage of the past—including a decade of underfunding in higher education which threatened to put the sector’s very sustainability at risk. The government has committed $510 million over four years—and considerably more in the years beyond—to the Sustainable Research Excellence in Universities scheme, which will provide significantly increased funding for the indirect costs of research. In return for this funding, universities are required to increase transparency and improve reporting. All 41 eligible higher education providers have signed up to the scheme.

And, despite recent troubles impacting on our international education sector, indicative data suggests that growth in international enrolments at universities is holding up. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship has reported that, while student visa applications for all sectors dropped by 15 per cent from October to December 2009, higher education applicants rose by 2 percent. The overall decline in student visa applications is expected to impact mostly on the VET sector.

We are also putting our universities on a more sustainable footing by improving the indexation of block grants for teaching, learning and research. Universities will now have the funding certainty they need to make long-term investments in staff and programs. This landmark reform was announced in the 2009-10 budget, and implementation will be progressed this year.

Collaboration, both domestic and international, stretches our research dollars further, spreads risk, favours serendipity, propagates skills and builds critical mass. To promote collaboration between researchers and end-users, the government has developed a new Joint Research Engagement Scheme and refocused the Cooperative Research Centres program. Collaboration between universities will be supported by the Collaborative Research Networks Scheme, which will help Australia’s less research-intensive, smaller and regional universities forge alliances with larger, more research-intensive institutions.

International collaboration is just as important. Australia, like almost all countries, is a net importer of ideas. We produce 3 per cent of the world’s research papers. This is a fantastic result for a country our size, but it still means 97 per cent are produced elsewhere. Accessing research capacity beyond our borders is therefore critical to lifting our innovation capacity and performance. That’s why the government is both internationalising mainstream research programs and providing dedicated support for international engagement. Most importantly, we are creating a more capable and more competitive university research sector—a sector that will command respect and attract collaborators worldwide.

Australia’s higher education system will ultimately stand or fall on the quality of the people working in it—staff and students. Yet, no matter how bright and creative our people may be, they still need effective tools to work with and functional environments to work in. That is why the government has invested so heavily in university infrastructure over the last two years.

We began with the $500 million Better Universities Renewal Fund to help universities rebuild their campus facilities after more than a decade of neglect. We have followed that up with $2.9 billion in new spending from the Education Investment Fund, including:

• $580 million for eleven EIF Round 1 projects in university teaching, learning and research
• $500 million for the Teaching and Learning Capital Fund—Higher Education
• $934 million for EIF Round 2 projects in university teaching, learning and research and in VET
• $989 million for infrastructure to support astronomy, marine and climate science, and emerging technologies through the Super Science Initiative—all of it accessible to university researchers.

A third round of the EIF and an EIF Sustainability Round were announced in the 2009-10 budget. These rounds are under way, with successful projects to be announced early this year. Future EIF rounds will be announced in due course.

In addition to building a stronger system overall, the government is also encouraging each university to think about its place within that system. From 2011, each university will negotiate a funding compact with the government defining its unique mission and describing how it will fulfil that mission and meet the Australian government’s broader policy goals. Universities will be encouraged to focus on areas in which they have particular strengths and can make a distinctive contribution. All universities will be required to make a contribution to the government’s equity objectives. Interim agreements have been negotiated for 2010 as a forerunner to this game-changing reform. Interim agreements have now been signed with almost all universities, and a summary of the issues raised during negotiations will be published soon.

The government is providing $400 million in structural adjustment funding—including $200 million for infrastructure—to help struggling universities make changes needed to refocus their missions, improve quality and foster better links with other providers and VET so that they can excel in the new system. We are also developing a more logical basis for funding regional universities, starting with a Review of Regional Loading, which will report later this year.

Enrolments driven by student demand and informed choice, performance-based funding, mission-based compacts—all of these reforms will give universities an entirely new degree of control over their own destinies. We respect and value the role of universities in Australian society and in our economy. They are active partners in the reform process, and the government would like to thank all higher education institutions for their contribution to date. There is still a great deal of work to be done, however, and the government looks forward to strengthening this partnership—a partnership so important to Australia’s future—as the education revolution continues in 2010.

With those words, I ask leave of the House to move a motion to enable the member for Sturt to speak for 17 minutes.

Leave granted.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Sturt has been so busy speaking throughout this whole debate, I am surprised he actually knows what is going on.

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I did somewhat suspect that the member for Sturt was going to grant leave to that and, with that leave, I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the member for Sturt speaking in reply to the minister’s statement for a period not exceeding 17 minutes.

Question agreed to.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I can assure you I always have an ear for Madam Deputy Speaker and an ear for my colleagues at the same time.

There is a growing chorus of dissent about the obsession with branding that consumes this government, and this minister in particular. Everything under this minister is described as ‘revolutionary’. We have the education revolution, the digital education revolution and the Building the Education Revolution. Professor Ross Fitzgerald suggested in a column in the Australian newspaper last year that a renovation of a toilet block under this minister might be dubbed ‘flushing the education revolution’. Even the minister’s statement today was entitled the ‘higher education revolution’. The truth is that any examination of their record in higher, secondary or primary education shows that we simply cannot trust this government to actually deliver. While the Bradley review into higher education offered good ideas and highlighted the need for reform, Labor have proven themselves to be all spin and all branding but little substance. I will use this opportunity this evening to respond to the minister’s statement by weighing her lofty sentiment with what she actually delivered as the part-time minister for education.

This part-time minister is responsible for workplace relations, employment and social inclusion in addition to education. She is also the regular stand-in for our jet-setting Prime Minister. Not surprisingly, as a result, education, one of the key areas of public policy that the Labor Party like to claim as their own, has been given less attention and care than our millions of primary, secondary and tertiary students deserve and expect. Far from being the great policy triumph—the education revolution, Labor’s pride and joy—education has become a latch-key kid, mostly home alone, left to fend for itself. Embarrassed and ashamed by the lack of care and attention they have given to education, Labor has done what some parents do to try and remedy a situation like this: they have tried to buy love. So education has been showered with money—borrowed money. But the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister still have not realised what most people know instinctively: you cannot buy love. Quantity is not a substitute for quality.

If there is one thing that every Labor government, including this one, knows, it is how to spend money. But what every Labor government does not know is how to spend it well or how to spend it efficiently and effectively. Spending money you do not have will not get you out of trouble. Spending money will not compensate for the lack of care and attention given to education. The fiasco of the so-called education revolution could not be a clearer example of that. First, we had the digital education revolution—or ‘more computers in schools’ program. It sounded great as a sound bite from the Prime Minister—he was then Leader of the Opposition. Then the reality really hit. Now we know that the whole program has been ill thought out—no attention to detail, badly implemented, way behind schedule and way over budget, with the Commonwealth having to double the initial price tag and the states and parents having to dig deep into their own pockets to come up with another few billion dollars on top of that to actually make it all work.

As of today, 2½ years after the then Leader of the Opposition’s initial brainwave, and more than halfway through the life of the program, only a fraction of the promised one million computers have actually been delivered and none of them have been connected to the very fast fibre broadband as originally promised by the Prime Minister. Then we had the Building the Education Revolution program—‘computers in schools’ on steroids. Instead of giving our schools what they actually needed and wanted, the government decided to give them what it wanted. And what it wanted was thousands of memorial school halls to which a plaque could be affixed and a sign erected to remind everyone how generous the federal government had been with taxpayers’ money.

We know that the implementation of the BER has been as flawed as that of the computers in schools program—grossly overpriced, behind schedule and beset with examples of systemic waste and mismanagement. The government still has not been able to explain how building multipurpose halls will help our children improve their literacy, numeracy and school performance. It still has not been able to tell the Australian people how many jobs have actually been created by this stimulus spending. So here we have another cash splash, one to dwarf all the others, and another example that blindly spending money is not a substitute for well-thought-out and well-considered public policy. Instead, we have a $16 billion excuse for the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to pop on their hard hats, don the high-visibility vests and smile for the cameras. This has been the most expensive photo opportunity in Australian history. Here is Labor’s education policy in a nutshell: nice sounding ideas, plenty of cash, appalling implementation, little value for money, but plenty of spin. This is what we have come to expect from our part-time education minister.

If primary and secondary education sectors have been the neglected children of the Rudd government, largely ignored but showered with money, then tertiary education has become the forgotten and unwanted stepchild, mostly out of sight and out of mind. The funny thing about Labor’s education revolution is that we were supposed to have a revolution in our primary schools and a revolution in our secondary schools but Australia’s universities have been left out. Knowing now how the education revolution has turned out for Australia’s schools, it might actually have been a lucky escape for our universities. But this does not excuse the lack of thought, planning and foresight on the part of the Rudd government regarding the present wellbeing and future prospects of one million tertiary students and the wellbeing of the tertiary sector, which, as well as being one of our top export industries, is so important for the future prosperity of this country. The inconvenient truth is that Labor knows that there are votes in primary and secondary education but not as many in tertiary education, so Labor can afford to take the sector for granted—and it did. That is why Labor came to power without a coherent and consistent universities policy. What they presented instead was a hodgepodge of ideological knee-jerk reaction mixed with some half-baked ideas, all spiced with plenty of spin and nice-sounding rhetoric that in practice meant very little.

So what has been Labor’s tertiary policy? It was the commitment to abolish by stealth voluntary student unionism and slug one million Australian university students with a $250 a year tax to finance services that an overwhelming majority of them do not, or cannot, use and are unwilling to pay for in any case. It was the commitment to abolish full fee-paying domestic places at public universities, denying Australian students who were willing to finance their own education the same opportunity we afford to tens of thousands of overseas students at our universities. Not only has this ideological crusade reduced the range of options available to young Australians but also it has deprived our universities of a fast-growing additional stream of revenue. The futility of the decision to abolish full fee-paying domestic places has now become quite apparent due to the global financial crisis. Universities lost a valuable revenue stream exactly at the time when they needed it most and they were not able to offer enough government supported places as demand for university places spiked recently.

It was also the commitment to reform Youth Allowance. This fiasco is worth examining in some detail. The minister’s proposed changes to Youth Allowance, introduced last year, gave with one hand while taking away with the other. In this legislation the government proposed reform which would have retrospectively impacted upon thousands of Australian students who were nearing the end of a gap year they had decided to take in 2009 in an effort to qualify for youth allowance under the existing provisions. Had it passed the Senate last year, it would have crushed the higher education dreams of many, in particular some of our neediest rural and regional students.

The Rudd government continues to state that students are its primary concern, yet the minister has made no attempt to prioritise the concerns of students or made no attempt to reason with the opposition last year to secure the passage of the student income support legislation. My door is always open, Minister. To make matters worse, the old Commonwealth scholarships were abolished by the minister in previous legislation, leading to the current catastrophic situation where there are now no new scholarships available this year.

The coalition warned the government during the debate that they were putting all scholarships in jeopardy for 2010. We even gave the government the opportunity to split the bill and allow scholarships to be dealt with separately to avoid the disastrous situation we have now. Yet the minister made no attempt at any stage to pick up the phone and discuss the coalition’s concerns in an attempt to secure passage of this legislation. Students are wondering whether they can even attend university at all this year, having had no idea from the government about when they will finally negotiate.

Then we have the university compacts. While the details of the policy are still sketchy, Labor seems to be committed to reorganising the government’s relationship with universities through compacts, or individual contracts, where funding is based on the different characteristics of each university. The problem with compacts is that they try to micromanage university funding based on a bureaucratic assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each individual university. As Macquarie University’s vice-chancellor, Professor Steven Schwartz, has argued, this will have the effect of freezing the status quo, as money is allotted based on reputation, reducing flexibility and making it more difficult for universities to grow and compete with each other. As Professor Schwartz has written:

The assumption underlying the idea of compacts is that government experts have the foresight, creativity and expertise to design better universities than those that evolve from the normal interplay of supply and demand.

Once again, Labor’s penchant for central planning and micromanagement triumph over commonsense and the best interests of the tertiary sector.

Last but not least, we have had the fiasco of the Education Investment Fund. The EIF has proved to be another case of the Rudd government promising big but delivering small. With great fanfare the Rudd government unveiled three nation-building funds as the centrepiece of their first budget. The Education Investment Fund, with $11 billion in assets, was designed to finance capital works in higher education. The EIF was to consist of $6 billion, first put aside by the coalition under its Higher Education Endowment Fund, with an extra $5 billion contributed by the Labor government from budget surpluses.

The reality has been starkly different. Not only has the Rudd government grossly underdelivered on its promise to top up the fund but also it debauched the very idea of a secure, long-term funding source for university infrastructure. It did it firstly by opening up the eligibility criteria for access to the fund to not just universities but also vocational education facilities, thus increasing by hundreds, if not thousands, the pool of potential recipients and therefore vastly diluting the funds available to universities. Secondly, Labor decided that not just the interest but also the very capital of the fund itself would be available for distribution. This has turned what was meant to be a perpetual endowment into another political slush fund that was no different to normal recurrent expenditure under Labor and bound to be splashed around by the minister in the run-up to elections.

This has been the sum total of Labor’s higher education policy: old ideological vendettas mixed with an interventionist drive and topped with a poorly thought out ride on the piggybank. To call this a higher education policy would be to insult the intelligence of Australia’s vibrant and successful tertiary sector, and Labor knows that. But it thought so little of the sector that, instead of bothering to come up with a universities policy either before or even after getting elected, it decided to wash its hands and outsource it to others. Hence, for more than a year after Kevin Rudd’s election we were witness to a sorry and bizarre spectacle of at least 25 inquiries and reviews being commissioned by the government into various aspects of higher education.

The Bradley review has been the most prominent and comprehensive of all the inquiries and reviews carried out. The minister welcomed the report—with great relief, one suspects—because it put an end to the farce of the Labor government not having a higher education policy for more than a year after coming into office and because it absolved the government of the need to come up with policies themselves. And so the minister graciously accepted the Bradley review’s recommendations, but only selectively, because those recommendations cost money and the government no longer had any, having already plunged the budget into deficit. But it underlines very clearly once again what low priority the higher education sector has in this government’s thinking. Labor could find tens of billions of dollars to splash around on things like pink batts, but they could not find enough money to properly resource our universities—one of our very important engines of economic growth and productivity.

In its response to the Bradley review, the government committed itself to a more student-demand-centred higher education system and to increasing participation and equity in higher education. Under the policy, all Australian universities will be funded on the basis of student demand from 2012. The government will fund a Commonwealth supported place for all domestic students accepted into an eligible accredited higher education course at a recognised public higher education provider. The government also committed itself to a target of 40 per cent of all 25- to 34-year-olds having a qualification at bachelor level or above from 2025, up from 30 per cent today.

The coalition is broadly supportive of the government’s avowed commitment to a more student-demand-centred higher education system and, of course, to increasing participation and equity in higher education. But we remain sceptical, based on Labor’s past record, that the government will actually be able to properly implement such goals. Where we are different from the government is in our strong belief that the implementation of the Bradley review is not the be-all and end-all but merely a beginning of a long-term reform process that will see Australian universities and Australian students freer and more flexible to pursue future challenges and opportunities.

The coalition is not encouraged by the government’s more immediate response to the Bradley review. The government claims that it is providing $5.7 billion of new money for universities in its last budget. But, of that, $2.99 billion has been taken in the massive raid on the Education Investment Fund. The real budget spending increases in higher education have been $1.2 billion for research, only $1½ billion for teaching and only an extra $246 million in new funding for teaching measures in the current financial year.

Today, we are celebrating the first anniversary of the Rudd government acquiring a higher education policy. In wedding lore the first anniversary is known as a paper anniversary, and how appropriate that is because all we have seen from the government so far is plenty of paper, a lot of rhetoric and pious sentiments but not a lot of action. Where there has been some action it has turned out to be mostly wrongheaded and counterproductive. Education remains a neglected child of the Rudd government and higher education remains the forgotten, unwanted step child. (Time expired)