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

Tonight I rise to speak of something of great importance to my electorate—higher education. My seat of Chisholm is home to three very large higher education institutions—Monash University, the Melbourne campus of Deakin University and Box Hill TAFE. To give you some idea of how large this is in my electorate, Monash University, one of the largest universities in the country, has on campus 50,259 students. Of those, 26,689 are at Clayton campus in my electorate of Chisholm. There are 15,262 FTE staff at Monash University. Of those, some 8,000 staff are employed at the Clayton campus of Monash in my electorate. Deakin University has 34,616 students enrolled across the board, with the vast majority enrolled at the Burwood campus—16,942. Staff numbers are impressive. There is a total of 2,978 staff, of whom 1,163 are located at the Burwood campus. I do not have the statistics on hand for Box Hill TAFE, but these numbers are mirrored. My electorate has one of the highest educated cohorts in the country. So higher education is near and dear to my electorate.

Last Monday night I had hoped to speak on the private member’s motion on changes to youth allowance. Unfortunately, issues with chair rostering did not permit me to get down to the chamber to give that speech. I was going to talk about the government’s stance in the last parliament and our reaction to the Bradley Review of Higher Education in Australia. Two very important things came out of the Bradley review, and one was that more money needed to go into higher education. I am proud of a government that has actually contributed a vast amount of extra income to our university sector—something I do not think we have praised ourselves enough for. That is very important in my electorate, and I certainly know from the vice chancellors and the CEO at Box Hill that they are greatly appreciative of the money, particularly the HEF money for higher education, that has gone into building projects. I am very much looking forward to being at Monash for the sod turning for the New Horizons centre, an $86 million project that will add greatly to the already terrific facilities out on the Clayton campus.

The Bradley review also talked about student income. For many years students have been living below the poverty line. One issue was the independents allowance. Too many people were using the 12 months of staying out of higher education as a free ride to getting student assistance. One of the great tragedies of my electorate is that, although the university is in Clayton, not many of the young people who grow up and go to school in Clayton ever get to go to the university. They come from a sociodemographic that would not usually achieve that. One of the fantastic things the Bradley review has pointed to, and which the federal government has done, is the lowering of the threshold for where people’s income cuts in so that students genuinely in need of assistance can actually get access to that money. People within my electorate, in metropolitan Melbourne, were impacted by this greatly. Many of them could then go onto university.

I am one of the proud people in this place who is a first generation university educated individual. My four siblings and I—the five of us—are all Monash University graduates. It was a very proud day for my mother when she got to see the last of her children graduate from Monash Uni. We thank the Whitlam government—there would have been no way my parents could have sent their five children to university without some assistance. The proudest day I ever had was seeing my mother graduate many years later, from the University of Melbourne. It was a wonderful thing that, in later years, she could go and graduate herself. We need to applaud higher education and we need to support it with money.

We also need to look at an issue that is having a huge impact upon my electorate, and that is student visas. Changes to the visa system were required to stop rorting of the system, but these steps have gone too far. At the Monash campus in my electorate it looks like there might need to be 300 redundancies to offset the downturn in overseas students. The overseas student business is the highest income earner in Victoria. And it is not just the money that goes to the university; the effect flows through to my local community. The local take-aways would be in huge strife if there were no overseas students to feed. (Time expired)