Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Our higher education sector is set for a massive transformation whether we like it or not. Just as the newspaper and retailing industries are facing huge disruptions due to the internet so too will the education sector. It will be immensely challenging to existing institutions, but potentially hugely beneficial to Australians. The main force driving change in the education sector is the technological ability to deliver content to anyone, anywhere over the internet at almost zero marginal cost.

For centuries the university model has been premised on a select number of students assembling at a campus to be taught a set course from learned professors. The physical constraints on the system were obvious. A lecture theatre can only accommodate a limited number of students. A top professor has only so many hours in a day. Each university has therefore been restricted to a small number of students to meet these physical constraints. The constraints have also been financial and regulatory. These constraints have created a system which is oriented around the provider. Students have had relatively limited choice of university and must meet the timetable, location and pace of busy professors juggling multiple courses and scarce lecture theatres. With the advent of high-speed, ubiquitous internet access this is set to fundamentally change.

The key aspect is the ability of the internet to separate the students from the physical campus. As ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young suggests, lecture theatre teaching is simply no longer required. He said: 'Not only is there infinitely more information available in cyberspace, but that information is customisable to individual students,' meaning that different students can take different paths to reach the same destination. It will not be the case that every lecture goes online in every university, nor will it be the end of face-to-face teaching for many courses. Multiple models will develop.

But the trend towards online will accelerate. Already one in five students does at least part of their course off-campus.

We are at the beginning of the revolution. Online classes will become interactive with problem solving, feedback, and review built into each lesson. The classes will not just be more convenient for students to access, but will be a better learning aid, customised to each student's needs. Once a student is removed from the lecture theatre, international providers become accessible. Suddenly, instead of students having one or two choices of universities, there could potentially be hundreds. This hyper-competition could include the global brands. Completing macroeconomics from Chicago's School of Economics could be just as easy as doing it at Deakin.

Online university courses have been around for some time, but with some of the world's most prestigious universities now entering the space, the pace will increase dramatically. Harvard, MIT, Stanford and others began offering online courses at the start of 2011, the so-called massive open online courses. Almost two million people have already signed up. The enhanced competition from global players will challenge existing institutions but can only be beneficial for students, giving them unprecedented choice, customisation and flexibility.

Government policy needs to change in five ways to capture the full opportunity it presents. First, we need to lower the regulatory barrier for overseas universities to operate courses in Australia. In particular, we should remove the necessity that a university must do research as well as teach. Let the best come in with course offerings and judge them on their performance. Second, TESQA needs to put aside its on-campus mindset and embrace the online environment. As UNE's Vice-Chancellor, Jim Barber, said, TESQA needs to shift 'its emphasis from specifying how teaching should be conducted to what teaching should achieve.'

Third, public subsidies should follow the student, rather than only go to Australian public providers. If a course is accredited, then the student should be able to access the public subsidy. The nationality, ownership structure, and method of delivery should be irrelevant. Fourth, universities should be allowed to differentially price, even within a single degree. This could include customised prices for extra staff contact, or pricing for two years' worth of courses over one year—if the student can cope. Finally, government funding levels need to be examined again. The government has just reviewed the base funding required to deliver courses, but it is entirely rooted in traditional methods of delivery. We should model the costs of online or partially online content provision, which, at least in the medium term, should be cheaper.

We have exceptionally good public universities and there is no reason why they cannot adapt and remain the dominant players, not just in Australia but throughout Asia. The opportunities to capture the rapidly increasing demand from Asia through our own online offerings are enormous, as my colleague Andrew Robb has outlined.

The key for Australia and its students, however, is not whether we produce the courses, but whether we can access the best courses available at competitive prices. (Time expired)

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

September 29 was Police Remembrance Day. It was also St Michaels Day, Patron Saint of Police and Protectors, which may explain why 29 September was chosen as Police Remembrance Day. Whilst I was unable to speak to the motion in recognition of our police officers put forward by the member for Fowler and debated in the House on 17 September 2012, I take this opportunity to make some brief remarks in recognition of police officers across Australia and more specifically in my own state of South Australia.

Every day thousands of police officers leave home to do a job filled with uncertainty and a high degree of risk. The same could be said of several other occupations except that for police officers the risks primarily come from other people. By its very nature a police officer's role is to control or respond to the behaviour of others. That is what makes a police officer's work so unpredictable and so dangerous—dangers which, in the course of duty, have cost the lives of 754 police officers across Australia with 61 of them being from my home state of South Australia. Their duty was to ensure the safety of the rest of society.

Of course the statistics about those who have died, although indeed concerning, are only part of the picture. Many more police officers have been in life threatening situations and sustained serious injuries in the course of their work. In April 2011 two South Australian police officers found themselves in that very situation. I refer to Officers Brett Gibbons and Travis Emms who attended a call out to what appeared to be a domestic incident at a house in Hectorville, an eastern suburb of Adelaide. On entering the house, and without warning they were fired upon from close range by a person armed with a shotgun. Their story with a full version of events was covered in detail in the August edition of the South Australian Police Journal, and recently in Adelaide's Advertiser and Sunday Mail newspapers.

The fallout from the ordeal was that officer Brett Gibbons sustained horrific facial injuries, Officer Travis Emms was badly injured and three occupants of the house were brutally executed. Whilst that may have been an extreme example of violence from what could be described as a psychotic person, that is what policing is about and what makes the associated risks so different. Officers Gibbons and Emms are thankfully back on duty, perhaps physically and mentally scarred but not deterred. They are both fine examples of our nation's police officers and both deserve our utmost praise and respect.

Regrettably, random violent attacks on people seem to occur all too often in today's society. Each time they do, it is our police officers who inevitably have to respond to them and deal with offenders who are often highly agitated, often under the influence of drugs and very dangerous. Of course that is only one aspect of the daily pressures, stresses and demands of the job—stresses which flow through to family members whom I expect breathe sighs of relief at the end of each shift when officers return home safely.

I count many serving and former police officers as personal friends. I see and hear first-hand the effects their work has had on their lives. Police Remembrance Day each year enables us to show our gratitude and respect for the police officers who have lost their lives or who have in some way paid dearly for their service to our nation. Tonight I take this opportunity to do that. I also take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of former South Australian Police Commissioner Mal Hyde, who retired in July. Mal Hyde served South Australia as Police Commissioner for 15 years and I believe that he can take considerable pride in his leadership of the South Australian Police. I extend to Mal and his wife Marcia my best wishes for their future.

I also take this opportunity to congratulate incoming South Australian Police Commissioner Gary Burns on his appointment. A local South Australian who joined the South Australian Police as a 16-year-old in 1969 and worked his way up through the ranks, Gary has done the hard yards and is well prepared to take over from Mal Hyde.

I recently attended a luncheon hosted by the South Australian Police Association at which Gary outlined his vision for the future of policing in South Australia. It was clear that Gary's years of service in the South Australian Police Force have given him a very good understanding of community expectations and issues peculiar to policing in South Australia. I extend to Gary my best wishes in his new role as South Australian Police Commissioner. I have no doubt that he will live up to the task ahead of him.