Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am going to speak tonight about a wonderful university in the electorate of Parramatta, the University of Western Sydney. At various times in my 10 years here it has straddled the border with Bennelong but, with the latest redistribution, it is firmly back in the electorate of Parramatta, and I am very glad to have it. It is an extraordinary university. It is not a sandstone university, it is not in the Group of Eight and its alumni are not as old or as wealthy as those of some other universities. But it is a university that cares greatly for the community it is in and that serves it incredibly well. The majority of students at the University of Western Sydney are first in family. When you go to a graduation ceremony at the University of Western Sydney it does remind one a little of a university match, with lots of shouting and strange chants coming from the floor—not the usual serious graduation ceremony at all but very much a family party.

I am incredibly worried, as many in my community are, about what the government's changes will do to the University of Western Sydney, not only the $5 billion cut to funding across the nation and the 20 per cent reduction in the government contribution per student but the deregulation of fees across the nation. There can be no doubt that fees will rise. I have heard the minister say that fees will not rise, that some fees will fall. But given the change they are making to the fee structure, it is impossible to see how that can be true. The average change in the amount of fees the government pays per student to universities is a 20 per cent cut. It is 20 per cent less on average. Students on average pay 40 per cent of current fees. So, by my calculations, they will have to cover 60 per cent of total costs even for the university to meet the cut the government has made. Then, if the university does charge a 20 per cent increase in fees, they will have to give 20 per cent to scholarships, so the actual amount the universities will have to raise their fees by is 25 per cent. That is not 25 per cent of 40 per cent. That is 40 per cent plus 25 per cent, or 65 per cent. Overall, that is a 62 per cent increase. It is impossible to see, given that the government is reducing the amount of subsidy per student, that universities will not have to move in to meet that shortfall and increase fees by 25 per cent.

For the University of Western Sydney this would be a disaster. I am both pleased and distressed really that the university has announced that it is going to freeze its fees for students commencing in 2014. It is doing this because, as we know, students commencing this year do not know what fees they will pay in years 2, 3 and 4. The level of uncertainty at the moment is quite extraordinary. I have had some people in my office recently. I met with a group of high school students a couple of days ago who were very worried about what the fees might be. It is already starting to impact on decisions people are making. The University of Western Sydney has decided to lock in its current fee structure for all domestic students commencing in 2014, even though it knows that that will have a considerable impact on the university's revenue. I thank it for doing that, but again I worry about the impact of that revenue drop for the University of Western Sydney.

It is also likely that the universities that are able to charge greater fees, who then have to contribute 20 per cent in scholarships, will provide scholarships to their own universities, so we are also likely to see the universities with the highest fees being able to attract with scholarships the smarter students from poorer areas—again hollowing out universities like the University of Western Sydney. This again would not be a desirable effect.

When I first got elected in 2004 I was really quite appalled at the disparity in the number of people enrolling at the University in Western Sydney when compared with the rest of the country. In 2004 people enrolled in universities in Western Sydney at 3.2 per cent compared to five per cent Sydney wide, so it was just over half the Sydney wide rate. In the 12 years of the Howard government that gap widened. In one of the biggest boom times we have ever had that gap widened. A boom is when you can make a difference to students with a disadvantage, but the Howard government failed to do that and, in fact, the gap widened.

When we came to government in 2007 we set about trying to address that widening gap. The federal government invested in the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program with the universities and that significantly turned around the enrolment rate for people, particularly those of low-socioeconomic status. In fact, at the University of Western Sydney the number of students from low-SES families increased by nine per cent between 2011 and 2013. That was quite an extraordinary turnaround.

The government set a target that, by 2020, 40 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds would have as a minimum a bachelor level qualification and that 20 per cent of higher education enrolments would be students from low-SES backgrounds. The government's focus on that low-SES group was based on the philosophy of social justice and economic prosperity.

It is incredibly important for a community like Western Sydney that we have a strong university. Historically university enrolments in Western Sydney have been quite low. In fact, for many years we did not have a university. We found it incredibly difficult to attract highly skilled people back to Western Sydney. Once a young person leaves Western Sydney, moves to the inner suburbs and goes to university it is really quite difficult to get them back to Western Sydney, but we have found that since the opening of UWS, in areas such as law and medicine, we now have people raised in Western Sydney, trained in Western Sydney and working in Western Sydney. I cannot stress how important this is, how destructive it would be if we find a hollowing out of our incredibly important University of Western Sydney in favour of fees. Let us face it: the sandstone universities that are able to charge high fees will essentially hollow out the universities in areas like Western Sydney and regional areas.

There is also the issue of the HECS debt. We heard the minister on Sunday morning saying that current and past students would not be affected by the HECS increases. We know now of course that that is not true. What worries me here is that, of two students who attend the same university and do the same course, the one who goes into community work will actually pay more than the one who goes for a high-powered job in the banking sector, for example. We will find that people who give back to the community—for example, people who go into aged-care nursing, people who work in counselling services and people who work in financial planning for the poor—will actually pay more for their degree because of this compounding interest than a person who goes to, say, Macquarie Bank.

We have heard the minister say that it is four per cent, but the average bond rate over the last 10 years has been between five and six per cent, so we can expect that eventually that will bounce back and we will have people paying compound interest at six per cent right across the country. For people who have already made decisions about their study, have finished their study or are currently studying on the basis of a cap of two per cent to be suddenly hit with an increase in the cap of up to six per cent is unfair in anyone's terms. We heard this government when they were in opposition talk about certainty. We heard them talk about certainty until they were blue in the face. Well they have not provided much certainty since they have come to government. We have people enrolling in universities now or considering enrolling in universities who do not know what their fees will be. People who have heard what the minister said yesterday and have not caught up with the correction will believe that they will not be hit with a six per cent interest bill in 2016, yet they will.

We have had people enrolling at university on one contractual arrangement to find that contract swept away by the government. The level of uncertainty in this is extraordinary, and it is already impacting on the decisions that people are making about whether or not to go to university, and which courses to take. The issue of certainty is incredibly important. People make decisions about their lives—where they live, how much rent they can afford, which one in the family works and how much, whether they take overtime et cetera—based on the things that they know. And this government has ripped away, with no notice, a very fundamental principle in this country: we go to university based on the capacity of our minds, not on the capacity of our wallets.

This is shameful legislation. It is a shameful change to our universities. It will be very destructive. (Time expired)