Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. I would like to remind the minister that the University of Western Sydney's chancellery is in my seat of Lindsay. Will the minister please outline to the House how the government's approach to cutting red tape and the unnecessary regulations will be of benefit to the higher education sector?

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

I am very pleased to get a question from the member for Lindsay about cutting red tape and unnecessary regulation in higher education, because I know that she has a terrific relationship with the University of Western Sydney. In fact they will be enormous beneficiaries of the government's reforms. Today the omnibus repeal bill and other appeal measures were introduced into the parliament by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, the member for Kooyong, and other ministers. In higher education, they will make a real difference to regulation, red tape and cost.

So the government is not only delivering on its promises to abolish the carbon tax and so reduce the burden on households and small businesses; it has abolished the mining tax, which was a handbrake on the growth of the economy. It has also more than doubled the promise we made before the election that we would reduce the cost of red tape and regulation to business by a billion dollars because after these measures are introduced, the reduction in costs to business will be $2 billion. The Prime Minister is not only the infrastructure Prime Minister but he has also reduced enormously the cost of red tape and regulation on business.

In higher education, the measures that have been introduced today will, for example, reduce the four annual reports that universities have been required to deliver on disability, indigeneity, disadvantage and the Commonwealth scholarship scheme—to simply one. So rather than the universities having to report to four different masters, they will simply have one equity report, saving the money.

It will also free the universities from collecting the Australian Graduate Survey and, instead, will contract Graduate Careers Australia to do that job, saving the universities time and money. It has ended the Sustainable Research Excellence and the Staff Hours Survey—it is quite a mouthful—which the opposition thought in government was a good measure. It took 9.1 years of staff time for universities to collect that information simply to tick another box in the previous government's massive red tape and regulatory burden on universities. We are abolishing that, because we can get the information from other sources—something Labor never thought of when they were in government; they simply asked the universities to do more of their work for them.

We are also going to be reducing through our reforms to TEQSA the regulatory burden on institutions across Australia doing a real risk assessment rather than the current one-size-fits-all. In summary, these measures will save over $15 million for universities—money that can instead be spent on students and better quality universities.