Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to condemn the government's inexcusable failure to act to save tens of thousands of Australian jobs at our public universities. The only action they have been prepared to take is to try and bail out the private universities, but they have refused to act on the public universities after weeks and months waiting. All they have agreed to is to promise not to cut more money next year, as if that is going to help. Universities in Australia support 260,000 jobs, 14,000 of them in regional Australia. There are 21,000 full-time equivalent jobs at risk—that is, 30,000 human beings', including the part-timers', livelihoods at risk. Their revenue has been decimated. Projections are they could lose up to or more than $20 billion from international student revenue in the next few years. They have lost tons of commercial revenue from all sorts of sources, with campuses shut down as well as industry partnerships and grants.

The impact on research is especially worrying, with our bizarre national funding model, where universities fund research through international education and profit from domestic students. This government has forced universities to chase more international education with its recent $2.2 billion cut to public funding, and there are thousands of researchers who now face the chop. These researchers are critical to our economic recovery, and the government must act. There are simple things they could do. They could extend JobKeeper, they could uncap domestic places, they could put money into research, and they could stop being impotent on international education and actually do something to save those jobs.