Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Science and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to contribute to this debate on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006. It is quite a happy coincidence that we would be debating this bill when, in the Great Hall tonight, we have had the announcement of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science and the Prime Minister’s science awards for Australian science excellence. The winner of the Prize for Science this evening was the Australian National University Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, who has worked with the US Army and NASA to design tiny craft based on his research of bees’ brains—an extraordinary contribution to Australian science excellence. He is certainly a worthy recipient of that prestigious award and I congratulate him. As well we had the announcement that Monash University biochemist Dr James Whisstock has received the Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year for his work in exploring the protein ‘serpin’. This is very significant research into that protein, which controls biological processes linked to diseases including dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. He too is a worthy recipient and I extend my congratulations to him.

Also, the Sydney astronomer Dr Naomi McClure-Griffiths, who discovered a new spiral arm of the Milky Way, received the $50,000 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for the Physical Scientist of the Year. She is a dynamic young scientist who obviously has a wonderful future ahead of her. Marjorie Colvill, from Tasmania’s Perth Primary School, won the $50,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Primary Schools. We could see from her enthusiasm and her approach to primary science teaching and enhanced literacy that the children in Tasmanian schools are in great hands. Sydney teacher Anna Davis was awarded the $50,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools. She works at Casimir Catholic College in Marrickville and is teaching science and inspiring students in the sciences in a school which reflects a diversity of cultures. She has an amazing capacity for stimulating curiosity in the sciences. They are very worthy award recipients and I congratulate them all.

It is timely that we are debating this higher education legislation amendment bill because there are few people who would entertain the notion that education is not the key to individual or national advancement. We know it is widely accepted that the best way forward for any nation is to invest in its people. The best way forward is to educate people, to invest in human capital and to nurture and develop an environment in which innovation and development is encouraged. This is not in doubt in any way.

If this government were serious about enhancing and advancing the talent of Australia’s labour force, it would also be serious about education, not the single-minded productivity agenda of slashing wages and conditions to produce a short-term economic result. That is not development and not investment in productivity; that is simply a recipe for hindering the further development of our people and at the same time limiting the opportunities that workers in this country have. Labor governments of the past had an incredibly positive position in relation to an education agenda—we invested in our people and we invested in our future—and a Beazley Labor government will continue this proud tradition.

In the past decade there has been appalling underfunding of our public university system in Australia. That underfunding has become so chronic that all of the enrolment growth since the change of government in 1996 in Australian universities has been in full-fee-paying students, predominantly in foreign full-fee-paying students but more recently in Australian full-fee-paying students. The government is so committed to full-fee places that it deprives young Australians of the opportunity of getting into university on a subsidised basis.

In the last couple of years there has been a decline in the number of Australian undergraduate places that are subsidised by HECS, and that has occurred for the first time in half a century. Just as disturbingly, the government forecast in a statement made by the then education minister, now the Minister for Defence, that there will be fewer undergraduate students in Australia over the coming decade. So, where Labor has an aspiration to increase access and increase the number of university graduates, the coalition government is forecasting a decline. The outlook for our public universities is a very sombre one. Some of them will succeed because of their reliance on foreign full-fee-paying students, but the truth of the matter is that we are losing competitiveness as a destination for foreign full-fee-paying students. As a consequence, that is now beginning to taper off as a source of revenue.

The demand for university places across Australia has declined by five per cent since 2003. Many Australian universities, particularly in regional Victoria at Ballarat University, in Western Australia at Edith Cowan University and in Queensland at the James Cook University in Townsville, are not actually attracting enough students to fill government subsidised places this year. In fact, this is the first time a Victorian university has not filled its government supported places since 1989. There seems little doubt that HECS rates are turning potential students away from study in regional Australia.

This year maximum annual HECS rates ranged from $3,920 to $8,170 depending on the course of study. These HECS fees are simply too high for students living in regional areas. We have also seen that, amongst the developed countries in the OECD, Australia alone has effectively reduced its education spending on higher education in both the university and TAFE areas by seven per cent. At the same time we have seen the release of yet another report condemning the Howard government’s performance on higher education. The OECD’s Education at a Glance 2006, an in-depth analysis of education across the world, shows that those other OECD countries have increased their investment in public education by 48 per cent. Simple maths shows that there is a 55 per cent differential between what is happening in Australia and what is happening elsewhere. Every vice-chancellor in Australia knows the impact of the reforms Dr Nelson put in place, the amount of red tape and bureaucracy and the significant detriment that all universities face because of immense funding pressure.

What that means is that Australia is going backwards while everyone else is moving ahead. Worse still, the report shows that the Howard government’s HECS hikes mean Australian university students are now paying the second highest fees in the world. The report comments on trends in higher education around the globe and says:

Increasing private spending on tertiary education tends to complement, rather than replace, public investment. The main exception to this is Australia.

Under this government Australian students are footing the bill for massive funding cuts, and we are one of the worst countries in the world on this.

Labor also condemns the government for failing to invest in education, training, distribution and retention measures to ensure that all of Australia has enough doctors, nurses and other health care professionals to meet current and future health care needs. The point that I am making is that the lack of investment in these particular areas over 10 years, when those in the university sector called for greater provision and saw that there was going to be a future problem of great significance, relates directly to the problem we have in this area.

This bill finally takes that up, in concert with the deal done at COAG regarding the health workforce and mental health package, to provide new medical general nursing, mental health nursing and clinical psychology places and increased funding for nurse clinical training. There is provision in the bill for that. We have 605 new commencing medical places, 1,036 new commencing nursing places, that extra funding for nurse clinical training, 431 mental health nursing places, 210 new clinical psychology places and 40 new places for a centre for excellence in Islamic studies. This is an omnibus bill, and you will find all sorts of bits and pieces in it, not just in the medical area but across a range of different approaches.

There is also money for a commercialisation training scheme for new postgraduate research places in science and innovation. That is a welcome measure because historically we have had a fundamental problem in Australia in turning innovative ideas and products into commercial reality. Translating the great ideas and inventions that we have into something that Australia can really make something of is our one continuing fundamental area of underperformance. In some cases the reason has simply been scale and the fact that Australia does not have the market depth to develop these onshore. In some cases you have to get the big providers.

We do not have one of the great strengths of the United States system—an intersection, or an interweaving, of the academic areas with business so that people can move readily from one area to another. Nor do we do have the interfaces they have that allow them to better commercialise their products because there is that flow, that understanding and that experience. I am highly supportive of that approach. It is extremely welcome. We need to do a great deal more of it, as we need to develop our technology parks—and I will come back in a moment to the Australian quality of research—and the interaction that we have with our universities.

We have some serious objections to the issues around higher education being proposed by this government—the massive increase in the cost of HECS, forcing students to pay up to $30,000 more for their degrees, and the creation of an American style higher education system where students are paying more, with some full-fee degrees costing more than $200,000 and nearly 100 full-fee degrees costing more than $100,000. Senator Sterle addressed that issue in his contribution to the debate.

It is imperative for Australia’s international position that the research undertaken in our universities and research organisations achieves excellence. We celebrated some of that in the science prizes this evening. It is important to the preparedness of the Australian community to support the efforts of our researchers so that the quality of performance can be demonstrated. It is also important to be able to identify where Australia’s current and emerging research strengths lie so that future investment can be directed to sustaining them. It is imperative that as a nation we deepen our research capability in some key areas in order to compete with the best universities in the world. Insufficient public investment in research is failing to sustain research efforts and prevents Australia from building world-class, world-scale research capabilities in areas where we have the potential to compete globally.

By international comparison, Australia’s investment in university research is small in scale yet widely distributed. The dissipation of Australia’s relatively small-scale investment in university research hampers our ability to continue to play a role on the world stage in knowledge advancement. Other countries are scaling up their research capabilities, with major infrastructure investments and incentives for attracting and retaining international stars and high-quality research teams around them. Many of those countries with deep public research capabilities also have large corporate research and development capabilities and strong links between the two. Australia has very little private research and development. We only spend 0.89 per cent of our GDP in this area.

So there are lost opportunities in a number of different areas. It is one of the reasons we have such an underprovision of the skill sets that we should have in Australia. There is a fundamental skills crisis in this country because not enough people have been trained. We needed the increase in places for doctors and the clinical places for nurses that are provided in this bill well before now, and we need to do a great deal more.

What is the government currently doing to fill the hole? It is bringing in people from overseas utilising the 457 visas we have been hearing so much about, which were originally for companies such as IBM or Xerox to bring in executives. These companies would bring them here for up to four years and fill those niches. The number of those visas has dramatically expanded to hundreds and thousands. We need to train young Australians. We need to train them first and we need to train them now. We have needed to do that for the last 10 years, but shamefacedly we have to say that has not been done. We have done our young people a disservice. But the system is under immense pressure because of the indexing changes the government has made, and it has less capacity to provide for these training needs.

I think the most critical issue we have to confront is the extent to which we are putting at risk Australia’s higher education reputation by not having a coherent policy response to the needs of the university system. We need our university system to be able to diversify, innovate and meet Australia’s higher education needs, because it is our fourth largest industry. We earn something in the order of $7 billion a year from bringing students in from overseas. We do that because Labor in government initiated the process of opening our education system up to the world and encouraging students to come to Australia. The reason they came was that we could provide a world-class education system. That world-class education system is not as strong as it should be, and it has certainly failed in a number of areas simply because of a lack of government commitment to expanding it and nurturing it in the way that it should.

The Howard government’s massive fee increases are also discouraging some young Australians from going to university. The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee’s report on applications for undergraduate courses shows a decline in applications over the last three years. In 2003 we had 229,427 enrolments. In 2006 that had dropped to 218,529. Young people are graduating from university with ever-increasing levels of debt, making it much harder for them to buy a home, start a family and get ahead. We have heard that the average HECS fee paid by Australian students has doubled under the Howard government, discouraging prospective students from taking up places at university. The Howard government fee hikes mean that medical students will pay more than $30,000 extra over the course of their degree, law students over $20,000 and engineering students more than $16,000—and that is for HECS places; that is not even talking about full-fee-paying places.

Labor’s plan to fix this mess is outlined in Labor’s higher education white paper Australia’s universities: building our future in the world. It points the way for reform of university funding, world-class and world-scale research hubs, the expansion of associate degrees and a new Australian Higher Education Quality Agency. Labor’s nation-building reform will result in real choice and high-quality education and training for Australians. Importantly, all Australians will benefit, because Labor’s much-needed reform will also deliver the skills our country needs to compete with the rest of the world. Lifting up all universities is central to a Beazley Labor government’s economic agenda. Building the skills of the next generation is how we will build a prosperous future for all Australians.

Labor means quality investment in quality universities. Labor’s plan will also encourage diversity and excellence in our universities. It will cut red tape and reward universities with additional funding in return for a commitment to quality. Labor will introduce a compact with our universities, establishing new funding streams to recognise their different strengths, promote excellence in research and encourage them to diversify, innovate and compete. All universities will be better off under the new funding system. Labor’s plan will release universities from the Howard government’s 2003 straitjacket which strangled them with red tape through programs such as the enrolment targets system. Labor’s plan includes proposals to stop the massive HECS fee increases, reduce the overall financial burden on students and provide HECS relief for degrees in areas of skills shortage.

Labor’s program is well funded, and high-quality universities will build Australia’s future economy by ending that one-size-fits-all model of university funding. Labor has always regarded higher education as the cornerstone of our nation’s social and economic prosperity. We believe that an appropriately funded and resourced higher education sector is the best investment a nation can make on its own. To bring home that fact, how ironic it was that in recognising the three people who won the prizes tonight Mr Howard said:

It is worth noting that all three scientists were born overseas, demonstrating that we are attracting leading scientists to Australia.

What we should be doing is educating, encouraging and nurturing them here.