Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

As I said, and Senator Vanstone agreed with me, she could not help herself in having an argument about full fee paying places, and I feel that I need to respond very briefly to some of what has been said on that.

The minister says, with a flourish of her hand, ‘Full fee paying places are an opportunity for people to invest in themselves.’ Do you know what they are an opportunity for? They are an opportunity for people who have a sufficient bank balance—whose parents, families or themselves earn enough—to jump the queue when it comes to access to our universities. That is what it is. You can dress it up as some wonderful rhetorical statement by saying, ‘This is about investing in yourself,’ but, fundamentally, it is saying, ‘In Australia now you can buy your way into university over people who are more suitably qualified who have better results than you simply because you can pay for it.’

That is what this is about. It is not about investing in yourself; it is about inequitable access to higher education. It is about ensuring that people can have the opportunity if their financial circumstances are sufficiently generous and positive to buy themselves a place in our universities. As a Senator Bartlett previously indicated—and I have too—we are talking about $100,000 or $200,000 degrees. These are not places that are accessed by ordinary Australians; these are places which are accessed by people who are going to spend more on their degrees than many Australians may even spend on their house. So let us not pretend that this is some great equity measure from the Howard government; it is about wealthy people buying their way into universities.

The minister says, ‘We should give these people the same opportunities as overseas students.’ What about giving more people access to universities instead of making it available on the basis of whether your parents earn enough money to buy your place or whether you have earned enough money to buy yourself a place? What about actually funding universities so that we can have sufficient access. The minister’s approach seems to be: ‘There are all these poor people who cannot get access, so we’ll let the rich people buy a few more places. Then we might be able to fund the poor people more.’

This is a government—and we talked about this during the second reading debate—which has presided over a reduction in terms of the gap between indexation of costs and actual costs. I think it was over half a billion dollars over the term of the Howard government. In other words, they are reducing the effective recurrent funding compared to costs to universities, which is where you could actually do something about ensuring education is accessible. Let no-one listening to this debate believe any of the rhetoric that suggests that making people pay $200,000 for a degree is somehow an equity based measure. As I recall, my colleague Ms Macklin from the other place earlier this week or last week actually issued some data, which I believe the Department of Education, Science and Training in fact provided through a question on notice—or it might have been another government body—which demonstrated the gap between entry level scores applicable to government funded places as opposed to up-front fee places in universities and demonstrated precisely what Labor has been saying for some time: there are a number of courses in which full fee paying places require a lower threshold of entry. In other words, if you are wealthy and you do not score as well, you do not get in.

The minister says, ‘We all know that what you get in your HSC or your year 12, or whatever the equivalent qualification is, is not necessarily an indication of how good you will be.’ That may well be true, but that is the primary test that is used, and we know that that is what people compete on. I would have thought that it was a pretty reasonable principle to say that you should get into university on merit and not on the size of your bank balance. That is the first point. The second point is: let us not pretend that this is somehow an equity measure. The third point is—and I want to finish on this, because I am aware of the time—if we are serious about saying, ‘We want more poor kids,’ I think was the phrase used, if we want to broaden access to higher education, then perhaps we should fund the higher education system properly.