Natasha Stott Despoja (SA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

So I have worked out how to get results—threaten to leave, and what do you know! But that is $25 million—an incremental, small amount in the bigger picture of higher education funding. Yet we know income support is so valuable; it is one of the key factors in determining that people, particularly from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds, can access and participate in higher education. So, well done! There is still a lot more to go. There are other aspects of the budget, and I will turn to them after I have addressed the aspects of the legislation before us. There are good bits but there are also some aspects of the budget that are particularly worrying.

To return to the bill in question: as I mentioned, the Democrats do not have any in principle objections to the specific amendments proposed in this bill before us but we do have problems with the overarching policy that this bill seeks to support. In particular, the bill revises the maximum funding amounts of the Higher Education Support Act 2003, the HESA, to provide funding for the implementation of the RQF, the research quality framework. The RQF is the government’s attempt at creating a performance management framework for the university sector. The principles behind the RQF—that universities should be rewarded for excellence—are sound enough. I do not think anybody has a problem with that rhetoric. Indeed, I think few would advocate that there should be, if you like, a free ride or a lack of accountability for or responsiveness to the spending of taxpayers’ money, and a well-implemented performance management framework could focus funding where it is needed and where it will have the greatest effect.

The danger with frameworks like these is that it is incredibly difficult to measure impact in all its myriad forms, and trying to specify what constitutes impact and what does not can generate all sorts of unintended consequences. As the Macquarie University researcher Russell Downham wrote in the Australian last year:

... novel solutions to practical problems are often found where they are least expected.

And:

Given the increasing complexity of our knowledge and its potential interconnections, there is little reason to believe we could predict which research programs will have the greatest impact beyond the short term.

As Senator McGauran would know—but he has gone and I was looking forward to his involvement in this debate—the RQF was intended to replicate the United Kingdom’s research assessment exercise, the RAE. The RAE was found to be too complex and quite burdensome for university staff and it has since been scrapped. It has been abolished in the United Kingdom and replaced by a system of metrics such as the impact of published papers or the amount of income earned in research and grants and contracts.

In recent times I have been visiting many vice-chancellors, as I have done over the last 11 years as the higher education spokesperson for the Democrats, to talk about this issue. I know that there is a public veneer of support from the AVCC and individual vice-chancellors, but when you start talking to some of these men and women you find they are very concerned about this framework and particularly about its implementation. Most are concerned, of course, about the administrative burdens and the likelihood that it may generate some perverse outcomes. It would be interesting to know where the impetus to establish the RQF is coming from within the government when the UK model on which it is based has since been scrapped and when there are few in the tertiary education sector who believe the RQF will result in positive change.

I am also curious that a government that supposedly favours small government is establishing a scheme that will dramatically increase the administrative burden for the higher education sector, both for the universities themselves and for the Department of Education, Science and Training, so much so that the government has allocated $87.3 million to address these costs. Obviously, it is anticipating some administrative problems.

I note that this bill also amends, as Senator Carr has noted, the HESA to change the National Protocols for the Higher Education Approval Processes. As with the RQF, it does so before the whole policy is actually set in stone. After extensive consultations, the national protocols were revised and approved by the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, MCEETYA, in July last year. MCEETYA will now develop guidelines to give effect to these national protocols, but these have not been finalised. Like Senator Carr, I have a lot of sympathy for the position put forward by the National Tertiary Education Union during the Senate inquiry into this bill, when they said that the bill should be withdrawn until the final policy settings for both the RQF and the guidelines for the national protocols are finalised. That seems pretty sensible to me. This is further evidence of how the government has dealt with higher education policy—and probably policy generally—over the years, pushing through the legislation aimed at implementing plans before the plans have actually been fully developed. We are being asked today to pass legislation providing funding for the implementation of the research quality framework before we know how the model is actually going to work in practice.

Ordinarily the Democrats would be loath to support such a bill. Call us quaint or old-fashioned, but we believe the logical approach would be to set the policy first and then make the required administrative changes to implement that policy. But we face a dilemma. This bill includes a funding package to help the higher education sector adapt to the significant administrative burden that the RQF will impose on universities. So while I think that this is bad policy and I disagree with the way the government is going about it, both in method and substance, I am realistic about the numbers in this place. I also do not like standing between universities and some money. Let us face it, they have been starved for funds for long enough and they are desperate for money not only to assist with the new models and policies being imposed on them by this government but more generally.

On that note, there has been a lot of talk about the national endowment fund today. Certainly, no-one would baulk at the suggestion that $5 billion is anything but a good injection of money into the sector—or $200 million or $300 million per annum, depending on whose assessments we are looking at today. That said, why is the government so determined to ignore the issue of indexation for universities? It is the one thing that vice-chancellors and others in the sector have been calling for for years. It is not just this government, I might add. Labor dropped the ball on this issue as well. Labor were marginally better on the issue of indexation through a complex arrangement of borrowing and loans but, nonetheless, no governments have ensured that universities have been able to keep up with the costs of inflation through realistic, sustainable indexation in grants and operating costs. That would have been a logical way to proceed with issues such as research infrastructure or capital works or a range of other areas that apparently the endowment fund is supposed to deal with.

We also do not know the mechanics of the national endowment fund. How is it going to work? Who will be responsible for determining the criteria? I note the comments on the front page of the higher education supplement today quoting, as an administrator, Patrick Woods, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Technology, Sydney, in his reaction to the budget last night. He said:

The mechanism for accessing the Higher Education Endowment Fund is unclear. It appears to be a disguised process for giving greater funding to the Group of Eight [universities]. The Government has given us more university places. We don’t want more places, we want funding for the places we already have.

This is a message that has come through loud and clear over the last decade or so and yet the government has been slow to respond.

I see that this bill also includes changes to the Higher Education Loan Program, HELP. Again, I do not necessarily regard the amendments in themselves to be particularly problematic. But the policy behind them is problematic. I acknowledge that HECS, the forerunner to HELP, was about as gentle a way of getting students to pay for their university education as you could have, but I also recognise that this government distorted the original HECS architecture and the principles behind that system, and I do not resile from the fact that the Australian Democrats have never supported fees for education. Thousands of HECS-HELP students now have debts in the order of $40,000. Full-fee students under FEE-HELP are many times worse off, with some full degrees now costing more than $200,000, as we have heard repeatedly. This is directly contrary to the Prime Minister’s promise that no degrees would cost even $100,000 under his administration.

One of the big problems, again, with the budget which relates to this and the issue of income support and the pressures on students and the fact that this is a debt-ridden generation of students and graduates, is that the cap on the proportion of full-fee paying places in relation to domestic undergraduate places will be removed across all disciplines. That was the real nasty little part of last night’s budget that I am not sure people have paid attention to yet. A dramatic increase in the number of students who are burdened with full-fee debts is surely just around the corner.

It is well recognised now that students and graduates have financial burdens of mortgage-like proportions—around $40,000 or $50,000. I cannot understand how that would be a good start in life for any student—and I am not just talking about young people; I am talking about mature age students as well. We know that that will have an impact, and has been shown to have an impact, on other significant purchases, such as cars or a house. It has even been shown to have an impact on the timing of decisions on such things as marriage and children, and these are serious issues. The government may want to boast about having surpluses or being debt free, but we have a seriously debt-ridden generation among us, with more to come. By removing the cap on the full-fee paying domestic undergraduate places, the government have effectively opened the floodgates on full-fee degrees. There is no pretence now of equity. In some respects I wish the government would just stand up and say that, by saying, ‘We acknowledge we’ve almost completely deregulated undergraduate education, as indeed successive governments have done to postgraduate education, and we are not prepared to put significant money back into income support.’ That might be one way not necessarily of offsetting those costs but of enabling students, particularly disadvantaged ones, to participate in the sector. I acknowledge the money for Abstudy and Indigenous scholarships and, as I mentioned, rent assistance to Austudy students, but it is a really small amount in the total pool that governments should be making available as a priority in investing in education in the future.

So, yes, I acknowledge the good bits of the budget and I certainly welcome an injection of funding for infrastructure and courses. As I say, I am very happy to see the government heeding our calls and the calls of other groups in the sector for changes to income support. But I worry about the removal of the caps and the impact of that, particularly on domestic undergraduates, throwing the long-term equity of tertiary education into doubt, and, again, about the government’s unwillingness to even countenance indexation for the sector.

The Democrats have little choice but to support this bill. As I say, I am very conscious of the fact that universities need what money they can get, but I think that the government should be taking time to reconsider the policy behind such legislation. Are we at a point now where we put forward the money for administration before working out a policy? I suppose that in one of my other portfolio areas—the human services area—the access card has made it entirely clear that governments are prepared to allocate money and distribute funds but not to get the specifics of the law, the policy, the model or whatever it may be not just on the table but also democratically debated, scrutinised, analysed, changed if needed and then passed by a majority in the parliament. I think this is a very sorry approach to take to any policy making.

I hope the government will consider, particularly in relation to the RQF, that there are other ways to evaluate performance and to ensure that the model they are putting forward is clear before this parliament is asked to consider such legislation again. I hope also that the government will look at the legacy their policies on HELP fees are leaving the students and the graduates of this country.