Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is not clear from the papers. Let us make it clear that what is in the papers is that there is $300 million per annum to be shared between 38 universities on capital works. That is not investing money in education and in students. And we need to do that. We need $7 billion each year put into government spending on education just to bring us up to the OECD average—the kind of public money that comparable countries are putting into education. We are way below that average. And just to bring us up to that average, we need $7 billion. And we did not hear that last night.

In fact, there was a small amount of money—smaller than even the year before—put aside for capital works. It was not for spending on education and students. Due to the announcements last night, more students will now be charged full fees. That means that more students will have a larger student debt at the beginning of their working lives. That is not good for the Australian economy. That is not good for Australia’s future prosperity. To do as the government did last night—saying that more students can be charged full fees—means that more students will have a larger debt when they start their working lives. That is a clear indication from this government that it does not want to be the one to invest in university education in this country. It wants students and their parents to pay for it. That is what the announcement last night was: more students paying full fees—that is, transferring the cost of investing in education away from government coffers and on to the shoulders of students who are going to universities and their families. That is what we heard from the federal government last night.

The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007 brings in two major changes to higher education in Australia. It seeks to legislate changes to the national protocols which define what a university is, and it provides funding for the implementation of the new research funding regime formulated by this government—that is, the research quality framework. Before I go into the detail of the legislation, I want to set the context in which this piece of legislation is being proposed. I came into this parliament in 2002, and since then there has been an almost endless stream of pieces of legislation that have rearranged or modified the higher education sector. We have seen a whole range of different ministers seek to fiddle the figures in the way in which they have explained this expenditure, and we saw that again last night. In this period of time we have seen them trying to hoodwink university management, bullying staff and betraying students. And we saw more of that last night.

We did not see $5 billion invested in education; we saw it put into the bank, and we heard students told that they could pay more money for going to universities. Students can pay more to go to university, and money will not be invested in education; it will be put in the bank. That is what we heard last night.