Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to support the motion by Senator Sherry which points out that the budget fails to tackle Australia’s poor productivity performance, meet the challenges of climate change, deliver practical solutions and ensure long-term investment in broadband infrastructure. This budget focuses on a short-term election fix rather than on long-term nation building.

With regard to productivity performance, this country is slipping further behind our international competitors. If you look at our performance in research and development, it is the same case. If you look at our performance in terms of exports, it is the same case. If you look at our performance in terms of infrastructure development, it is the same case. What you are seeing here, particularly with regard to education, is the failure of this government to face up to their obligations. We have noticed the trend that has developed over this 11-year period, whereby this government essentially have taken a very hostile attitude to education. In the five minutes before an election, they seek to present themselves in another light. They suggest that, by talking the talk, somehow or other they will be able to persuade people that they understand the issues. We know, particularly in this case, that that is not the situation in reality. We know that the same argument applies with regard to the approach taken by the government on climate change: they think that, if they mouth the words, we will be persuaded that they understand the problem, and that is just not the reality.

The government has in fact transformed higher education in this country and has done so largely by stealth. It has done it by degrees but not by halves. This transformation is nothing short of staggering. In 1996, when the government came to office, the Australian government accounted for some 57 per cent of overall university revenue. The latest data available show that this share was down to 41 per cent by 2005. In 1996, university income from student fees was at 25 per cent, including the HECS revenue, and the latest figures from 2005 show this income, out of the pockets of students and their families, at 37 per cent.

We know that in the last two years that figure has actually grown. As a result of this budget, we will see that trend exacerbated. This is a tectonic shift and nothing less. What is clear is that our universities are being encouraged—in fact, directed—by this government to act as businesses, no more, no less. By stealth, this government has implemented a market approach to higher education. It has got to the ironic situation where the Productivity Commission is now saying to this government that it must remember the purpose of these higher education institutions. When the Productivity Commission says it is time to have another look at this, you do have to ask yourself why this government has got so far off track.

I recall back in 1996, when former Senator Vanstone became the Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, that she was under orders from Mr Costello to cut 12 per cent out of university spending. I recall the stories of the approach that she took at a Vice-Chancellors’ Committee dinner, where she stood up and held up a bottle of wine, as Senator Vanstone was very capable of doing, and said that she would deliver cuts that were equal to the alcohol content of the bottle.

As it turned out, she was not able to achieve that objective because she only secured six per cent cuts in that budget. She reduced university operating grants by six per cent over four years; she brought in marginal funding at a very low rate for students over the Commonwealth established quota for each institution; she allowed universities to charge full fees to undergraduates for up to 25 per cent of enrolments in a course; she introduced differential HECS rates; and of course she created that whole notion of market forces in terms of what she said were student choices. She also abolished the government’s independent advisory body, the Higher Education Council.

Senator Vanstone said that she was seeking to rebalance, between student and taxpayer contributions, the cost of higher education. She deliberately sought—and I think she achieved it—to break the nexus between the cost of a course and the price that students were to pay. The unsatisfactory indexation arrangements that she imposed were set in stone. In fact, they have not been changed since. They are certainly not changed in this budget.

So what we saw was an institutional framework in which the universities of this country were starved of funding. In time, they became more desperate as the government directed the universities to undertake programs and intervened more directly in the management of universities to strip away the principles of institutional autonomy. In fact I recall that in that process Senator Vanstone reduced funding in the university sector by $1.8 billion in those four years. But it was not just about reducing the money; it was about pursuing a change in the management and the direction of higher education—in the process, seeking to transform the governance arrangements of universities. Of course, in this week’s budget we can see that a further step in that transformation process was taken, and I will come to that in a moment.

With Minister Kemp, Senator Vanstone’s successor, there was a further thrust towards privatisation and an attempt to broaden the differentiation between the different types of universities. What we saw this week was a further step in that direction. Dr Kemp introduced the performance based funding model for research infrastructure and for research training. Under Dr Kemp, the government sought to impose an industrial relations philosophy on the way in which universities were to treat their staff and the way in which they were to reduce the wages and conditions of staff. The so-called workplace reform agenda that he pursued sought to make Commonwealth funding conditional on the pursuit of the government’s industrial relations agenda.

The next minister for education, Dr Nelson, imposed further policy instruments and policy settings to promote price deregulation and an expansion of the fee-paying mechanisms. A partial deregulation of the HECS charge allowed universities to add a further 25 per cent to the charges they made. As universities became increasingly desperate for the revenue, increasing numbers of universities took up that option. With the introduction of FEE-HELP, students were increasingly required to put themselves into debt on top of the arrangements that had been made with regard to HECS, and those principles applied to private institutions that were brought within the system. For the first time, we saw a change in the way in which the Australian higher education system approached the public sector institutions and we moved closer to the American model with regard to the differentiation of quality in the university system.

Dr Nelson also provided additional operating funding for universities on the basis that they pursue still further the government’s industrial relations agenda in an attempt to cut unions out of universities’ management and undermine the capacity of staff to pursue the protection of their own conditions and academic freedoms. We saw, of course, significant and profound changes in the way in which the government administered research grants. The government sought to withdraw money from researchers who had been accepted by an independent and peer-reviewed statutory authority, the Australian Research Council. The government sought to withdraw funding from academics who were undertaking research in areas that the government thought for political reasons was unacceptable. So we had this form of censorship introduced into the research pursuit in this country.

As a consequence, I think that our competitiveness as a nation in terms of our ability to attract international academics was undermined. Our capacity to actually defend academic freedom in this country was undermined to the point where, particularly in the science and technology disciplines, we had a major drain in our capacity to attract high-quality people to undertake university work. As a consequence, our universities are increasingly populated by people who are now at the end of their careers because we were not able to replace them in sufficient numbers with people who were coming into the system. So the best and brightest often found that it was more attractive to work overseas.

With this budget, the government is actually exacerbating these trends. We see that universities will be required to return to increasingly private sources of funding through commercialisation and commercialised research and, of course, through the application of private student fees. We see an open-ended loan scheme for full-fee paying students being operated and not restricted by number. We see the removal of caps on fees. We see that, in some universities, there will be an increase in terms of the price that has been able to be argued that universities can charge. We see no measures in this package to protect the quality of our universities. There are no additional measures and no attention to those questions other than reliance on discredited RQF arrangements that they put in place in last year’s budget.

We will see the loan limit of $80,000 for some courses—in fact, for most courses—soon force up the price of courses still further. We will find that university access will become increasingly restricted to those with the ability to pay. We will see a further decline in what is known in the sector as the achievement of the equity objectives. We notice that what Dr Nelson thought was onerous and intrusive—even for Dr Nelson—is now becoming the norm in terms of the intervention and management of universities, to the point now where this government openly argues that it has the right to micromanage institutions to the extent of stifling free speech and forcing a reactionary agenda upon the universities in terms of their teaching and research agendas.

What we notice, then, over a decade is a government that has increasingly sought to have the universities meet the criteria of institutions that meet a very narrow vision. It is almost as if the main players within this government had a nasty experience in the sixties and thought that the university system was an enemy: it was made up of people who represented part of a cultural elite; they were left wing inherently and therefore they had to be brought to heel. What you see is a university system which this government actually does not like. What you have is a government that does not like to deal with intellectuals. We have seen over time, in the government’s pursuit of its so-called black armband view of history, its war against the ABC and its war against a whole range of cultural institutions in this country, a view that is predicated on quite erroneous assumptions about what the role of a university actually is.

We now have a situation where, by international standards, in terms of the number of PhDs we are producing in this country, we are miles and miles behind our competitors. Let me remind you that in Canada they have 8.2 PhD holders per 1,000. In Germany they have 21.1 PhD holders per 1,000. In Switzerland they have 27.7 PhD holders per 1,000 workers. But, in Australia, it is 7.8. We have a situation where Australia is falling further and further behind comparable countries in the OECD.

We say we want to be part of a global economy, yet what does this government do in terms of Asian language studies? What did it do in 1996 as one of its first acts? It did not like the notion of Keating’s agenda for engagement with Asia. It took the view that Keating’s approach in terms of Asian language teaching was about the ‘Asianisation’ of Australia, if I remember the language at the time. What we were told back then was that we do not need to speak Asian languages. Now, of course, we find that in Australia we have a situation where less than one per cent of our university students are undertaking Asian language studies. We have a situation where this government has increased the HECS for students in economics and accounting courses.