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

The incorporated speech read as follows—

The Greens are interested in two considerations when assessing Education legislation that comes through this place: 1: Quality 2: Equity

This bill breaks from the norm of Higher Education bills from this government in that it does have some measures which will improve the quality of higher education provision in this country and it also contains some improvements to equity provisions. But unfortunately and predictably the measures which threaten to reduce quality and undermine equity overshadow them.

This bill includes many significant changes to the funding and administrative provisions which guide the higher education sector. Last time I spoke on a higher education bill in the Senate I reminded Senators of the over 50 pieces of legislation I have dealt with in the 5 years since I have been The Greens spokesperson on higher education in Parliament. And here we go again.

Perhaps the most headline grabbing change that is in this bill is that it abolishes the cap on the number of full-fee paying places that a university can offer in each course. Until now universities have only been able to enrol up to 35% of enrolments in any one course as full fee paying students. This bill does away with that cap. It then goes further to say that whilst universities must offer their commonwealth supported places first (ie before they then fill up courses with full fee paying students) they only have to offer the number of commonwealth supported places within a funding cluster not within each course in that cluster.

This means that instead of having to have a least some (or indeed a majority as it used to be) of commonwealth supported students in every course, now universities are free to put all the commonwealth supported places allocated to a funding cluster into just one course within that cluster and then proceed to fill the other courses entirely with full fee paying students.

This means that for the first time in public universities in Australia we can see completely privatised courses for domestic students. I.e. universities will be able to set up say an accounting course and only accept students who can pay a full fee up front. This fee is determined entirely by the university so the university can get the student to pay a higher fee for their education so that the university makes a profit.

This change further solidifies the transformation under this government of the university sector from a publicly owned and operated educational community dedicated to free inquiry and educational excellent to a publicly subsidised private market of profit making purveyors of educational services.

Who wins out of this transformation? Do the students win?

Well if the shift to full fee paying courses gets off the ground then you can’t say that they will. They will end up more in debt than ever if indeed they are able or prepared to stump up the high fees in the first place.

Will educational standards win?

The answer must be a no. This change like so many of the changes introduced by this government has been made completely without reference to the big picture of educational outcomes.

This government has become so enamoured with the economic fundamentalism of privatisation, deregulation and profit making that it has totally lost sight of the point of a higher education system.

It’s certainly hard to see how this current change will improve educational standards.

When we see that the current take up of full fee places is well below 5% even though universities have been able to enrol up to 35% of students for some years now you wonder how universities are going to lure students into paying the large fees and filling up the full-fee courses this change is designed to allow?

It doesn’t take a genius to work out the best way would be to offer much lower entry grades than are needed to access a commonwealth supported place. That way a new market can be accessed particularly for high demand courses which offer higher remuneration opportunities on graduation.

But this will surely mean that standards will fall just in the same way as they have fallen in some courses which have been largely underwritten by full fee paying overseas students in recent years.

We have all heard the stories of academics being pressured to pass students who would not have ordinarily made the grade because of the financial imperatives that come with full fee paying courses.

So this particular change will not help students, it will not improve standards, and may in the way I have just described put academics under new pressures. SO why is it needed?

I have to say I am left scratching my head as to find any reason except that any shift away from relying on commonwealth supported places will further enable the government to affect a retreat from supporting our higher education system. That is the government does not want to invest in higher education.

Lifting the cap on full fee paying places may well take a while to have much of an effect. But what will impact on student much more quickly is the shift in the Commonweatlh Grants Scheme that this bill introduces which will mean that once again HECS fees for many students will go up.

The change to the CGS is to reduce the number of funding ‘clusters’ from I 2 down to 7. Why 7 you may ask. Why is 7 better than 12? Well there is no answer to that it just appears like an arbitrary change. But putting that to one side what the change does is to increase the amount that students will have to contribute to the cost of their education via the HECS-HELP scheme for studying accountancy – economics – administration and commerce. These courses have been moved into the highest bracket of HECS fee along with Dentistry, Medicine, and Veterinary Science.

That means that a commencing student studying economics will have a HECS debt which is up to $6000 more for a 3 year course. How does this improve the educational outcomes of our higher education system? It doesn’t.

On the other hand there are measures here which increase the amount that the government pays to universities on a per student basis for teaching maths, statistics, allied health, medicine, nursing, behavioural science, dentistry and veterinary science. This is of course welcome. But before we laud the government too highly for this increase, let’s remember that this increase comes in lieu of adequate indexation for universities from the government.

Adequate indexation was a core request that was voiced by the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee back in 2003 when the Higher Education Support Act was so hotly debated. I well remember that debate and remember the representatives of the AVCC finally agreeing to support the bill on a promise from the government that the key issue of adequate indexation would be addressed in the follow year. Four year later, we are still waiting.

These funds are much needed because as we well know Australia is trailing well behind its competitors in the OECD in terms of public investment in higher education as a percentage of GDP. The government hotly deny this accusation of underfunding but it is pretty hard to argue with the figures from the OECD which show that not only has Australia not kept pace with its public investment in education as our national wealth has grown but we have instead gone backwards. That is inexcusable.

Public investment in higher education is crucial to ensure that the two criteria I referred to at the start of my comments are met—that is higher quality and real equity.

When the government pulls investment out of universities, we see universities turning to private sources of income to make up the short fall. I have already touched on how a reliance on student fees has a negative impact on quality and creates obvious problems for equity, but it is also corporate income that universities are turning to as the government reduces its investment in universities.

The problems of this approach have been clearly shown this week in a report by the public policy think tank the Australia Institute. The Australia Institute’s report ‘University Capture: Australian Universities and the Fossil Fuel Industries’ tells us; in Australia over the last decade the fossil fuel industries have become steadily more involved in Australian universities. Fossil fuel industry associations and fossil fuel companies have spent millions of dollars funding research projects and sponsoring university chairs, academic posts and even entire schools. The Australian Coal Association Research Program, for example, has allocated $145 million to 929 different projects since 1992.

Likewise in 1999, the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) set up the Minerals Tertiary Education Council (MTEC) with $15 million to achieve ‘cultural change in universities’. It sponsors 12 lectureships and contributes to the development of course materials at several universities.

And it is not just the fossil fuel industry that has sought to influence the educational landscape in our universities. Science labs are sponsored by bio tech companies, computing facilities provided by hardware and software manufacturers and academic positions sponsored by organisations as diverse as financial services companies, churches and poker machine manufacturers. What all these organisations have in common is that they have a particular barrow to push and that is why they are Involved in subsidising education services.

This bill is part of this deliberate policy of encouraging universities to rely on private money and therefore weakens the independence and ultimately the quality of the work done in Australian universities.

The Greens and others find it appalling to watch this train wreck in slow motion and we fervently hope that there will be a changing of the guard in the education ministry soon and that this changing of the guard will mean that the public is put back in public education—including in higher education.

We also are working very hard to ensure that those who understand the importance of the public funding of public education have the majority in this Senate Chamber next year.

We do this because we want to see the twin goals of quality and equity to be reinstated as guiding principles of government’s higher education policies. That must include more support for students. The Greens policy calls for a simplified higher education living allowance that would ensure that means tested students would be able to access the living support they need to allow then to actually attend the courses that the government pays for them to attend rather than having to work to pay the rent. The Greens want to see student organisations properly funded so students can benefit from the vitality of campus life and access student controlled services, advocacy and representation.

The Greens welcome increased money on scholarships in this bill but note that compared to The Greens policy of abolishing fees (which would cost less than a quarter of the annual cost of the tax cut for high income earners announced in this years budget) it appears piece meal and little more than an admission that the rise in HECS fees and the general increase in cost of student life is a barrier to poorer prospective students.

The fact is the government can afford to make university free for those qualified to attend. They simply choose not to. It is a false economy, a short sighted ideological move than is costing us all in so far as it prevents merit from becoming the only way to success at university.

The Greens will not oppose this bill because it does increase funding to universities and it does make some provisions which will improve the access for some to a university education. But we will continue to work towards a future where education is free to all Australians and where the freedom of academic inquiry is unhampered by the need to go cap in hand to the business world.