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

You are obviously not rapt enough. I will read from page 8 of the Hansard of the Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education hearing of Thursday, 31 May. Mr Manns and I have exchanged views for many years. I have always found him to be very precise in his evidence to Senate committees, and he is obviously a highly competent officer. The Hansard reads:

Senator CARR—Does the department have any projections on the increase in the number of domestic full fee paying students?

Mr Manns—The estimate behind the recent budget measure that removes what is commonly called the cap on fee-paying places is a 20 per cent increase in the number of domestic fee-paying places.

Senator CARR—Over what length of time?

Mr Manns—Potentially immediately. Provision has been made for that to happen.

Senator CARR—From 2008?

Mr Manns—For 2008. But I suspect that realistically it might take some time to flow through.

Then we went on to discuss precisely what those implications were. In 2005 there were 15,630 students paying full fees, some of whom were in summer semester, out of the total student body of some half a million. Those are the latest figures. So, while it is a relatively small number, about three per cent of the total student body, it is clearly an important factor when it comes to the question you posed to me about Labor’s compensation measures for universities. It is not such a large sum of money that it cannot be realistically responded to through normal appropriation measures. What is clear is that the government’s intention—and the budget assumption is built upon these intentions—is that there be a 20 per cent increase in the number of domestic fee-paying students from next year.

I then asked whether it would be possible under the new arrangements for entire disciplines to be transferred to full fee paying programs. Mr Manns said:

It will be possible under the new arrangements for a university to offer a particular course only on a full fee paying basis, provided, as we said earlier, that it offers all of those places that it has been allocated in the broad discipline cluster as Commonwealth supported places first. That rule will continue to apply. Within that, the current rule that applies course by course will no longer apply.

So it is apparent that, within the funding clusters—for instance, if we take the law, accounting, administrative economics and commerce cluster—it is possible for one of those disciplines to be offered on a full fee paying basis. That point was confirmed when Mr Manns said:

Theoretically, if it is in the same cluster, yes.

But he then put the view to us that he thought it was going to be difficult for the universities to do that and that it would require discussion with the department. At no point was there any mention of a directive or new guidelines being issued to change the import of what was being said. One presumes that, if that information were available to officers at the time, we would have been advised of it. My question to the minister is: when was it decided that the guidelines would change and that new directives would be issued?