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

I am going to assume that that was rhetorical, because that was just too cute by half when these issues were raised in the Senate estimates, the government has been aware of them and today in the Senate we have had an announcement on how the government will address this issue. I am just going to leave the government to back-pedal on that one. Anyone who has observed this debate knows exactly what is going on. This is news. This was not announced in the House. If it was, I am sure the minister or her advisers will let us know. We are not dealing with the terminology. We do not have before us what is proposed for the university sector. That is understandable. That is how it works sometimes.

I have a particular view that any such so-called guarantee or restriction on how the full-fee cap removal will work should be in some kind of statutory format. I do not trust the idea that it is going to be left to ministerial discretion. But I would like to ask—given that this is not news, according to government—what the response of the university sector has been to this proposal and how long the consultation has been on this proposal. I am assuming that they are aware of it. It may not have been public news until it was announced today in the Senate, but I am sure that they have been involved in discussions with the government.

I am just wondering how they view this proposal from the government of a possible restriction on how they operate. I want to clarify for the record—because this is the question that really counts—whether this proposal that universities will be prevented from providing only full fee paying courses be part of the agreement. I am not talking about within the cluster; I am talking about the courses. Will this proposal and the agreement that will be struck with universities, to which they have to adhere in their funding arrangements, now prevent them from providing only fee-paying courses—100 per cent fee-paying courses? It seems that you can still manipulate the courses within that cluster in order to provide only fee-paying courses. If the intention of this proposal is to prevent that, albeit subject to ministerial discretion, why remove the fee cap in the first place?

Clearly, if the government is not in favour of only full fee paying courses, why not keep a cap that prevents universities from having 100 per cent full fee paying courses instead of this potential manipulation of the clusters? We now have a belated response to this concern with the introduction of an added part in the funding arrangements so that universities will have to justify what they are doing. If they are varying courses and the amount of fee-paying places within those courses, they will need to get ministerial approval. The government is now giving a guarantee that there will be no such thing; it will not be possible to have 100 per cent fee-paying courses only.