Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

You should not believe a word from them when they try to tell you that this proposition is just an administrative matter. ‘We are not really interested in returning to Work Choices. We simply want these new protocols where we tell the universities how to manage their affairs, where we say that universities are not entitled to ensure that enterprise negotiations are run on a proper basis.’

I heard Senator Mason. I am sure senators here would find this to be true: they have an obsession with Work Choices. You can hear their moans at night when they dream about Work Choices, because they thought it would be here forever. What people are entitled to know is that this proposition is simply an attempt by the Liberal Party to reintroduce Work Choices by stealth. The government wants to get rid of the higher education workplace relations requirements, which were part and parcel of the national protocols for higher education. These measures of course were an expression of the Howard government’s hostility towards and paranoia about universities and their hostility towards academics, whom they regarded as the intellectual elites of this country. They forced universities to impose Work Choices and AWAs on campuses and to accept the extraordinary notion that they should be treated as if they were some sort of junior high school—that the minister for education in the Commonwealth should act as a traditional director of education used to in state governments. Anyone who dared to defy these edicts was to have their funding threatened. Their funding was to be cut if they did not respond to the extraordinary obsessions of the Liberal Party.

This government’s approach is entirely different. We take the view that we ought to trust and we ought to respect universities. We ought to respect the people who are building the skills and who are creating the knowledge for the future of this country. More than that, we take the view that universities are critical to this nation’s future. That is why we are making such a massive commitment to higher education in this year’s budget. Universities should be subject to the same industrial relations laws as every other institution in the country. But that is not the view of the Liberal Party. Their view is that they should treat them like junior high schools used to be treated in the 1950s.

We say that universities should be free to run their own affairs and respond to the needs of the communities that sustain them. What we want to see is more diversity in higher education, not less. We want to ensure that there is academic freedom and we want to ensure that there is institutional autonomy. We want to ensure that we respect the rights of our researchers to actually get on with their jobs. That is why we are working with the sector to develop the best practice approach to university governance. That is why we are negotiating mission based funding compacts that recognise each university’s unique circumstances while holding all universities accountable for the delivery of agreed outcomes. That is why we are moving to revise the Commonwealth Grant Scheme guidelines and to amend the Higher Education Support Act to get rid of the previous government’s punitive higher education industrial relations requirements, which were embedded in the national governance protocols. Universities Australia, the body that represents all the universities in this country, fully supports the government’s reforms. It points out that our universities achieve most when they are able to get on with doing their job, when they are able to undertake their proper function as autonomous academic institutions.

Amendments to the legislation will be debated in due course in this chamber. The minister for education wants to repair the guidelines that currently exist and, of course, this disallowable instrument is seeking to obstruct our capacity to do that. The motion that has been brought before the chamber by Senator Mason proposes a flat refusal to accept the judgement made by people of this country last November. It is a case of purely ideological bloody-mindedness. It is symptomatic of an opposition bereft of new ideas and wedded to their old ways. It is very much time that the people opposite me here weaned themselves off Work Choices once and for all. It is time they admitted their addictions to these distorted views, which were in fact a very, very dangerous drug. It is time they understood that they do not fool anyone by trying to pretend that the national governance protocols do not embed the principles of Work Choices.