Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

They may not be. Senator Trood says that they will not be, and he may well be right. The precise question should be: will universities be adequately compensated in the proportion to which they currently enjoy domestic undergraduate full-fee-paying students? That is the question. The universities have been a bit equivocal on this. They argue that they might be, yet their arguments are perhaps tempered by a certain fear of government response, so their view has been rather equivocal. But what we do know from Senate estimates is that domestic undergraduate full-fee-paying students were a source of growing revenue to universities. That is the point; they were a source of growing revenue. There were more and more domestic undergraduate full-fee-paying students. This was a source of growing revenue, and the 11,000 new HECS places that have been promised by the government are ongoing, but they are frozen in that number. That is the problem. So, in a sense, a growth of revenue will now be terminated. Universities will miss out, but I say again: the government did make clear this policy before the last election. So, while we oppose the policy, we do not oppose the bill.

I am a bit disappointed with Senator McLucas’s interjections. There are many things we can disagree about in this chamber, but I know that Senator McLucas and Senator Carr, the minister principally responsible for education in the Senate, care a lot about education. Let us not kid ourselves. Public education in this country is at crisis point. We cannot attract and retain sufficient teachers in our public schools and we must do everything we can to retain them. The profession must be professionalised, not industrialised. We must seek to retain our young teachers and bring mature-age teachers into the profession. Only if we continue to promote the profession of teaching, get away from the idea of critiquing the most recent education theories and start talking about delivering serious syllabus to our children will the teaching profession again been respected as it rightly should be.