Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a great pleasure to participate in a lively debate on an issue that is as important to this place as education is. I would like to contribute to the debate and hope to make a constructive contribution to the concerns that are before the Senate this afternoon. The Higher Education Support Amendment (2008 Budget Measures) Bill 2008 comes before us in the context of a national conversation that took place last year around the time of the election, when the Labor Party spent a great deal of its time telling us about the need for an education revolution in Australia. Up and down the country, spokesmen and women for education on the Labor side told us about the shortcomings of the Australian education system. They told us about the failures of teaching, the failures in learning, the absence of research and the underfunding. There was a litany of complaints about the nature of Australian education. This was not just at the higher education level, which is what this bill is concerned with; it was at the primary level and the high school level as well. Apparently there was virtually no part of Australian education that did not need some kind of change, some kind of reform. In fact, those who had a lack of familiarity with education might have thought that Australia’s education system resembled that of a rather poor and underdeveloped African republic on the basis of the rhetoric and the charges which were made with regard to the strength of the education system in our country.

Revolutions, it seems, are not what they used to be. They used to be about substantial upheaval. They used to be about transformational change and reform. They used to be about substantial and significant alterations to the status quo. And what have we got here? The revolution seems to amount to giving a few computers to a few schools across the country and saying: ‘That is what the need is. That is what the requirement is. If we provide you with that opportunity then the revolution is complete and our rhetoric is satisfied.’ What a dissembling that is. It is classic Rudd government spin on the way in which we should be dealing with the very serious question of education in our country.

The saddest thing about this so-called revolution was that it ended up junking, disposing of, one of the very great innovations that had taken place in Australian education over the last few years. Of course, I am speaking of the Investing in Our Schools Program, which was introduced by the Howard government. It was an extremely successful program for our schools, one that provided sports arenas and equipment for many public schools. It provided drama facilities for some schools. It provided air-conditioning in some instances of which I am aware. It provided musical instruments. It provided the opportunity for some schools to get IT equipment which would otherwise not be available to them.

It is interesting to ask in the context of this very valuable program why it was necessary for the federal government to enter this field and why it was necessary for this program to be introduced in the first place. The answer to that question is a very straightforward one: the state governments, who of course have primary responsibility for this area, had completely neglected their responsibilities. They had been delinquent in providing the funds which were necessary for these elementary parts of a school education in Australia in the 21st century.

We now have the curious situation, the sad situation, the tragic situation, where we are expected to believe that a revolution was necessary. I was never persuaded that a revolution was necessary in Australian education. Certainly, reforms were desirable. I am not suggesting for a moment that we could not have improved the education system at all levels in various kinds of ways, but there was certainly no need for an education revolution. But one of the key programs dealing with the education system, which was valuable for Australian schools, has been removed and innovation has been quashed.

This bill deals with higher education issues. The Howard government was lashed on these issues for a long period of time by the Democrats, as we have heard this afternoon. The election promises from the Labor Party in relation to the reforms which they said were necessary were long and rather tedious. I do not need to go into them. But it is entirely typical of the Rudd Labor government that the revolution in relation to higher education comes down to not very much at all. Indeed, what was virtually the first thing the government did when it arrived in government? It set up an inquiry into higher education. So now we are waiting for Professor Bradley’s review to be completed. On the basis of that review, perhaps those of us who are anxious might fire up the revolution in some way. It might provide us with a road map. It might provide us with some sort of direction in which the education program might proceed into the future. But we are not there yet. At the moment we are waiting for the Bradley review to be completed, or at least we are waiting for its results to be announced. Who knows how long that is actually going to be?

In the meantime, what we have is the Higher Education Support Amendment (2008 Budget Measures) Bill 2008, which is before the Senate this afternoon. I acknowledge that there are in fact some useful reforms in this bill and I think they ought to be commended. The bill, as Senator Stott Despoja has mentioned, proposes an increase in Commonwealth scholarships, giving priority to areas where there seems to be a national need, such as nursing, teaching, science and engineering. That increase in scholarships is certainly welcome. There is a doubling of postgraduate awards in the bill. That is also welcome. There is increasing alarm throughout the higher education community in Australia about the general decline in the number of people who are in graduate schools, and that of course is a matter which is going to profoundly affect our future. So the increase in scholarships might well arrest the decline. If it does so, then that is to be applauded.

Senators from New South Wales and Western Australia will certainly be delighted that there is funding in this bill for the facilities required by the University of Notre Dame. I am pleased to see a university receiving some support in that way. The bill also provides extra funding for students in maths and sciences. What we know about maths and sciences is that, as disciplines, they are in decline. The number of people who are interested in moving into maths and science is in decline. There seems to be a real barrier to people making that a specialty in their undergraduate education. There are real barriers to people moving into those areas of teaching. This is not just a national problem; it is an international problem. If that is the case, if this bill and the provisions that are in it encourage more people to move into maths and sciences then it is to be welcomed. It may provide those incentives and, if it does, then so much the better.

The bill also provides for the funding of facilities at the dentistry school at the James Cook University, which is an institution in the state of Queensland which I am delighted to represent in this place. The bill makes $449.5 million available over four years for the establishment of a dental school in Cairns. Also, $33 million will go to capital infrastructure. Further, approximately $7 million will go to clinical training. I welcome those allocations of funding. JCU has already a strong and strengthening reputation as an important regional university, particularly in tropical specialties in the area of tropical disciplines. This dentistry program will continue that tradition; it will provide an education in dentistry which will focus on providing services to regional, rural and Indigenous communities. Those services are to be welcomed, because those of us who travel around our electorates all know how difficult it is to get dentistry and other kinds of clinical services in those regional and remote areas. If the funding of the dentistry school at JCU contributes to an increase in resources in that area then it is certainly to be welcomed.

The interesting thing about this initiative is that it is not a Labor initiative. It is in the bill, and I welcome it in the bill, but in fact this was a coalition initiative; it was announced prior to the election as an initiative that the then Howard government was prepared to introduce, should it be re-elected, and we would have carried through on that commitment. What we discovered, of course, was that it was such a good and important initiative, one that was so widely welcomed across the community, that the ALP could not do other than emulate it a couple of weeks after the announcement was made. It was pleasing to see that part of the so-called revolution involves the introduction of an idea and a proposition which were actually the coalition’s idea and proposal going in to the last election. A rather troubling aspect is that this proposition in this bill is not funded to the same extent as was intended to be the case in relation to the coalition’s funding, which was proposed as a figure of about $52 million. There is a danger that the kinds of funds for JCU which have been provided in the bill will be less than are needed. The result of that might well be that some student positions might be underfunded and, more sadly, if it were to come to pass, some of the outreach activities which are intended to be involved in the clinical training might also be curtailed. In any event, I am delighted to see that the funding for JCU has come through and that they will be able to go forward with their school of dentistry.

I suppose the contentious part of the bill, and the last item that I particularly want to make mention of, is the matter of full-fee students in undergraduate positions in universities. This attracted some lively attention earlier in the debate. Senator Mason referred to a ‘whiff of class envy’ in relation to this matter. I actually think it is not so much a reflection of a whiff of class envy—although it is probably that—but more a reflection of an ideological obsession that the Labor Party has with these kinds of positions. It seeks to reverse a policy which was introduced by the Howard government. It is useful in these contexts, when a policy is being reversed, to reflect on the reasons why the policy was introduced in the first place. One of the reasons for it being introduced in the first place was that it offered universities a greater measure of institutional flexibility in the way in which they offered their undergraduate courses. It was not something that all universities necessarily wanted to participate in. Indeed, even in 2006 the number of students who were enrolled in these kinds of undergraduate full-fee-paying courses was relatively small: about 2.5 per cent of the undergraduate population, amounting to in the vicinity of 14,000 students. So it was not that every university rushed towards offering these kinds of positions, but it was that some universities decided that their mission statements and their approaches to delivering education could be fulfilled by offering these kinds of courses.

The ALP, the now government, has always opposed this way of offering higher education—and for absolutely no convincing reason. There are always arguments, of course, but the arguments amount to very little indeed. These places drove down, allegedly, the entry standards into programs. There was never any evidence that that was actually the case. Allegedly it was a policy that offered education to the rich. Of the students of whom I am aware who entered these programs, my experience was that very few of them were actually rich. They wanted to go into a particular program for a particular reason, they had a very strong commitment to those areas of discipline, they could gain entry in this way, they were prepared to make the commitment and they were prepared to provide the resources which they needed to enter those kinds of programs.

The facts always belied the arguments which were made as to why these particular places ought not be available in universities. From my perspective, the ALP always led a rather narrow, irrational and ideologically opposed debate about the virtues of these programs. I do not share the ideological biases, of course, which underpin the arguments against them, and I do not share the ideological convictions which underpin this particular reform—although, as Senator Mason has said, we do not oppose the bill, because we recognise that it was an issue which was taken to the last election.

The problem with this particular reform is that it does violence to certain principles which should underpin a sound higher education program. In my view, one of those principles is that a higher education program should encourage diversity in higher education. It should encourage the opportunity for universities to decide how they want to deliver their educational programs. They ought to be given an opportunity not to homogenise themselves—38 universities all doing the same kinds of things across the country. Policy ought to be providing an opportunity for universities across the country to build on their comparative advantages. They ought to have an opportunity to define themselves as institutions in ways which reflect their own preferences—to focus on particular cohorts of students or to focus on particular disciplines, if that is what they choose to do. They ought to have an opportunity to go with their strengths, to put it colloquially. A program of this kind ought to be underpinned by equity. There is no compelling and valid reason why Australian students should not be, in some cases, asked to pay for courses that overseas students are also asked to pay for.

Aside from the educational philosophy there is the problem of costs. This has been alluded to by the previous speakers in this debate. Under this program $249 million is provided as compensation. My view is that this will not be enough. It will not be enough to compensate universities for the revenue which will be forgone as a result of this policy change—$249 million will only fund about 11,000 of the nearly 14,000 places which are available. So there is going to be a shortfall and someone is going to have to pay for it. Is it going to be the universities? Are they going to be put in a difficult position as a result of this program or not? (Time expired)