Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate my remarks.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

After nearly six years of speaking on behalf of the Australian Greens on higher education I am pleased to be able to deal with a bill which is moving us closer towards The Greens vision for higher education in this country.

The Greens vision for education in this country is that everyone is able to access education regardless of how much they earn or their parents earn. If we want to be a clever country we have to make sure that everyone has access to education. And education has to be a life long learning experience. That means free public preschool so that every kid and particularly every Indigenous kid has access to top quality early childhood education.

The Greens want to see our public schools given the funding they deserve from our federal government. You want to see a real education revolution? Start with putting the money that education ministers from around the country have said is necessary to ensure that our public schools can teach to the minimum standards that education ministers have set down. That’s an additional $2.8 billion each year for public schools. You have to start with that necessary funding for our public schools before can even begin on the path to an education revolution.

When it comes to higher education, the Greens vision for this country is that we return to the situation we had in this country not so long ago, that is, free tertiary education.

Cost should not be a barrier to people being able to access top quality education.

The Greens recognise takes baby steps in the direction of the Greens vision for higher education in this country.

However, in examining the reasoning behind some of these measures we are left wondering why the Commonwealth has not gone further in addressing barriers to entry, accessibility and affordability of higher education which a number of these measures address.

This bill makes some significant changes to the fee structure for domestic undergraduate students at Australian universities. Firstly, this bill abolishes the full upfront fee degrees for domestic undergraduates. The Greens have always opposed the introduction of full fee degrees and in particular the differential entry requirements that have been associated with them. These entry requirements had a serious effect on equity, turning some courses into de facto full fee only degrees right from the outset. One academic from Monash University outlined the problem to me back in 2003...

“Current arrangements in place at Monash University (and in other universities) allow full-fee paying students to switch to HECS places in their second year (subject to satisfactory performance). Hence full-fee paying students leap-frog the VCE/HSC entry requirements and then obtain a subsidised place in their second and subsequent years. The result is that qualified students are denied HECS places in their first year.

The government has claimed basically that expanding the number of full-fee paying students has no effect on current arrangements—it only allows some extra students to enrol who would not otherwise have been able to study. This is not true.

If universities respond to the new legislation as they already have to their existing opportunities to enrol full-fee paying students, there would be almost no HECS places available for first year students in (say) law. All the HECS places would be allocated to second and later year students. All (or almost all) first year students would be full-fee paying. The potential impact on access to, and equity in, higher education is enormous. Such arrangements already exist in one course I know of. “

We now know that these negative equity outcomes became more widespread and as the full fee degree system was further deregulated and FEE-HELP was introduced. The situation got worse and was poised to become endemic. The abolition of full fee degrees is perhaps the most significant measure in this bill and hasn’t come a moment too soon.

When the deputy prime minister spoke in the House of Representatives on this piece of legislation she said that this bill was abolishing full fee university degrees, “to ensure that students gain access to higher education on merit and not on ability to pay.”

The Greens agree and the welcome the abolition of full fee university degrees in this piece of legislation.

We welcome this move. Our support for this is hardly surprising given our support of free public education. The Greens want to ensure that ability to pay is never the determining factor as to what level of education Australians receive.

As I said before, this simple principle informs our policy at all levels of education.

We do not support requiring pre-schoolers’ parents to pay for the most essential education their child will ever receive – early childhood education. We support the provision of free public education of the highest quality at primary level, we support it at secondary level, we support it at post compulsory secondary level, and we support it at the tertiary level as well.

This principle of removing financial barriers to accessing higher education was invoked by the Government when speaking on this bill in the House of Representatives.

When the Deputy PM says she wants “to ensure students gain access to higher education on merit and not on ability to pay”, The Greens say hear hear!

But why only apply this principle to full fee university degrees?

What about those students who do not even try to get into uni or TAFE because they can not afford the high fees, or are scared of the debt they will incur?

The Greens agree with the government that access to education should be about merit not wealth, which is why we want to see all the financial barriers to a university and TAFE phased out not just full fees.

The Government clearly agrees with The Greens about how the fear of debt prevents students from going to university. That is why this bill reduces the HECS debt for science, maths and statistics students in order to encourage more students to enrol in these courses.

The Deputy Prime Minister tells us in her second reading speech on this bill that these measures will,

“provide considerable incentives for students to study mathematics and science at university.”

The logic of this statement is that paying the current higher rates of HECS fees for these courses is a disincentive. The Greens agree.

But we also think that paying the $4,162 that these courses will cost a student to study in 2009 is also a disincentive, and should these fees should be covered by the Commonwealth—as they were when the Deputy Prime Minister went to university.

The logic of alleviating disincentive continues in this suite of budget measures with the introduction of HECS-HELP ‘benefit’ which allows the Minister to reduce or cancel students HECS debts. Why? Well again it is a measure designed to provide incentives (or reduce disincentives) related to the costs of education.

The Greens welcome the move to reduce fees in the area of early childhood education, as we welcome the news that graduates teaching maths or science will have their HECS repayment burden reduced. These are important changes in the fee system in Australian higher education.

And they are changes that The Greens have been advocating for my entire time in Parliament and before that as well.

These changes recognise that fees and debts turn students off education.

As I say, The Greens have been of this view from the outset and we will continue to push for the expansion of this programme of debt relief and fee reduction until all Australians can access university “on merit and not ability to pay.”.. as the Deputy Prime Minister said.

I have visited universities and spoken to students across the country as an MP and before entering parliament. That experience left me in no doubt as to the impact that student poverty has on the quality of the education we produce in this country.

I have heard many stories about students working full time in low paying jobs just to pay the rent and pay for their groceries and the impact that that has on their ability to put time and effort into their supposedly full time university study

You can’t tell me that these students are achieving their full potential.

Bear in mind that the Commonwealth is subsidising the cost of the tuition for the majority of these students and if the government wants to ensure that that investment is benefiting the whole community they need to ensure that students can focus on their study while at university rather than have to spend all their time at uni working with reduces the number of students who complete a quality education.

The Greens yet again call on the government to increase student support.

This is an issue that has been conspicuously dismissed in the budget. There are no proposals from the so-called ‘education revolution’ government to increase AUSTUDY, Youth Allowance and ABSTUDY.

The Greens join the higher education sector, National Union of Students, the National Tertiary Education Union and Universities Australia in calling on the government to urgently overhaul student financial support measures and deliver students a living wage whilst they are studying.

The Deputy Prime Minister has indicated that the ‘Bradley review’ of the sector will have a broad terms of reference and that this review will be looking at participation, access and opportunity. The Greens expect that this review will, like all other investigations into this area, find that student poverty is undermining the quality of higher education, is a threat to equity and must be urgently addressed.

The Greens welcome the increase in Commonwealth Scholarships in this bill from 44,000 to 88,000 by 2012. The Greens want the scholarship system to be examined as part of the Bradley review with a view to expanding the support available to students or even better, subsumed by a comprehensive system which ensures that students are able to concentrate on their studies during term time and are not forced to work more than 20 hours a week on average as the current student population does.

In the area of post graduate studies again this government has moved in the right direction but inexplicably fallen short of what the sector needs. This bill increases the number of Australian Postgraduate Awards which deliver financial support for PhD and Masters by research students to nearly 10,000. That is a positive step but again it doesn’t address the very real financial pressures that these students face because the level of financial support these awards give leaves postgraduates forced to work instead of researching or else struggle on an income less than the Henderson Poverty Line.

The philosophy underpinning the measures in this bill is of a much healthier variety than the previous government. The Greens hope that this government is starting to recognise that education spending is an investment rather than a cost. But what’s missing is the political drive to see the logic through and make the very large contributions that the sector needs. If these investments are not made in the next budget—which will be after the Bradley review has been completed—then the government’s rhetoric about an education revolution will be precisely that. Rhetoric! They will be exposed as frauds disguised in the language of commitment to education but with not follow through and no guts to commit to a genuine education revolution.

I will not be in the parliament when this test is faced but my fellow Greens will be—and in increased numbers. The Greens will continue to advocate for public education and for the investment that public education needs and deserves for our whole society to flourish. But time is running out—after 12 years of neglect its time to act.

One of my first speeches in this place was about my commitment to benefits of public education and about the need to support public higher education in particular. Then like now it came on the eve of a major review of the sector. Back then I told the Senate’

“The Greens believe that the solution to the self-created crisis in higher education is rooted in a fundamental reinvestment by the federal government in the sector—not via increased access to loans schemes but by a direct investment in the higher education sector.

In this context, the Greens see a review of higher education as timely—not as a chance to undermine the public education system but as a chance to put appropriate funding, appropriate investment, back into public education and to put this back on the agenda.”

It was true then and it is still true today. I have a little more hope now but The Greens will not rely on hope. Instead we will continue the fight to make Australia’s public education system the envy of the world and in doing so ensure that our community is best equipped to meet the challenges of the century - and meet them together, as a thoughtful, harmonious and prosperous people.