Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today on behalf of the Australian Greens to support the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008. The bill effectively repeals a provision in the Higher Education Support Act which tied university funding to compliance with workplace relations requirements and governance requirements. The Australian Greens did not support this provision when it was introduced by the previous government; it was bad policy then and it is bad policy now.

I listened carefully to the contribution from the opposition. The point is not accountability; the point is tying everything to funding. It is a punitive provision. It is a bullying provision. The best thing about this legislation, apart from the fact that it removes these punitive provisions in relation to university funding, is that it spells the end, I hope, of that meanness, of that awful culture, that has existed for the last 10 years whereby everybody was threatened with their funding if they did not behave and do as the government told them, regardless of whether it was in the best interests of their university, their school, their community or whatever it was. It became a feature of the Howard government years that people were afraid to speak out for fear of losing their funding. Artists were afraid to say anything because they were in fear of losing their grants money and so on and so forth. In this case it was universities who were told, ‘Either you introduce the AWAs or you do not get your funding. You have these protocols or you do not get your funding.’

It is not an issue of accountability. There is not a single person in this chamber who does not want to make sure that taxpayers’ money is used wisely, that whichever institution or individual receives that money is accountable for the way it is spent, and that it is transparent. I would be supportive of that regardless. This bill does not abolish the protocol that is there. What it does say is that it is no longer tied. There is not that punitive imposition of the government’s will by holding universities to ransom to an ideological perspective. That was what it was about. It was simply holding universities to ransom to an ideological perspective.

Whilst I appreciate the opposition’s contribution in relation to the vice-chancellors, I also draw attention to the fact that in the vice-chancellors review they said:

... it was not wise to apply a “one size fits all” governance model (that extends into areas of management), particularly when the stated object of the Government is to promote diversity ...

We can all quote from various reports about what vice-chancellors may or may not have said. It is quite clear there that they are not saying that the governance protocols en masse have been necessarily bad; what they are saying is that when you impose something and make it a condition of funding you take away the capacity for diversity.

What I hope this bill will signal is a more collaborative and cooperative approach. If there is one thing that I would welcome from this government—apart from a change of position on climate change, which of course I do not need to tell the Senate about—it is the education revolution. I long for this education revolution. We cannot move to a low-carbon economy, we cannot move beyond being a resource based economy where we dig up, cut down and ship away until we invest in education—and public education and in the public interest—and get rid of this notion that all research has to be tied to some commercial outcome. We have lost much investment in public interest research in the last decade and we are not going to get through this transition to a low-carbon economy, we are not going to get to where we need to be, unless we unshackle the brilliance of the minds in our universities to pursue their higher education research without being tied to a commercial objective by funding from some private entity. Yes, there is a role for private investment in universities; I could not agree more. But I am tired of the fact that so much of the research in the universities is now owned in partnership by commercial entities and we are not unshackling that brilliance to go out and pursue public interest research, which has led to some of the major breakthroughs we have seen in this past century and certainly will in the coming century.

I am excited by what I hope will be an education revolution. I am not encouraged at this point, I have to say, by the fact that the government has squibbed the issue of public school funding. There is a big report out today by an academic in relation to that, saying indeed that what we are getting for the next few years in public school funding is precisely the Howard government model and it is simply not good enough. That certainly does not suggest the education revolution is underway in the manner in which I understand revolution. Revolution to me means something exciting and something that throws over the old model; not something that maintains the old model until 2011 or 2012. So we will have plenty to say about the public education model. But in relation to this bill, as I indicated, under the previous government the workplace relations requirements included an obligation for universities to offer AWAs to university staff. In my view that was an unacceptable interference with university independence and a blatant attempt by the former government to impose its industrial relations ideology. We have never supported AWAs in any context and we are glad to see the back of them in this bill.

Similarly, the nexus between funding and governance has to be broken for all the reasons that I have given. I want to see a different culture. I want to see a collaborative, cooperative culture in which we go and talk to universities about how they might envisage the best way to manage their institutions given the changing requirements for how we deliver education in a carbon constrained economy and how we deliver education in the transition to an economy no longer totally dependent on resource extraction, to move into a much more sophisticated and complex economy where knowledge and service industries become much more prominent. So I am looking forward to that kind of collaborative, cooperative effort to encourage good governance and more diversity in our university sector. I am pleased that the opposition at least has given up on the workplace relations requirements. I do not think that it is wise to hang onto imposing the governance requirements through those threats to funding and I indicate now that the Australian Greens will not be supporting the opposition amendments to be moved by Senator Mason.

What I most look forward to is a positive agenda for higher education and a big investment in education in the public interest and in Australia’s best interests. I am aware that the Prime Minister today is making a headland speech. He no doubt will be trying to tell the story of how Australia will look under a Rudd government. I would hope that in telling the story of how Australia will look he will talk about a healthier, happier Australia, an Australia in which everyone has access to high-quality, well-funded public education and where everybody is encouraged to achieve to their highest potential through higher education, whether that is in vocational training or through the university sector. What we need is a country which is innovative, where lifelong learning is encouraged and where we do not have the notion that you leave school and it is all over. Instead, you have an idea that through your whole life you can access education and you can change careers. More than ever before people are going to need to change careers to adapt to a different way of living and a different way of delivering education.

I have posed myself the question: how are we going to deliver education in a carbon constrained world? How are we going to deliver education when the oil price is $150 or $200 a barrel? How are we going to completely transform education delivery through information technology so that wherever you are in a country, no matter how big or how small your community, you can access global learning opportunities. That is what I consider to be an education revolution. Putting computers in schools is a great start, but it is no use offering schools computers if you do not provide them with the funding to rewire and reconfigure their schools to actually make the best use of them. A lot of the costs associated with these things are going to be borne by fundraising efforts by councils and parents and friends bodies around the country. Anyway, what we are seeing with the computers is simply a substitution of the Howard government’s Investing in Our Schools Program, which was stopped. That money is being used for computers. So it is not actually an additional rollout of funding; it is a substitution. Again, it goes across all schools but it does not address that inequity in terms of the reduced share of Commonwealth funding that public schools are getting.

So let us hear the Prime Minister’s headland speech today. Let us hear the new narrative for the country. Let us hear that this country is going to be a kinder, more compassionate, more inspired nation, a country in which we encourage innovation and a massive investment in education from early childhood through to universities, where the old punitive ‘do as we say or we will take away your funding’ mentality is gone, where we have a government that goes out and says, ‘Yes, we want good governance. Yes, we want accountability. Yes, we want transparency. But we are coming to talk to you about it. We are going to collaborate with you about it. We are going to talk about how best to deliver education to the Australian community in this century and we are going to get rid of these awful AWAs and forget that we ever had to deal with them to the extent that is possible given the harm that they have done to the morale in universities and other workplaces around the country.’ I want to look forward and I am very supportive of this legislation. It just goes to show that a change of government can make a difference in some areas and that what was bad policy is now taken off the statutes. Thank you.