Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to be able to take part in this debate today because it demonstrates a serious point about the difference between the way our government will approach the area of higher education and communication in this sector and the approach of the previous government. We have already heard a range of issues put forward today in terms of how this piece of legislation, the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008, will be enacted to ensure that there will be a change to an ongoing process. What we must understand is that the issue of higher education in our community is an ongoing process. This is but one step, but it is a very important step, as you would know, Mr Acting Deputy President Trood, coming from that industry yourself.

We have heard that we are particularly looking at two elements: the issue of the protocols and the issue of the workplace relations requirements put in place by the previous government around 2005. This was after some discussion with the community and the industry, but all too little, because what we have heard is that, consistently over the last few years, there has been discussion about what the impact of this imposition of process would be on the operations of the universities and, perhaps more importantly than just the operations—and universities are businesses in some sense—on the expanse, the enthusiasm, the energy and the creative elements of universities as educational institutions. In her contribution Senator Milne touched on the importance in our community of having the freedom of academic expression, the freedom of creativity and the freedom to allow people to operate in their own way and work with their communities to come up with an education outcome which is best for all of us but allows individuals to express their own views and their own ways of operation.

When the then government were talking about introducing these limitations and imposing these processes in the 2005 period they talked a lot, as has Senator Mason today, about the issue of accountability. It is very clear that no-one is running away from the element of accountability, because we know that it is a strong responsibility of government to provide public funding for our higher education area. There will be further input during this debate about exactly how effectively funding is made to universities. We know that there is so much evidence on record about the role of public funding in universities and we know that the Howard government, who were insisting quite publicly and strenuously on the issues of accountability, proper processes and effective operations, did not fulfil their own responsibility to the real economic needs and funding processes for education. No matter how you trot out the figures, Senator Mason—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—no matter how you do the graphs and no matter what processes you put in place, there were cuts to the funding for public education in the higher education field in our community over the last few years. That is without question. I do take the point, though, that Senator Mason made earlier about the need for private investment as well as public investment. There is no argument about that.

What we are talking about, however, is the government’s responsibility for the funding program. There has to be an acceptance that the government of the day must take on the responsibility for effective funding of the higher education area—however, not alone. We are not saying that it is either/or. We need to encourage effective private investment in this area as well. All too often under the previous government when we were talking about this area of higher education, and in fact in other areas as well, it had been put forward that you had to have one model or another. There was no availability for flexibility and there was no availability for cooperation. If you did not follow a certain pattern you were flawed and wrong and, depending on the day, you could even be accused of being socialist in your view.

What we need to understand is that we have to engage our community effectively so that there is a wider engagement, ownership and excitement about how higher education can work. That means not just public investment, although the core responsibility of any government in this area must be public funding for universities; we also have to admit that we need to engage other parts of the community so that we can get private funding. We also need a sense that there is a flexibility in models so that people can experiment to an extent to see what best suits the needs of their own region, the needs of their own students and the needs of their own professional areas.

Coming from a regional part of Queensland, I know that it has been particularly difficult to look at the range of university campuses in Queensland, which vary greatly. There is no way that you can say that one model, one process or one set of rules can be applied to all the university programs in Queensland, let alone the whole of Australia. Working in the Darling Downs area with the University of Southern Queensland, I know there have been great difficulties—struggling with reduced funding, with varying campus responsibilities, and also with a focus on pushing students into a number of particular professional areas. Having the flexibility to offer and expand a range of programs and courses would be an incentive to get more people into the higher education area. The imposition of single models of restrictive funding and of particular philosophical approaches actually makes it more difficult for university governance bodies, who are trying to ensure that they can put in place models which best suit their needs locally and encourage more Australians into higher education. It surely must be one of the aims of any government to have more people benefit from the education process.

I will not go on with the term ‘education revolution’ because I think we have heard that on a number of occasions in this place. Nonetheless, the term ‘revolution’ does encourage people to have a certain excitement about the process. I am trying to get across the message that the process in the legislation imposed by the previous government tended to restrict that excitement and that engagement. It put more focus on universities meeting those rules than on their being able to respond to their communities with effective education programs.

There will be discussion today about the range of industrial relations programs that were imposed on the higher education area as a step by the previous government, bit by bit, to ensure that their industrial relations program was rolled out across the higher education community. The higher education area was an easy target to pick on. The higher education area, as we know, has great dependence on the public purse for funding. It was a stroke of brilliance in many ways to say at that time, ‘As a government we have the responsibility to provide funding to the university sector,’ which was accepted, but at the same time use a sector of our community as an experiment in some ways—perhaps by using a scientific approach—in industrial relations policy.

There can be no doubt that the reforms that were rolled out in the higher education workplace relations legislation represented a list of core elements of the previous government’s industrial relations programs. There were snippets of the Work Choices program put in place in this industry. You could tick them off. You could have the focus on AWAs, the lack of flexibility in process, the lack of security, the lack of what was called by the previous government ‘intrusion of third parties’, which we all saw as the involvement of staff associations or workplace associations in helping members. That intrusion policy limited the number of people allowed on university governance boards.

I disagree, Senator Mason, with your assessment of the qualities that you brought to your role as part of a university governing organisation. I am sure that you brought great skills to this area—as indeed so many people did in working on the university governance panels. I know how valuable it was for a range of university areas to have people from the local community, such as local political figures—and local and state politicians were always involved in the universities—and student union people, involved in working on the governance of their university. It was ownership of their workplace.

However, that was one of the core areas that had to be reduced in the changes that the previous government imposed in their one-size-fits-all model. They told universities across the country what the size, shape, role, background and experience of their university governing panels must be. The same process of governance, ownership and imposition went through to the way that the workers were involved in those universities. This included workplace relations, conditions, how they could interact with their employer, whom they could involve when talking with their employer and how they could interact when developing workplace agreements—all those things that are part of the daily operations of a workplace.

Once again, the government of the day did that without any shame and without trying to hide it—there was no element of the previous government that tried to hide what they were doing. What they were doing through their workplace relations policy in the university and higher education sector was putting in place exactly what they hoped to do in the rest of the Australian community. However, at no time did we on this side of the chamber, the Labor Party, accede to that. We did not support it. We asked questions about the link between the workplace relations situation in universities and their funding. We consistently asked questions from the time that these reforms were first rolled out.

There is no surprise in this debate, either. We are working through exactly the same issues that we worked through when the previous government imposed this legislation. What we are saying is that there is a key difference in the way that we believe that universities should be funded and how that is linked to their governance. There is a clear difference in the way we believe that workplace relations should operate on university campuses.

The time has come to put this clearly into our legislation. We have listened to all the issues, fears and complaints that were raised in the range of Senate committee inquiries that went on when this legislation was brought in. What is on the agenda today is to once and for all break the key linkage between funding and people imposing from outside what they think should occur in governance and in workplace relations. That is not running away in any sense from the core issue of accountability. There is not a single university governing body or community in this country that does not acknowledge their obligation to the government, to the student and to the community to have responsible practices.

Senator Mason pointed out that the protocols were put together by many of the universities. That is laudable. The kinds of things that they talked about will be, as Senator Collins pointed out, considered in the ministerial council response. However, that is not saying that the protocols should be linked to the funding. This is not an argument as to whether there should be protocols or special arrangements at individual campuses for how they interact with their communities. We do not say that that is not right. What we are saying is that linking the imposition of a set of rules on workplace relations with genuine funding that enables them to continue their job is wrong. That stifles the ability of the universities to be effective in their own way and has a punitive element to it.

We have heard already in the discussion today the word ‘trust’ mentioned many times. The previous legislation made a public statement that there was no trust between the government and the university governing bodies and communities around this country. The government basically said: ‘We felt that they could not be trusted to effectively implement their own arrangements on governance and on workplace relations. We felt that there had to be an intrusion from the government such that if you do not follow our model you will not be funded.’ And the government clearly understood that these universities—as they have told us many times—rely almost totally on the effective use of public funding to continue their operations.

If the people who are running the budget tell the universities—which are desperately trying to continue to operate—that unless they fulfil these rules they will not be funded, it is pretty easy to see that the response would have to be compliance. And that is what happened. Despite the concerns that were raised, despite the worries of the people who were working in the institutions and despite the concerns of people who had worked at different times in the area and came back and said that they did not like what was happening or the constraints that were being put on them or the fact that they were not able to make their own decisions—despite all that—the universities had to respond. Despite the public concern, despite the evidence that came to the Senate inquiries and despite the concern of people writing in the international press about how education could be maintained in a free and effective way, the universities and the vice-chancellors—to maintain their existence and to be able to continue operating—had to respond.

The opposition maintains that that is an argument in favour of keeping them—because all the universities worked to the protocols and used the higher education workplace relations system. Of course they did, or they would not have been able to operate. It is an odd argument to say that they did it and so therefore they must keep operating in the same way, when you know that their only way of keeping their funding and continuing was to meet the requirements.

In terms of where we go next I think it is particularly important, as has been mentioned by previous speakers, that we maintain the professional respect that we have for the university sector in this country, that we acknowledge that they are effective managers in many cases and that they do know what the professional needs of their community, their students and their workplace are. That does not mean that we do not expect that there are responsible business operations and that people are responsible to the government for ensuring that they run their business well.

What we hope to have and what we hope we will be able to work effectively towards in a whole-of-government way is a dynamic relationship between the higher education sector, the government and the community. This means that we will be open to and that we will be encouraging wider community financing and wider community involvement, but that we will also recognise that the ongoing response of strong government is to ensure that there is an effective higher education sector in our community. If we do not do that, we are actually not fulfilling our responsibility to our community and to our young people. It will be a particularly challenging time so that our research, our education process and our ability to be a higher education nation can be done together not only with a degree of trust but also with an understanding that we are working together in this process.

In terms of where we go next it is important that there is an understanding that there is knowledge in our university sector, that they are not some kind of irresponsible group that do not understand how they should operate to ensure that they are doing their job effectively. If we do not have that trust, we will immediately go back to a situation where we are just issuing demands and orders and there is some kind of automatic response. That is not what we expect from the area that should be responsible for creative thought, creative industry and a dynamic future for our whole country.

It is important that these higher education workplace relations requirements and national governance protocols are removed from law. That is not to say that there is not an understanding that there need to be high results in the sector. What it says is that this punitive and, I think, very outmoded process of linking behaviour to money automatically—this constraint of individual and flexible approaches—should not be part of the education future for our country.