Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Notwithstanding the good senator opposite. We are seeing in this place those opposite playing up again. It is not unlike Senator Mason to play up a bit, but they are also relying on outdated and factually baseless arguments about how this reform will let students waste time lingering in our universities and draining taxpayers dollars. In Australia we simply do not have a situation where students are studying for excessively long periods of time. It is a myth. Those opposite seem to be stuck in a bit of a time warp and lack a true understanding of what tertiary education means today and to the unique intellectual capital of our nation. Those opposite were never serious about investing in higher education in any meaningful way. They simply dressed up the student learning entitlement, painting it as a policy aimed at improving retention while continuing to rip funding out of the tertiary sector. The student learning entitlement never transpired into funding for essential services and student support—those proven elements of any retention strategy. Across the sector, the Group of Eight and others have come out in full favour of the abolition of student learning entitlement. Put frankly, Senator Mason, it is time to move on.

This legislation also provides for the introduction of mission based compacts between the government via the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and tertiary institutions. The mission based compact will be the mechanism through which universities can show how they are contributing to the government's goals for higher education. The compacts will include details of the major education and research funding for each institution as well as performance targets. The compacts will allow for universities to be rewarded for improving the quality of their offerings, attainment and the participation of students in higher education. As the mission based compacts will differentiate between teaching and research, they will allow an accurate benchmark from which to measure and reward performance, taking the sector forward.

I will now take a moment to talk about the academic freedom aspects of this bill. Notwithstanding Senator Mason's no-doubt-excellent record on objectivity and impartiality when he was lecturing, this bill will also bolster academic freedom, enshrining the government's commitment to free intellectual inquiry in legislation. Until the introduction of this bill, academic freedom was assured only through the national protocols agreed to at the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs in 2007.

This bill extends the government's commitment to academic freedom by ensuring that it relates to learning, teaching and research. Including an explicit reference to learning also bolsters a student's access to intellectual freedom. Of course, those opposite will criticise this element of the legislation too. It comes as no surprise that they would again play up on their old rhetoric. Manifest in their long-held paranoia is their mistaken belief that free intellectual inquiry and the protection of academic freedom are biased towards the Left. I only hope that they can for once put aside this baseless assumption and help the government bolster academic freedom for learning, teaching and research within Australia's tertiary sector.

This legislation represents the final pillar in our higher education platform. It builds on the results of the major programs of reform that the Prime Minister commenced as Minister for Education in 2009. As a direct result of our reform agenda already, we have seen close to 100,000 additional students grasp the opportunity of a university education since 2007. Since then we have seen an extra 80,000 undergraduate students each year get the opportunity of a university education, from 408,000 in 2007 to 488,000 this year. We have also seen the number of Commonwealth supported postgraduate places double from 16½ thousand in 2007 to 33,000 this year. Having already succeeded in opening the doors of Australia's universities to more students than ever before, we are even more determined to continue to boost participation.

The legislation before us is a measure that has been welcomed far and wide across the sector. National Union of Students President Jesse Marshall in May this year branded the legislation a 'welcome investment in providing opportunity to Australians to participate in higher education'. Universities Australia has expressed strong support for this bill, urging all parties to support the legislation and approach it in the spirit of bipartisanship. Universities Australia's Chair, Professor Glyn Davis AC, has said:

Passage of the Higher Education Support Amendment (Demand Driven Funding System and Other Measures) Bill 2011 will directly transform the accessibility of higher education in Australia.

Student demand-driven funding was a key recommendation of the Bradley Review, and its implementation will help achieve the higher participation and attainment targets for universities that have been set by Government."

Professor Davis said that this bill helps to complete the transformation of the sector and:

Along with a national regulator and the potential for positive outcomes from the Review of Higher Education Base Funding, provision of funding on the basis of student demand further defines the Government's new foundations for the university sector.

Innovative Research Universities also welcomed the changes, arguing that the bill achieves its intended purpose of allowing universities to be funded for each enrolled undergraduate except, as I have said before, medicine.

IRU's Chair, Professor Ian O'Connor, heralded this legislation as 'a major step forward for universities, recognising the need to open access to all Australians capable of university study'. The Good Universities Guide has highlighted how the demand driven funding will benefit students. With such overwhelming support I cannot see how those opposite would stand to oppose aspects of this bill.

I want to echo and endorse some of the comments of the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs and Workplace Relations, Senator Chris Evans. Minister Evans described this new legislation as the opportunity for Australia to move away from a decades-old system of central planning for university funding in which, every year, universities negotiated student places with Canberra. He said:

For the first time, universities will be able to grow with confidence and diversify in response to student needs.

Our commitment as a government is to the continued expansion of a high quality university sector, to educate the graduates needed by an economy based on knowledge, skills and innovation.

As the Bradley review highlighted, the quality and performance of a nation's higher education system will be clear determinants of its economic and social progress.

OECD data shows that Australia's proportion of graduates in the population is less than in comparable developed economies. This was echoed within the Bradley review. The review warned that Australia was falling behind other countries in both performance and investment in higher education. Moreover, the review reaffirmed that we will need more well qualified people in Australia to meet the demands of a rapidly growing global economy. The only way to increase participation in higher education is to look to those groups that are underrepresented in our universities. These are Indigenous Australians, people with low socioeconomic status and people from regional and remote areas.

We also must strategically invest in our education sector. Let us not forget that educational institutions, particularly our universities, form the third-largest export industry in Australia. Developing the intellectual capital of our nation is vital both for our own national development and prosperity and also to secure our reputation and rankings worldwide.

The reforms we have progressively introduced since 2009 ensure that we are laying the strongest foundations for our future at home, in our region and beyond. I look forward to seeing more Australians, regardless of their background, aspiring to and achieving a higher education.

To recap what this legislation plans to do. The Australian government is fully committed to transforming Australia's higher education system through implementing a demand driven system for funding undergraduate places at higher education providers, which are listed in the table in the Higher Education Support Act. The bill will give effect to the implementation of the demand driven funding system for undergraduate student places at public universities from 2012. It will do so by removing the current cap on funding for undergraduate Commonwealth supported places, except for medicine, and the current seven-year limit placed on students' eligibility to receive Commonwealth support for their higher education.

In the new demand driven funding system universities will have greater flexibility to respond to student and market demands. The amendments are integral to achieving the government's higher education attainment target of increasing the proportion of 25- to 34-year-old Australians with bachelor-level qualifications to 40 per cent by 2025. The mission based compacts will provide for Commonwealth oversight of the teaching and research missions. The bill will also promote free intellectual inquiry.

I commend the bill to the Senate and I look forward to seeing the support of all for this bill.