Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

This decimated student services. I hear 'Hear, hear' from over there. You see—the policy has not lost its flavour for those on that side of the chamber. Only when Labor undid that wrong and brought in the student support and amenities fee did we begin to see essential services return to strength on campuses.

The coalition's meddling on campuses did not just affect student-run services. The long arm of this sort of neo-right ideology reached back into the staffrooms and the administration blocks, forcing universities to implement aspects of the coalition's industrial relations agenda or risk losing funding. Those were the higher education workplace relations requirements under the legislation at the time, and of course they very much became part of Work Choices. The party that claimed to hate regulation created a special branch of it just to tell universities what conditions they could and could not offer their staff.

Those opposite talk about their legacy in higher education—well, let me say to this chamber: it is a legacy that has not been forgotten. The legacy of the Howard era in higher education left the university system in crisis. It was a decade of neglect and much, much worse.

These actions of over a decade ago sound a warning, because it is the same coalition, with many of the same faces, using the same cabinet submissions to operate on the current policy position—as we see, for instance, with the cabinet submission which was leaked in 1999 which outlines chapter and verse what this government is doing today.

It was two months into their term when the government identified $1.43 billion in cuts to the education portfolio. This was on top of more than $3.7 billion in cuts in their first 100 days of government. Mr Abbott once claimed that universities would experience a period of 'masterly inactivity' under his government. Of course, that was wrong—there has been a great deal of activity. Either the Prime Minister was unaware of secret plans to gut higher education or that was, knowingly, totally untrue. So they started with the $3.7 billion worth of cuts and they continued this with an announced $5.8 billion. We saw it in the past under the Howard government and now it is flowing through to this current government.

Labor set about reducing the damage to the universities and, almost as soon as we formed government, we initiated the most significant review of higher education to date—the Bradley review. We also had the Cutler review, and initiated changes to the research program to ensure that we were able to meet the real costs of research. Under the Labor government, Commonwealth funding for universities rose from $8 billion to $14 billion between 2007 and 2013. And, if we were still in office, that amount, under Labor's forward estimates, would grow to $17 billion by 2017. We increased real funding per student by nearly $2,000 in real terms to $18,000 per year. Labor improved indexation and replaced the hopeless, out-of-date system. We increased funding for the science, research and innovation budget by well over 30 per cent, compared to the previous government. We delivered more capital and infrastructure in four years than the coalition managed to do in the whole decade that they were in office. Labor delivered more than $5 billion in higher education and research infrastructure while we were in office. We began one of the largest reforms ever undertaken in the university system, moving towards the demand-driven system which led to the additional 190,000 extra students in universities compared to 2007. The government talks today about 80,000. Well, that record is well and truly surpassed by actual places in universities—and not at a reduced rate; not the sort of proposition that the government is talking about at the sub-degree level. Because of our initiatives today there are an additional 36,000 students from disadvantaged backgrounds actually at university, and we set the goal of increasing the proportion of the population with a degree to 40 per cent of 25- to 35-year-olds by 2020. For women, that goal has already been achieved. And for the whole community, we were within cooee of reaching that goal already—well before the 2020 date. We provided significant funding for those universities with substantial numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

But this is a government that actually gets rid of equity targets. This is a government that cuts equity programming. We argue that that approach is wrong. We believe that our university system should be for everyone with ability, regardless of how much money their parents have. That is why we also sought to ensure that the university experience itself was a rewarding one and supported the student services and amenities fee.

We made it easier for young people to study through reforms to youth allowance, so that more than 220,000 young people received the maximum rate—a much higher rate of payment—for the first time. So much of what we did was to repair the damage of the coalition's previous government. The reckless damage and wilful neglect wreaked by the government that is now back in office shows us a measure of how the coalition actually operates in government. We are very proud of our record. We take the view that the Commonwealth of Australia should respect the role of universities and, to this end, we want universities to play a leading role in our nation's future. We believe the economic argument for investment in universities is very, very clear; universities directly contribute about $22 billion to our GDP every year; they employ over 100,000 people; university graduates contribute more than $170 billion per year in wages to our economy; and university graduates comprise about one-quarter of the population that generates almost one-third of Australia' wages. There are about nine Australian companies listed on the Fortune Global 500, but there are 19 universities in the world's top 500—that is Australia making its mark internationally.

Universities play a fundamental role in building Australia's future. They are essential to innovation. They produce the knowledge and the ideas. They help build the new technologies. They help build the new industries and they create the new jobs. They play an essential role in local economies. We just need to look at what is happening at Wollongong or in Newcastle—I might add Deakin University in Geelong and the central role that it plays in rural and regional Australia.

Universities help us to interpret our world and to adapt to change. They help us grow in stature as a nation, and we do not want to see them decimated by a government that has no respect for the work that they do and therefore their importance in our future and the future of a knowledge based economy.

Those opposite have a long history of attacking not just the university budgets and university culture; they, unfortunately, have a well-ingrained process of denigrating their work. They have an indifference to the importance of intellectual work in this society. Their failure to even, for instance, appoint a minister for science highlights the negligence of the government. Of course, we see this replicated in their cruel cuts to jobs at the CSIRO. They have sustained attacks on the independence of the Australian Research Council where again the level of their indifference to the importance of the research highlights the sinister nature of the attacks that this government has launched on the intellectual work of this nation.

MPs in the current government have more than once picked out or named a project run by an eminent researcher and mocked them without any understanding or insight into the project, which of course is clearly unfortunate. I say their attacks on climate change science are a disgrace. These projects and the way research funding is allocated are chosen by panels of peers on the basis of expert merit. They have been successful in an environment in which less than 22 per cent of projects are able to be successful and we see, for instance, that that is a measure of the deep competition that exists within the university system. Yet certain members of this government behave as ignoramuses when it comes to the issue of research projects in this country.

As recently as December, the member for Hughes ridiculed no fewer than 23 recent grant recipients in the humanities, arts and sciences—projects that are amongst the best of the best. If you think I am being too harsh, just think of the member in another place in 2011 who provided us with the revelation that champagne contained carbon dioxide so we should stop global warming by 'drinking chardonnay instead of champagne'. Perhaps this is a measure of the intellectual depth of this government, but I am afraid it is all too serious to be funny.

We have a government that has set upon a course of action of profound hostility to universities. They have used whatever imaginary budget emergency they can find to demonstrate their capacity for cruel and quite vicious cuts to the university system. Their walking away from the Gonski program highlights that they do not have any long-term commitment to education in this country, and the failure of this government to acknowledge their responsibilities to our society and our future speaks volumes.

The original money was set aside under these changes when we were in government for the better skills program, the Gonski reforms, but the coalition has gutted Gonski. It is no longer a six-year commitment; it is four years. The fundamental point about the Gonski reforms is the bulk of the money was in years 5 and 6, the very years that this government has walked away from, despite what was said during the election campaign that there would be no cuts to education and that we could have exactly the same approach to schools funding between Liberal and Labor—it did not make any difference. In government we see this government repudiating what it actually said in opposition, and now of course we see that this is a government that clearly is in the business of saying one thing in opposition and another thing in government. Therefore I submit to the Senate that these measures should be disallowed and the government should not be able to proceed with these cuts to the university system.