Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to contribute to this debate on Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014 and outline clearly why Labor will not vote for this piece of legislation and why we will stand with so many Australians opposed to these measures—not just Australian students but Australian academics and members of the broader community, who have clearly outlined their opposition to the government on these measures because they are, simply put, unfair. There are unfair to the students. They are unfair to Australia's higher education system.

Senator Back has done a miraculous job in gilding the lily in trying to outline the benefits for regional Australia of this package. This package does the exact opposite. It actually completely disadvantages regional Australian students when it comes to higher education. We have knowledge of that in my home state of Tasmania, which does have campuses in regional parts of the state which are now in jeopardy if this legislation is passed.

This package really stands in incredible contrast to the university legacy of the Whitlam government. I know we are not living in the days of the Whitlam university legacy now but we certainly have not moved away from it to the extent that is proposed in this package. In fact, the policymakers who put forward this package lived under that legacy. They had that free education benefit and they know very well that it was about letting merit decide whether you went to university; it was not about how big your was your pay packet was or how big was your family's bank account.

That is why the Australian people have called this unfair package the Americanisation of our world-class university system. That is exactly what it seems to be to me—the Americanisation of the system. We know how it works in America. It is very much about how much a family can invest into certain universities to be able to get a seat within them, whereas here in Australia, where we have values of egalitarianism and a fair-go ethos, we have a higher education system that we can be proud of. It is based on equity and merit rather than income. I think that is a very pertinent way of describing this unfair package.

Australians opposed these things because they understand the value of our universities. The understand the value not just to themselves or to their children and grandchildren; they understand them in terms of the value of the research that is provided to our country and to our policymakers. They understand the broader value of universities to our community.

Many of us have degrees, as do members of our families—degrees that have prepared us for highly skilled work. One thing we know about jobs of the future is that we are continually going to need highly skilled workers. On this side of the chamber we value very much the role that universities play—not just in educating individuals but as contributors to the public good. But in this package the government proposes to deregulate university fees, cut course funding by an average of 20 per cent, if not more, and dramatically increase the interest charged on student loans.

So while the Minister for Education Christopher Pyne panders to the politics of envy—and in doing so pits payers of tax who were once students against students who pay tax—universities will have to raise their fees to make up the funding cuts and then raise them again to provide the revenue they deem necessary to keep them competitive. All the analysis highlights that. All the analysis—whether it is from the Group of Eight right down to the National Tertiary Education Union—agrees that fees will need to go up by around 30 per cent just to make up for the dramatic cuts that this government wants to place on our universities.

Let's have a look at those cuts. In total, the Abbott government's budget measures cut $5.8 billion from higher education teaching and learning and university research. The negative impact of that cut on funding for Commonwealth supported places is undisputed. Commonwealth supported places are an incredibly important part of a university structure—except, of course, in the minds of Christopher Pyne and Joe Hockey. Even the Prime Minister finally fessed up in front of the most powerful leaders in the world at the G20 not so long ago:

… we have tried to deregulate higher education, universities—

he whinged. He then went on and said:

… and that's going to mean less central government spending and effectively more fees that students will have to pay.

He has said it himself. There is no point in Senator Back trying to gild the lily by saying that this is somehow going to be of benefit to regional students, or students anywhere, when it is very clear from the Prime Minister himself that this is the deregulation of our higher education system and it is going to lead to higher fees for university students.

The University of Melbourne's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Glyn Davis, revealed that student fees will have to rise by up to 61 per cent. The University of Tasmania's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Peter Rathjen, stated:

Those subjects that we do not teach, the research that we do not conduct, or the social programs that we do not support are unlikely to be replaced easily by other providers.

For some degrees, that figure of 60 per cent is incredibly high. That is not, of course, a problem for students who can afford that, for wealthier students. But it is a real problem for middle-class people, working people—the bulk of Australian students. It is a perfect outcome for a reactionary government that has forgotten its people, because that is clearly what this seems to be: a government that has forgotten its people. A government is supposed to govern for all people, not just for those that can afford certain things. A government is not supposed to cherry-pick certain areas—vested interests, one might say—and look after those and leave the rest. So I do not think that it is governing for all people. It does not seem to like certain people—some people who feel that the economy should be assisting them rather than them being slaves to the economy, is perhaps how it looks at it.

Swinburne University's Vice-Chancellor, Linda Kristjanson, dismissed this winner-takes-everything package in a message to Swinburne University staff on 27 May:

… deregulation will inevitably lead to much higher fees for our students … Over time, full fee deregulation will lead to a higher education system characterised by the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

That puts what I was just saying pretty clearly. The haves, of course, are fine in this education package; the have-nots are not fine.

That is where I draw back to the Whitlam legacy, because that is where we had our university system opened up to the haves and the have-nots. It is where, for the first time, we saw university students from families where there had never been a student attend university before. Since that time, university has continued to be a part of so many families' lives, with families having so much pride that their family member—a child, perhaps—was able to attend university because of that Whitlam policy change to higher education. Now it looks like we are going back to those dark old days, just like we are going back to the 1950s in so many policy areas, such as with the Prime Minister's comment about coal being good for humanity. It is a very sad time in Australia's history right now, to see the unwinding of so many good policy decisions and so much good legislation that has been put in place. I think the higher education system, starting right back from that Whitlam legacy, is certainly one of those.

I have to say that this seems like conservative ideology at its best. The top of page 1 of such an ideology, if there were such a book, would be, 'Protect the powerful and the privileged.' As long as the haves keep on having through reforms like this, as long as wealth is transferred from the poor to the rich through welfare cuts and tax cuts and as long as the Australian meritocracy is undermined, this government will keep claiming that black is white and that these changes will benefit students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds because they include the so-called Commonwealth scholarships.

Let's have a look at the Commonwealth scholarships. In the real world, how much money is the Commonwealth contributing to these scholarships? Absolutely none. How much money are all students contributing to these scholarships? All of it. These are not Commonwealth scholarships. They are citizens' scholarships—citizens' scholarships that will underwrite the privileged over the struggling. The elite sandstone universities will charge higher fees so they will have more money in their scholarship funds. Meanwhile, the local universities choose between raising fees for all so that they can offer scholarships for some or watching talented students being lured away to those big cities. The talented students themselves face a choice between a lifetime of debt and a lost opportunity.

Common sense dictates that the talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds will be deterred from seeking a degree. The fact is that a number of those, of course, will be women. Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief economist, Saul Eslake, has warned of the consequence of higher interest rates on student loans, particularly for women. Mr Eslake said the prospect of repaying university loans while raising a family may in fact deter women, while many other prospective students would weigh up the costs against the benefits.

The coalition's imposition of a real interest rate on university loans will also deter those who are likely to earn lower graduate salaries. We know what Christopher Pyne had to say on this matter. He said that women would not be disproportionately worse off, because those are the only degrees that women attain.

How insulting and how wrong does he have it for so many professional women out there who have degrees in a range of areas?

So shutting the door on opportunities for women and putting up the glass ceiling for another hundred floors or so is no big deal to this government. This is what Christopher Pyne, the education minister, said on that front:

Women are well-represented amongst the teaching and nursing students. They will not be able to earn the high incomes that say dentists or lawyers will earn…

That is what your education minister said to the Australian people. No wonder this country has turned against this government when you have outlandish, insulting remarks made by the education minister about women—and how wrong he is in saying them as well. How out of touch is this education minister, and yet he is the one who through this parliament wants to change our university system for men and women now and for so many generations to come. It is a complete wrecking ball he is driving through our higher education system. He is a man who is incredibly out of touch not just with the system itself but with women on top of that.

Let's have a look at it. If the average Australian wants to be an engineer or a scientist, the professions that will determine Australia's future prosperity, according to Minister Pyne, those kinds of degrees will not be done by women. According to Universities Australia, the cost of important courses like engineering and science will have to increase by 58 per cent to make up for the cut. Environmental studies will have to increase by 110 per cent. Charles Sturt University vice-chancellor Professor Andrew Vann has calculated:

For CSU we calculate this to be an average of 23.5% across the board. Some areas would need to rise substantially. Science fees would need to be increased by 62%, Agriculture by 48% and Environmental Studies by 114%.

This government should tell the Australian people precisely how much of our future they are willing to burn, because that is exactly what they are doing through this terrible piece of legislation. They should take an explicit policy implementing this funding bonfire to an election and get a clear mandate to try to do it. I bet you they will not receive it from the Australian people. They have already made it incredibly clear that they do not support this terrible policy to deregulate and drive up the fees of our higher education system.

The coalition does not have a legitimate mandate to implement this university funding dystopia. In fact, as the education minister admitted prior to last year's election, the government did not have a higher education policy which it was possible to seek a mandate for. It did not even have a higher education policy. There was no platform upon which the Australian people could judge them on higher education, because they simply did not have a policy. Now, some one year later, now in government, to tell the Australian people they are going to drive a wrecking ball through the higher education system and put students into decades upon decades of debt through cutting university funding is, I think, an act of complete deceit to the Australian people.

But that is all part of the plan of this government. They say one thing before the election, as we know, and then do the complete opposite afterwards. The minister has cited a speech he gave this February. He said 'that comprehensively outlined almost exactly what we did in the budget'. That was a very long speech in which the minister devoted 38 words to a 'comprehensive outline' of his budget plan. In fact, it was a some 6,000-word speech, and yet 38 words were for his budget plan for higher education.

How did the Australian public miss this, I wonder? I think it was because the government did not want to highlight what it was going to do tho the higher education system. No-one really saw these reform coming, because I think the government did not want us to see the reforms coming. I think they thought they could get away with us not seeing these reforms coming. But how short-sighted were they? What a way to treat the Australian community by seeing if they could just sneak this through in the budget and hope no-one would notice. In fact, what this does is drive such a detrimental change to every student in this country, especially those that, as I have highlighted, simply cannot afford to pay these incredibly erroneous debt degrees that it is placing on so many students.

The Australian people will certainly compare this government's performance with those of the Labor Party. The Labor Party stands very clearly for the values of egalitarianism and inclusiveness when it comes to higher education. In fact, we value very much the roles that universities and students play not just in educating themselves or universities educating individuals but as contributors to our public good. That is why we oppose cutting public funding to universities. That is why we will stand for what is fair and decent, and that is for our university system not to be gutted and for our students to have a future in that system.