Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014 as a senator in this chamber who had a free university education, and as a senator for the Greens Party, which feels strongly that we need a fairer and more equitable society in this country and that education is an investment in our people. It is a public good and, of course, governments have a very important role in the provision of public goods.

I also rise to speak on this bill as a Tasmanian senator and as someone who has worked for a decade at the University of Tasmania. I have some very strong views, not just on the role and importance of the university to Tasmania, the Tasmania people and the Tasmanian economy but also on the future of the university and what is required to really lift the university's profile.

I fundamentally oppose this bill on a very simple platform—it was not raised before the last federal election as a key policy of the coalition. I remember listening to the Governor-General's speech in this chamber on the first day of the new parliament, and I listened very carefully to the speech of the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, bringing down his first budget. It became very clear to me that the government said it was going to redefine the role of government in the Australian people's lives. There was a lot of talk about far-reaching reform and that this government would be remembered not just for things such as free trade deals but also for its significant reforms. Following the sad passing of ex-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam I talked to my children about the legacy of that man, and the Labor Party, during the 1970s and why it is so unusual that one political figure, who was in government for only three or four years, can be remembered as having left such a significant legacy. Yes he was revolutionary, but the reforms he proposed were giving something to the Australian people—such as free education and free health care. The reforms this government are proposing, whether they be in health care, with the GP co-payment, or deregulating university, are about taking things away from the Australian people. As my colleague Senator Rhiannon has so eloquently put it, this bill is not about improving higher education in Australia—it is about a $5 billion budget saving. The amendments that we will be debating will likely see Mr Pyne look for cuts elsewhere.

Let us be very clear: this was not raised as a key election issue that the coalition campaigned on to get elected. It followed a number of studies commissioned by the government releasing messages that of course they wanted, and those studies have now been acted upon. It is so significant and so far-reaching a measure that the Australian public should have got the detail before the last election. You could say it is deceptive and it is dishonest, and it is something that I believe would have influenced the outcome of the last election. My feeling, having gone to the first estimates hearings after the announcement of this higher education deregulation policy, was that this had not been planned for very long. I got the distinct impression, as I am sure everyone else got at that estimates, that the department was very much grappling with something they had not been given very much time to look at. It was in chaos and disarray. There has been more time to go out and sell this package, and we know that since Mr Pyne and his department have gone out to talk to vice-chancellors and universities there have been a number of suggested amendments and compromises, but let us be very clear: no election campaign, no information for the public and it was sprung upon the department. It is hardly something we should be rushing, and opposing this bill is absolutely fundamental to who the Greens are. We do, as a party, believe that higher education— education—is a public good that all Australians should have access to and it should not be about the amount of money a person has; it should be about providing fair and equal opportunities for everyone. I myself had that opportunity—I did not pay for my undergraduate degree; it was free. It may be an alien concept to students now that higher education in this country can be free, but a number of generations of Australians did get free higher education thanks to the reforms set in place by Gough Whitlam. I must say I did pay HECS on my postgraduate degree, and on my studies in viticulture, but what we are looking at here is a fundamental rewriting of higher education in this country.

As a Tasmanian senator I would like to say that not only is my university, the University of Tasmania, very vulnerable to the risks posed by this deregulation—probably singularly vulnerable, as are a number of other rural universities—but Tasmania's society and its people are vulnerable to the risks of this deregulation. I will talk about that in a minute. The university is the second-biggest employer in my state and its growth is totally synchronised with the growth of the economy, not just in key areas such as, as we have often discussed in the chamber, scientific research at IMAS and at the climate institute down in Hobart but also in the two other regional campuses in Launceston, where I happen to be based, and in Burnie. I worked for the university for nearly a decade and I recently spoke about the 100-year commemoration of the first economics lecturer at the university. I am grateful for my time there and for meeting the people that I met. I had the chance to do some research and do some teaching in areas of significant passion for me.

What I know, and I suppose not many people in this chamber do know this, is that the University of Tasmania in the last four years has been going through a significant restructuring. This was put in place by the new vice-chancellor, Professor Peter Rathjen, who I happen to have a lot of time for. He began a process of what was called academic reprofiling. The university was cutting costs, putting in place voluntary redundancies and non-voluntary redundancies, efficiency dividends and a number of other cost saving measures to raise money for a war chest—a war chest to go out and hire in key areas some of the best academics in their fields. The target under this academic reprofiling campaign was for 50 new world-leading researchers—not necessarily teachers, but researchers.

I have to say, from my time at the university and the many friendships I still have with those who have left—because many have left—and the time that I have enjoyed working with the NTEU, the Tertiary Education Union in Tasmania, that it has been a very difficult time for the university. It has been difficult from a morale perspective for those who are still there, it has been difficult in terms of support services for academics and it has been difficult around job uncertainty. I campaigned very hard, as did my other colleagues at the last federal election, to get a 10 per cent increase in funding towards higher education in this country to help out not just my university but other universities. The truth is that we actually need to increase funding to universities, not to decrease it.

Getting back to the University of Tasmania, it has been going through this restructuring process and morale in some departments is at rock bottom—and I have to say that I know that at the northern campus that is the case, and I also understand that, given the large number of cuts we have seen in climate change and marine research, a number of the other big institutions are also feeling the pinch, if you will pardon the pun, down in Tasmania. May I say that, out of the academic reprofiling campaign, with a target of 50 new academics, the university so far has got 20 after four years, and only 12 of those are professors. That does not mean that the other eight are not high-grade recruits; they are very important to the future of re-ranking the University of Tasmania. So they are less than halfway through their target of attracting these high-profile academics. The theory was that you get these world-class researchers in, with big names, and you start getting the ratings that you need to become a tier 1 university. It was a very brave and ambitious campaign put in place by the vice-chancellor, Peter Rathjen, and his team. They are now facing the concept of university deregulation, a cut in funding and raising fees, with the significant pressure that is going to continue to put on the University of Tasmania, on top of four years of hardship already in trying to restructure this institution. It is going to be very difficult to manage.

To his credit, Professor Rathjen was quick out of the blocks on the back of this higher education package, saying that the university would have to find at least another $31 million a year in funding. I want to stress again that they have cut a lot out of the university already. Good academics have no support staff anymore in some departments; they have to do everything themselves. Of course, these types of things inevitably feed through to the quality of education.

The university is on an island. One of the theories with this higher education package is that competition from non-university providers was going to be essential to raising overall education levels. Well, guess what: in Tasmania we have only two—out of 150 around the country—registered non-university providers at the moment, and I am not downplaying their significance, but they are seminaries; they teach priests. So they are hardly going to be competition for the University of Tasmania.

If we are talking about the importance of lifting overall education standards, let's not beat around the bush here: Tasmania needs to lift its higher education standards, as it does its secondary education standards. But you see the flow-on effect here, the chain of events, where students are battling—or should I say the education system and the state are battling to keep secondary school students in school? Their retention rates are the lowest in the country, and suddenly you make life a whole lot harder for students contemplating doing the extra two years, getting their high school graduation diploma and then going on to university.

Suppose you were a student and you were sitting back making this decision—and let's be honest: Tasmania has a larger number of lower socioeconomic areas than other places around the country, and we have a very low retention rate in higher education. If you were trying to encourage and incentivise students to do their final two years and go on to improve their lives and invest in their own education, why would you make it harder for them? Why would you increase the amount of money they have to spend on loans into the future to pay for their degrees? It is potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus the fees they have to pay for their degrees, plus the probability—which is very real in this day and age, because it is a dog-eat-dog world that we live in, and I had absolutely no qualms in telling my students this when I taught them—that, unless they do really well at university, they are still going to struggle to find a good job, not just in Tassie but everywhere. You add this layer that suddenly, if they are unemployed and they are under 30—so they get a job and they lose it, which is a very high possibility—then they have no income support either. So not only have they invested in their future career by spending years studying with no income, building huge debts, but you then add the axe hanging above their head that, if they are to lose their first job, they are not going to get any support from the state. So all these things compound and add to uncertainty in the minds of students, young people—let's face it—who, while they have the world at their feet, also have so many of the stresses and anxieties of how they are going to cope and survive, what they are going to do and what choices they are going to make with their lives.

So to me this is pretty simple. We have a state that urgently needs incentives to get children into higher education; we have a university that is restructuring and desperately seeking a new direction being hit with another restructuring through this higher education package; and we have a state that is highly vulnerable to a failure at the University of Tasmania, given the flow-on effects of it being the second biggest employer in the state. But I know from my own work that I have done with the Greens for our Tasmania 2030 document that we are the only political party that has put together a 20-year plan for growing the Tasmanian economy, and university is one of the central planks in that. Not just in my home city of Launceston but in Burnie in the north-west and in Hobart, university has so much potential to offer so much more to Tasmania. This is another reason that Tasmania is so vulnerable.

It is written in every academic's contract at the University of Tasmania that they have a community service obligation. We have three campuses in a small state for this reason, because the university is a critical part of the community. Each academic performs a whole range of functions, which I did myself: going and talking at schools; attending public forums and all sorts of events; and working closely with community groups and social organisations. They do not get paid for this. This is what university is. It is written in the charter of the university. There are high-cost campuses that are subsidised by what we call the stars or milking cow campuses in places like Hobart. There is no doubt that the northern campuses are high cost, but remember that that was the way in which the university was set up. It was set up because it plays such an important role in the community.

I think we are faced with a very grave situation, if the crossbenchers in here were to buckle and vote for this deregulation package. Let us start with the fact that this is deceptive. It was never campaigned on at the last federal election. For something supposedly so revolutionary and good for us, you would think that Mr Pyne and Mr Abbott would have been champing at the bit to get out at the last election and campaign on this and how much money they are going to save in the budget. There is a reason they did not. Their so-called vision for this country is finding cost savings for a budget—who cares about people, fairness, equity and the anxieties of our young people?

Senator Back, I have heard you talk in here before—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—and I understand your free-market arguments about education being a private good, but remember that, if we invest in our future, in our kids and even in higher education for older Australians and they go on to earn more money—which they do; the statistics tell us that—then that is more tax revenue for the government. The government earns a return on its investment in spades. Not only do we get a good outcome for people in this country that helps drive innovation and investment in so many areas right across our economy but the government gets it back in revenue, which it can reallocate to future generations of Australians. The US model for higher education service providers of charging high fees is not the way to go; that is not Australia. We should be different. We should be proud of the fact that education has been affordable in this country for generations. I am proud of the fact that I was able to get a free education that has given me all the things that I need to go ahead with my life, and I would like to see all Australians have that opportunity. What we are debating here is absolutely critical not just to my state but to the entire country. The best thing that the crossbenchers can do for the nearly one million university students across this country, for future students, the future leaders of Australia, and for the staff at these universities and their families is to vote down this bill and start a conversation about how to build up higher education in Australia and not rip it apart.