Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to sum up the debate on the Education and Other Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2017, and I want to thank the contributors to the debate. In its essentials, there has been agreement over what the bill is all about, particularly in establishing a VET student loan ombudsman to investigate and act upon student VET FEE-HELP and VET student loan complaints. There is general agreement that that is the right way to go. Senator Birmingham, from when he became the minister, has been very strong on ensuring the matters around VET FEE-HELP were addressed. This was a system that the coalition inherited, and it was a system that needed to be fixed. It was the coalition that fixed it.

The bill also increases the funding caps in the Australian Research Council Act 2001 to continue the Turnbull government's strong support for thousands of research projects. The point I would make about that is that the Research Council and all of the other bodies that provide advice and make decisions in relation to the funding of research projects do so according to fairly clear and transparent criteria, and that is important. They have got to be criteria that are available to everybody to understand, and they have to be based on well-accepted postulates of the scientific method and the like. In other words, there has to be some general agreement about the methodology that will be pursued in undertaking research and then, of course, there is a matter of peer group assessment of proposals to make sure that these can be prioritised and all of the rest of it.

They are fairly open processes in relation to something like climate change, just to respond briefly to Senator Roberts's point. For policymakers, the important thing here is what is the 'no regrets' option? The no regrets option is to address an issue that scientific opinion, on the whole, is strongly of the view needs to be addressed, and sooner rather than later. What a policymaker does is weigh up the risks of not doing something as opposed to doing something. You may do something, and it turns out the problem was not there after all. I do not think in that sense you have done yourself great damage. But if you do not do something and the problem actually turns out to be catastrophic, you have done yourself and future generations a great deal of damage. That is the dilemma the policymakers face. On that score, I commend the bill to the Senate.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.