Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to have this opportunity to speak on the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018. Labor opposes this bill in its current form, and I'll explain why to the Senate shortly. Firstly, I want to acknowledge the work of my colleagues Senator O'Neill, Senator Marshall and Senator Collins—the Labor members of the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee's inquiry into this bill. Their dissenting report sets out very clearly and cogently the many problems with this bill as it stands.

Next, I want to point out to the Senate the proud record of past Labor governments in the great work of broadening access to higher education in Australia. In 1940, when Australia had only six small and very elitist universities, John Curtin's wartime Labor government dramatically increased the number of scholarships available to students from government schools to enter university and also allowed women to apply for these scholarships for the first time. When Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister in 1972, Australia was still served by a small number of elite, fee-charging universities. Although the university sector certainly expanded during the Menzies era, our higher education system was still geared to the economy of the 1950s, not the new knowledge based economy which was emerging in the 1970s. Most university students still came from private schools and upper-income families. The only way students from low-income families could get to university was by winning a scholarship. Gough Whitlam and his education minister, Kim Beazley Senior, made university education free and introduced the first student funding scheme, the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme, known as TEAS. These two reforms revolutionised higher education in Australia. A whole generation of bright students from government schools were able to go to university who would not otherwise have been able to do so. They included some of the very same people who now want to withdraw that same access from the current generation of young Australians.

By the late 1980s, it was apparent that Australia's massively expanded higher education system could not be sustained on an entirely free basis. Rather than introducing up-front university fees, as the Liberal opposition of the time wanted to do, the Hawke government, through its visionary education minister, John Dawkins, introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme in 1989. Under this scheme, a fee was charged to all university students and the Commonwealth paid the balance. But students could defer payment of this fee and repay it through the tax system when their income exceeded a threshold level. This measure preserved the access to higher education created by the Whitlam government while requiring those students who gained high-income employment after graduation to repay some of the cost of their education once they could afford to do. This was a great Labor reform, which has stood the test of time.

The Howard government brought in several retrograde measures designed to undermine the principles established by Gough Whitlam of equal access and no up-front fees. They greatly increased the fees charged under the renamed HELP scheme and also allowed the universities to bring back full, up-front fees for some courses. The Howard changes have allowed the older universities to reclaim their elite status, becoming largely fee-paying institutions. And I will add there that, in fact, because those universities have become largely fee-paying institutions and because of the cuts to the higher education sector, those universities have, of course, had to go offshore to look for students, and we now see the result of this. We see that, in fact, some universities are tailoring courses for particular cohorts of overseas students, and we have seen a recent example where one higher education institution apologised for a supposedly incorrect use of course material when it was brought to the attention of the Chinese embassy here. I think this is one of the consequences that couldn't be seen at the time, but that is what happens when higher education institutions have to seek out fee-paying students in order to sustain their business model.

As a result of these changes, the ability of students from lower-income families to access universities—and, particularly, the more prestigious universities—declined, and students also amassed increasingly onerous levels of debt. It has always been obvious that the Liberal Party wants to return Australia to a two-tier higher education system in which high-prestige courses and high-prestige universities, which naturally lead to higher-income careers, are once again reserved for the children of the affluent elite, while everyone else is channelled off into lower-prestige universities or into the TAFE system, even as that system is being systematically attacked by Liberal state governments.

The last Labor government took a stand against this retrograde trend. In 2009, Julia Gillard, as education minister, introduced the demand driven system. Universities were allowed to enrol unlimited numbers of students in virtually all undergraduate courses in order to increase educational attainment and student equity. Labor's reforms aimed to increase the proportion of young Australians with undergraduate degrees to 40 per cent and raise the proportion of students from lower income families to 20 per cent. This objective was funded through the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships program. This reform was spectacularly successful. University participation rose enormously without any sacrifice of quality. Australia quickly moved from an elite higher education system to a mass higher education system. The proportion of students from lower income families rose from 16.2 per cent to 17.7 per cent between 2009 and 2014. In the same period, the overall number of students from lower income families increased by 44 per cent. Since 2009, the number of Indigenous undergraduate students has increased by 60 per cent. The number of students with a disability has increased by nearly 80 per cent.