Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am just getting used to the new seating arrangements. It feels a little bit more like a Labor Party conference with a lectern than the Senate chamber itself! I'll try and behave a little better in here than I do at those conferences.

I do want to take the time, today, broadly, to support the comments of my fellow Labor senators on the MPI debate, but I do want to make a couple of comments following Senator Faruqi's comments about the position of international students and the government's approach to the higher education sector, more broadly, in the coronavirus crisis and in the following period.

I walked into a food queue last week of Thai students, organised by a Thai community organisation in Chinatown in Sydney, 100 Thai students lined up with their bags, collecting food because they couldn't afford food. There was another queue just like that in Ultimo today. The university sector is Australia's third largest exporter. It's certainly the most labour intensive. There are 130,00 direct workers, highly skilled people, tens of thousands more people employed as casuals. It's a very big employment footprint.

The coronavirus crisis means, in the next six months, Victoria University predicts a $4.6 billion hit to that sector. It's going to compound, $19 billion over the next three years, but there's no package. There will be 21,000 lost jobs if action isn't taken by the federal government, but no package. Many of those jobs will be in core research areas in big cities. Thousands of them will be in regional communities, some of them represented by people on the other side. No package; no action. Worse still, research will stop. Classes will be cancelled. Opportunities for kids from working-class families will be gone. It's one more example where the posturing to the base, of figures on the back bench of the Liberal Party and the National Party, is dictating government policy.

This week it's been George Christensen running foreign policy for the government. A few weeks ago, it was Senator Paterson running higher education policy for the government. He stood up, reportedly, in the caucus and said:

With the ongoing China travel ban, I’m very sympathetic about the impact of tourism and farmers, but I’m less so with the universities.

The universities, he said, 'rode the cycle up; now they can ride the cycle down.' Those sorts of comments reflect a majority view on the other side and it shows what a deep misunderstanding they have of the sector and its value. Fighting a culture war against imaginary people in turtle-neck sweaters in university English departments—but what do universities actually do? They do agricultural research, medicine, cancer, mental health, engineering, economics, thinking about future work, research into space, defence technology, epidemiology and public health. Universities are full of experts. I understand the hostility of people on the other side of this chamber to experts, but they are experts, nonetheless, the very people who the federal government relied upon to develop its COVID-19 response. They don't just teach. They do deep research. One of the consequences of this failure to have a package, is that much of that research will stop. University research is not something that can be turned on and turned off just like a tap.

Further to this, there's this hostility from the other side to international students. The truth is, Australia's enormous contribution, in terms of education of international students, subsidises the places of Australian students at our universities. The increase in international students does mean less of a Commonwealth government contribution. We should be supporting these young people in this country. We have made a deep contract, not just each individual university but as a country, with the parents of these young people, to educate them and to look after them. The shameful scenes of food queues, the reports back to these people's host countries, will do enormous damage to the reputation of Australia as an educator and as, what should be, a good global citizen.