Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] Yesterday my colleague Senator Faruqi had to withdraw her blunt assessment of this bill, so I'm going to translate. Rather than offending the Senate and telling it how it is, what I'll say is that this bill is something that sounds like 'ship' and rhymes with 'chit'. This bill is a pile of doo-doo. This bill smells like a toilet and it's really crappy. Shame on the government for bringing it on, and shame on Centre Alliance and One Nation for supporting it.

In short, this bill, the Higher Education Support Amendment (Job-Ready Graduates and Supporting Regional and Remote Students) Bill 2020, is going to more than double student fees in the humanities and social sciences. It's going to slash up to $900 million in funding for teaching and learning. It's going to punish struggling students. It gives the finger to young people. This is tragic. Education doesn't just benefit individuals; as a country, we are better off when our citizens and community members have easy access to education. Education is a right for everyone, at all stages of life.

The Greens believe education should be free, from early childhood to tertiary degrees, because it benefits society, the economy and individuals. We should be doing everything we can, particularly as we recover from this pandemic, to encourage and support people to undertake university degrees and TAFE courses and to build their skills, their knowledge and their understanding of the world. Having an educated society means we've got workers with the skills to tackle the climate emergency, to create the clean green energy revolution that we desperately need. It means we've got the social workers, the doctors, the nurses, the epidemiologists and the other specialists to help us get through this pandemic. Having an educated society means we can flourish with the creative thinkers, the problem solvers, the artists—those who can help us learn from and reflect on where we've come and where we're going. They can chart our course into the future. These are the skills that the humanities and the arts develop.

Higher education has enormous benefits. We need to invest in it, not slash it, as this bill does, at a time when we need to reset our economy post COVID. This Liberal Party bill is going in entirely the wrong direction. As I said, on average it's going to more than double students' fees, it's going to slash up to $900 million in funding and it's going to punish struggling students. Average course fees are expected to rise by over seven per cent over the next year alone, and some of the estimates that we've seen say it could take over 20 years to pay off a three-year arts degree. That's assuming, of course, that graduates will be able to access consistent and reasonably paid work, even though we are in the midst of a pandemic and recession.

The slashing of $900 million in funding for teaching and learning means that students are going to have to make up a lot of that gap through fee hikes and that the universities, which are already cutting their teaching staff to the bone, will have to make up for the rest. Consider that in the context of last night's budget, where we had the government giving $99 billion in handouts and tax cuts to businesses, with no guarantee that we'll have anything to show for it at the end of it other than businesses buying a lot of stuff—most of it probably completely imported—bigger shareholder profits and incentives for young people to be employed in short-term, insecure part-time work. That's our long-suffering young people being shafted yet again.

We're meant to be applauding the government for saying, 'We're going to give a billion dollars in funding to universities for teaching and research.' This only just covers what's being slashed from universities in this bill. And there's the underlying issue, too, of the number of places that the Liberal Party is willing to fund at university. Put simply, there just aren't enough. Large numbers of young people want to go to university, and that's a good thing. At the same time, people at every stage of life, having got through this pandemic, may be taking this opportunity to retrain and upskill, and this package does not account for that.

One of the worst aspects of this bill is that it's going to punish students who fail more than half their subjects by cutting off their access to HECS. There's already just so much inequality built into our education system. We know that people from privileged, wealthier backgrounds are able to draw upon resources and that they face far fewer challenges in being able to access education. They're less likely to need to take up a part-time job, which cuts into their time for sleep and for wellbeing. The current experiences of my two kids give me a small insight into what's currently wrong with our tertiary education sector and into how this government is failing young people. My kids are privileged, and they have a family to fall back on to support them during tough times. But the experiences of so many more of our young people are far more dire.

My eldest son, John, is doing a PhD in linguistics. He's pretty well placed because he has a scholarship and he has part-time work in linguistics to support himself. Sadly, he caught COVID three months ago and he's still unwell, so he's had to take leave from his PhD and, of course, not teach his classes. He had to move back home so that I could help look after him, which is why I'm here in Melbourne rather than in Canberra this week. His work is casual work, so there's no job security and no sick pay. If he didn't have me to fall back on he would be in a really desperate situation. He'd be unwell, unable to pay the rent and desperately worried about what the future holds. It's already been really tough for him to cope with having COVID and post-viral symptoms for three months now. I can only imagine what his state of mind would be if he had the extra burden of thinking about what the future was going to hold—just surviving to contend with. And there are many, many people in worse situations who do not have family to fall back on. This is the state of our tertiary system today.

Our younger kid, Leon, is doing an arts degree. They've worked in the hospitality and arts sectors to support themselves through their degree. Of course, there has not been much work in those fields over the last six months and no JobKeeper payments for Leon either, because all their work was casual and they hadn't been working with the same employer for over 12 months. They've been very appreciative of receiving the COVID supplement on top of their student allowance, but that's now been slashed. So they're now worrying about how they're going to be able to afford to pay the rent once the cuts kick in, because casual work in arts and hospitality doesn't look like it's about to come back in a hurry, given COVID. They know that if things really get tough, yes, I would step in with some rent assistance. They'd be able to fall back upon the bank of mum.

But I think of all the young people who don't have that security, who in the current economic circumstances are going to find themselves couch surfing or worse. Last night's budget gives tax cuts to millionaires and $99 billion worth of handouts to big business, and it hasn't helped those young people one jot. People who are doing an arts degree, like Leon, are now looking at a massive increase in their student debt. You could forgive them for thinking, 'What's the point?' or throwing in the towel, feeling really morose about what their future holds. We have a mental health pandemic in this country, and it is of no surprise. Actions like this bill are just making it worse. This is also, of course, in the context of the other massive cuts and the slashing and burning that the universities have had to do to keep afloat with the loss of international students. Under our corporatised, privatised university system, rather than supporting universities the government is just happy to see them wither away, to become a shell of their former selves.

What's more, far from supporting STEM, this government is actively presiding over a system which has seen our once great research and teaching in this area contract massively. I've got an indication of just how bad things are from a friend who is a maths lecturer at one of our leading universities. At his university there have been 355 voluntary departures. He says that so far they have saved about $50 million—$200 million is the cost saving target—by all sorts of savings, including a round of targeted redundancies. The government is promoting STEM—the usual smoke and mirrors—but maths and stats will be losing six out of about 30 academic staff, having already lost that many over the last couple of years to retirement and resignation. He says: 'The level of staff losses probably depends on how close people were to retirement. Most are pretty happy to get out. The package was pretty attractive. Stats is okay, but maths is somewhat decimated. The rest of us are wondering what the workloads are going be like going forward, and we'll need to use some of the research focused staff to do large class teaching. They won't enjoy it, and the students won't enjoy it.' This is what he means by 'large class teaching': COVID has dramatically accelerated the move to online, and he's going to be teaching a class of 900 next year—900 students online. He said, 'I did a class of 450 last semester and got a good teaching score, so I'm sure 900 will work, but it relies on recorded lectures, interactive Q&A sessions and sufficient marking support. It wasn't imposed on me—I agreed to do it—but it has become an absolute necessity with all of the departures.' I guess the main take out is the government's failure to support higher ed has led to a heap of 50-something STEM people escaping the sector, which acts directly against any support for STEM and acts directly on the quality of the university education that our young people are able to get.

The National Tertiary Education Union summed up this bill when they said:

Should this Bill be passed, the direct result will be the under-resourcing of commonwealth supported students by public universities already under substantial financial pressures due to the COVID-19 crisis, with sector losses currently projected to be around $16b over the next 3 years and 21,000 full time equivalent (FTE) job losses.

This is just tragic. The most galling part about this whole system is the hypocrisy. The Liberal Party is stacked with ministers who got their university education for free, including the Prime Minister. But now they're in power, they're just pulling the ladder up after them. As I said, the Greens believe that university should be free. I also benefited from free education at uni. Why should my generation and all of those government ministers benefit from it but leave the young people of the day high and dry? We could afford it then and we can afford it now. Again, there's spending of $99 billion in last night's budget. We can afford free education. It is a matter of choice. I want you to know what free education felt like. Free tertiary education meant that I felt the world was open to me. I didn't know what I wanted to know when I was 18. Who does? I did a science degree because I felt I could put off to a later stage making a decision about what my career was going to end up being. That meant I could study whatever I wanted. Free tertiary education was freedom. It was hope. It gave me a sense of launching off into a life full of potential—rather than a life full of debt.

Put simply, this bill is the Liberal Party's attempt to destroy the university sector under the cover of funding. It will cut university funding when they're already desperately underfunded. It will hurt Australians who need to access education. It will hurt our society. It will leave us poorer and dumber when we are facing the joint challenges of a pandemic, a climate emergency and the inequality crisis. This bill should not be passed. It will be a disaster for our future. Thank you.