John Hogg (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason, I thank you for your indulgence in letting us interrupt such a brilliant speech.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President; the pleasure was all mine. Mr President, can I add my congratulations on your election. I know you will do a terrific job as our President and it will be wonderful to work with you. I also congratulate Senator Sherry on his swearing-in.

Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Superannuation and Corporate Law) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To continue the second reading debate on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008, I say that this is not a question of distrust or a born-to-rule mentality on behalf of the opposition; this is a question about accountability for nearly $9 billion of public funds. The taxpayers who provide billions of dollars every year—as well as private donors—expect greater accountability for the way their money is spent.

I note that Ms Gillard, in her second reading speech, also said:

At the same time that it was ordering universities around, the previous government failed on the very matter it had direct responsibility for. It presided over a massive decline in public investment for our universities—

and so on. I should just correct this. It paints a very misleading picture of the health of our university system and should be corrected. First of all, the previous government’s funding for the higher education sector increased significantly over its term in office, from $4.2 billion in 1995-96 to $6.7 billion in 2007-08, an increase of 60 per cent, or 13 per cent in real terms. But of course the government is stuck in the old socialist paradigm: unless it is public funding, it somehow does not count. In reality, universities today have access to far higher levels of revenue than ever before and from many different sources. That is what has changed. It is estimated that the total revenue available to higher education institutions from all sources was $13 billion in 2004, almost $5.1 billion or 65 per cent more than in 1996. That is the change: the mix going into higher education has changed significantly. What this points to is that, because of government spending combined with the ability of Australian universities to attract funding from other sources, total tertiary education funding is actually above the OECD average—1.6 per cent of GDP in Australia versus 1.4 per cent, which is the OECD average.

Finally, I note that Ms Gillard also said in her second reading speech:

While the governance protocols will be removed as a condition of funding, the government will of course encourage universities to pursue good governance practices and increase productivity and efficiency.

You might ask: ‘How will the government ensure that universities continue to adhere to the best governance standards if it does not have any power to enforce those standards—in other words, if there is no sanction for following those standards?’ If the principle of self-regulation is so good and so worth while, will the government apply it, for example, to corporate regulation? After all, if it is good enough for universities, which receive nearly $9 billion a year of taxpayers’ funding, why should it not be good enough for corporations, which do not? And why is the Minister for Education rallying for the freedom of universities to manage their own affairs with respect to governance but at the same time trying to lock them into more rigid arrangements through university compacts which can set the agenda for universities for years ahead—certainly in the medium term?

The question you need to ask is: ‘Why is Labor against these governance protocols that ensure accountability?’ It is clear that it is in the best interests of the government, the Australian taxpayer and business donors to ensure accountability, transparency and increased professionalism in the way university governing bodies spend money. Furthermore, universities have been supportive of the protocols in the past—surprise, surprise! Let me quote from a joint submission from the University Chancellors Council and Universities Australia to the review of national governance protocols just last year. They said:

The view of the Chancellors and Vice Chancellors is that the existing National Governance Protocols have worked well and that little variation is needed at this stage.

They continued:

It is clear, however, that the effect of the Protocols has been positive overall and has prompted improvements in a number of areas, including in some cases the induction and continuing instruction of members of governing bodies. They have also been helpful in clarifying the respective roles of governing bodies and the executive in the governance framework.

It is highly supportive stuff. They went on to say:

The introduction of the Protocols has provided a useful focus for discussions among Chancellors and Vice Chancellors on governance issues. Some would also give them credit for a renewed focus on risk management and the relations with controlled entities.

On the question of whether the protocols have had any negative impacts on universities, the chancellors and vice-chancellors had this to say:

Not of any significance. They have increased the cost to Universities of compliance. However, to this point, Chancellors and Vice Chancellors have not seen this as a matter of major concern.

So we have a policy that has worked and has the support of all the stakeholders, yet Labor is hell-bent on abolishing it and turning back the clock for Australian universities. I think it is a good idea that when people serve on university boards they are, as the protocols say, ad personam—that they represent themselves and the university, not another governing body, not another professional body, not a trade union, but that they are there in the interests of the university and the university alone in a personal capacity.

If this is indeed the case then I am concerned about this bill. It represents an example, perhaps a scandalous example, of what the supposedly new Labor stands for, which just like old Labor puts the interests of unions and their finances above other interests—in this case the interests of universities, students, taxpayers and accountability to the public. Sure, some universities might like this idea because they, particularly, would not want accountability. That is not their major aim; their major aim is to spend money as they will. I am not as concerned about universities as I am about the taxpayer and making sure there is accountability to the Australian public and the Australian parliament. That is the issue here. It is far more significant than any other issue. The issue is accountability.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today on behalf of the Australian Greens to support the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008. The bill effectively repeals a provision in the Higher Education Support Act which tied university funding to compliance with workplace relations requirements and governance requirements. The Australian Greens did not support this provision when it was introduced by the previous government; it was bad policy then and it is bad policy now.

I listened carefully to the contribution from the opposition. The point is not accountability; the point is tying everything to funding. It is a punitive provision. It is a bullying provision. The best thing about this legislation, apart from the fact that it removes these punitive provisions in relation to university funding, is that it spells the end, I hope, of that meanness, of that awful culture, that has existed for the last 10 years whereby everybody was threatened with their funding if they did not behave and do as the government told them, regardless of whether it was in the best interests of their university, their school, their community or whatever it was. It became a feature of the Howard government years that people were afraid to speak out for fear of losing their funding. Artists were afraid to say anything because they were in fear of losing their grants money and so on and so forth. In this case it was universities who were told, ‘Either you introduce the AWAs or you do not get your funding. You have these protocols or you do not get your funding.’

It is not an issue of accountability. There is not a single person in this chamber who does not want to make sure that taxpayers’ money is used wisely, that whichever institution or individual receives that money is accountable for the way it is spent, and that it is transparent. I would be supportive of that regardless. This bill does not abolish the protocol that is there. What it does say is that it is no longer tied. There is not that punitive imposition of the government’s will by holding universities to ransom to an ideological perspective. That was what it was about. It was simply holding universities to ransom to an ideological perspective.

Whilst I appreciate the opposition’s contribution in relation to the vice-chancellors, I also draw attention to the fact that in the vice-chancellors review they said:

... it was not wise to apply a “one size fits all” governance model (that extends into areas of management), particularly when the stated object of the Government is to promote diversity ...

We can all quote from various reports about what vice-chancellors may or may not have said. It is quite clear there that they are not saying that the governance protocols en masse have been necessarily bad; what they are saying is that when you impose something and make it a condition of funding you take away the capacity for diversity.

What I hope this bill will signal is a more collaborative and cooperative approach. If there is one thing that I would welcome from this government—apart from a change of position on climate change, which of course I do not need to tell the Senate about—it is the education revolution. I long for this education revolution. We cannot move to a low-carbon economy, we cannot move beyond being a resource based economy where we dig up, cut down and ship away until we invest in education—and public education and in the public interest—and get rid of this notion that all research has to be tied to some commercial outcome. We have lost much investment in public interest research in the last decade and we are not going to get through this transition to a low-carbon economy, we are not going to get to where we need to be, unless we unshackle the brilliance of the minds in our universities to pursue their higher education research without being tied to a commercial objective by funding from some private entity. Yes, there is a role for private investment in universities; I could not agree more. But I am tired of the fact that so much of the research in the universities is now owned in partnership by commercial entities and we are not unshackling that brilliance to go out and pursue public interest research, which has led to some of the major breakthroughs we have seen in this past century and certainly will in the coming century.

I am excited by what I hope will be an education revolution. I am not encouraged at this point, I have to say, by the fact that the government has squibbed the issue of public school funding. There is a big report out today by an academic in relation to that, saying indeed that what we are getting for the next few years in public school funding is precisely the Howard government model and it is simply not good enough. That certainly does not suggest the education revolution is underway in the manner in which I understand revolution. Revolution to me means something exciting and something that throws over the old model; not something that maintains the old model until 2011 or 2012. So we will have plenty to say about the public education model. But in relation to this bill, as I indicated, under the previous government the workplace relations requirements included an obligation for universities to offer AWAs to university staff. In my view that was an unacceptable interference with university independence and a blatant attempt by the former government to impose its industrial relations ideology. We have never supported AWAs in any context and we are glad to see the back of them in this bill.

Similarly, the nexus between funding and governance has to be broken for all the reasons that I have given. I want to see a different culture. I want to see a collaborative, cooperative culture in which we go and talk to universities about how they might envisage the best way to manage their institutions given the changing requirements for how we deliver education in a carbon constrained economy and how we deliver education in the transition to an economy no longer totally dependent on resource extraction, to move into a much more sophisticated and complex economy where knowledge and service industries become much more prominent. So I am looking forward to that kind of collaborative, cooperative effort to encourage good governance and more diversity in our university sector. I am pleased that the opposition at least has given up on the workplace relations requirements. I do not think that it is wise to hang onto imposing the governance requirements through those threats to funding and I indicate now that the Australian Greens will not be supporting the opposition amendments to be moved by Senator Mason.

What I most look forward to is a positive agenda for higher education and a big investment in education in the public interest and in Australia’s best interests. I am aware that the Prime Minister today is making a headland speech. He no doubt will be trying to tell the story of how Australia will look under a Rudd government. I would hope that in telling the story of how Australia will look he will talk about a healthier, happier Australia, an Australia in which everyone has access to high-quality, well-funded public education and where everybody is encouraged to achieve to their highest potential through higher education, whether that is in vocational training or through the university sector. What we need is a country which is innovative, where lifelong learning is encouraged and where we do not have the notion that you leave school and it is all over. Instead, you have an idea that through your whole life you can access education and you can change careers. More than ever before people are going to need to change careers to adapt to a different way of living and a different way of delivering education.

I have posed myself the question: how are we going to deliver education in a carbon constrained world? How are we going to deliver education when the oil price is $150 or $200 a barrel? How are we going to completely transform education delivery through information technology so that wherever you are in a country, no matter how big or how small your community, you can access global learning opportunities. That is what I consider to be an education revolution. Putting computers in schools is a great start, but it is no use offering schools computers if you do not provide them with the funding to rewire and reconfigure their schools to actually make the best use of them. A lot of the costs associated with these things are going to be borne by fundraising efforts by councils and parents and friends bodies around the country. Anyway, what we are seeing with the computers is simply a substitution of the Howard government’s Investing in Our Schools Program, which was stopped. That money is being used for computers. So it is not actually an additional rollout of funding; it is a substitution. Again, it goes across all schools but it does not address that inequity in terms of the reduced share of Commonwealth funding that public schools are getting.

So let us hear the Prime Minister’s headland speech today. Let us hear the new narrative for the country. Let us hear that this country is going to be a kinder, more compassionate, more inspired nation, a country in which we encourage innovation and a massive investment in education from early childhood through to universities, where the old punitive ‘do as we say or we will take away your funding’ mentality is gone, where we have a government that goes out and says, ‘Yes, we want good governance. Yes, we want accountability. Yes, we want transparency. But we are coming to talk to you about it. We are going to collaborate with you about it. We are going to talk about how best to deliver education to the Australian community in this century and we are going to get rid of these awful AWAs and forget that we ever had to deal with them to the extent that is possible given the harm that they have done to the morale in universities and other workplaces around the country.’ I want to look forward and I am very supportive of this legislation. It just goes to show that a change of government can make a difference in some areas and that what was bad policy is now taken off the statutes. Thank you.

Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think that it is important that we focus our attention on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008 today because it represents a critical stage in Labor’s program to remove Work Choices. I am pleased today that Senator Mason has acknowledged the mandate that we achieved in the last election in relation to the Work Choices component of the higher education arrangements, but there are also elements, which I will cover in a moment in responding to Senator Milne’s comments, that apply much more broadly than to just the workplace relations requirements that need to be removed here.

These arrangements, the higher education workplace relations requirements and the national governance protocols, were a core example of the excesses of the Howard government, a core example of their highly interventionist approach in attempting to shift the balance of workplace relations away from workers’ rights and entitlements. In some ways it is quite contradictory to their ideology that choice and flexibility should apply, and I note that in his contribution this morning Senator Mason referred to looking at corporations and what they do. I would like to see where we are requiring a certain board size or other prescription similar to that in relation to our corporations’ arrangements. Here we had perhaps the strongest interventionist approach by the former government in their attempt to shift the balance in workplace relations. I am pleased that today at this stage of a Labor government we are able to deal with not only the workplace relations issues but also the less direct approach taken by the then government and their protocols to try to control the employment relations in higher education.

The bill will amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003, HESA, by repealing the section requiring that higher education providers meet any higher education workplace relations requirements and national governance protocols imposed under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme guidelines. Under section 33.17 a provider would have its basic CGS grant amount reduced by approximately 7.5 per cent if at 31 August each year it failed to satisfy the minister that it had complied with both the higher education workplace relations requirements and the national governance protocols in the previous year—highly interventionist and high level of monitoring of the behaviour of these institutions, in a very inflexible manner.

The higher education workplace relations requirements consist of the following five elements. There is the so-called choice in agreement making, including the requirement to offer Australian workplace agreements to all employees. The abolition of AWAs was a key promise of this government, as I have said; we received that mandate in the last election, and I am glad the opposition has seen that far in its approach today. The other elements are: direct relationships with staff, which prohibits automatic third-party representation; workplace flexibility; productivity and performance; and freedom of association provisions.

I will move on now to the national governance protocols, which are a set of standards primarily covering the size and composition of governing bodies and the duties of governing body members. Repealing the higher education workplace relations requirements and the governance protocols will remove only the conditions on CGS funding. Full funding will be retained by providers. While the national governance protocols will be removed as a condition of funding, the government will continue to encourage universities to adopt good governance practices. This will include pursuing options for a non-legislative focus on governance standards in response to the forthcoming report of the review of the national governance protocols by the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. We are still serious about looking at outcomes from our educational institutions, and that review process will ensure that it is done in a healthy and constructive environment. We believe that the removal of the requirements as a condition of funding will be welcomed by the higher education sector. As Senator Milne said, we could all sit here today and quote various comments from the sector about the applications of these provisions, and I look forward to further elaboration on some of those points.

I will cover generally the culture of the higher education sector. Senator Carr and I recall the review that the Senate did called Universities in crisis, and I am sure there are many updates that I have not followed as closely in recent years. But I want to touch firstly on Australian workplace agreements. Remember, this was the Howard government’s approach to trying to force growth in the number of Australian workplace agreements. In the early stages they were not particularly popular; they were not the greatest way for employers to manage their day-to-day affairs on the ground. So what the Howard government did next was seek to impose AWAs artificially through its institutional arrangements, such as its funding arrangements for higher education. Through the Senate and through Senate estimates we spent much time trying to get details about the outcomes of AWAs, and the Office of the Employment Advocate had been constrained in the information that it would provide. There was very limited transparency. I recall Senator Mason saying how important he felt transparency should be.

At the end of the day, when we finally had access to the data about what AWAs were actually achieving on the ground, there were some outcomes that I will put before the Senate as a very tidy summary of the impact of AWAs, whether in higher education or across the board. Seventy per cent of them removed shiftwork loadings, 68 per cent of them removed annual leave loadings and 65 per cent removed penalty rates. With my occupational background, as someone who has worked in a sector where penalty rates often significantly supplement low rates of pay for part-time, predominantly female and young workers, I can say that 65 per cent losing penalty rates was an enormous impact on people’s take-home pay. This is why the Howard government was not re-elected.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We supported their removal in July—why don’t you mention that?

Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me continue on the impact of AWAs: 63 per cent removed incentive based payments and bonuses, 61 per cent removed days to be substituted for public holidays, 56 per cent removed monetary allowances, 50 per cent removed public holiday payments, 49 per cent removed overtime loadings and 31 per cent removed basic things such as rest breaks from people’s employment arrangements. Senator Mason knows this story and has accepted the mandate we have to remove prescriptive arrangements in the higher education sector that helped roll out Australian workplace agreements. Compared to a system based on individual contracts, collective bargaining offers both fairness, in that it evens up employers’ and employees’ relative bargaining power, and a framework in which employers and employees can effectively negotiate productivity gains. That is the core of our approach. That is the approach we will take not only to the workplace relations aspects of higher education but also to the governance aspects.

It is worth noting the context within which these requirements were imposed by the Howard government in the first instance. Let me paint a different picture from the one that Senator Mason painted in his second reading debate contribution. There was a general decline in the funding levels and morale in the university sector under the previous government. In its report Universities in crisis, released in September 2001, the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education References Committee noted some of the key changes in the workplace environment at Australian universities. Between 1990 and 1999, the total number of students increased by around 70 per cent. During this period the number of international students quadrupled and the number of higher degree students tripled. Yet during this period the total number of academic staff was effectively static: 34,184 in 1990 and 34,926 in 1999. And, while overall academic job numbers did not increase much at all, there was an increase in the number of part-time academic staff. As these figures suggest, this period saw a fall in staff-to-student ratios. Along with other changes in the workplace, such as increased reporting obligations and technological change, the increased workload resulted in low morale and high stress levels.

I wanted to stress these factors that have particularly impacted on the university sector in recent times, since they have made that sector particularly unsuitable to the introduction of highly individualistic, confrontational workplace relations models such as Work Choices. The requirements outlined also reflected the previous government’s relations with the university sector and were marked by distrust. Senator Mason said in his earlier contribution, ‘Trust us.’ What has occurred in this sector has been marked by a relationship of distrust.

One of the worst manifestations of this distrust and more general mismanagement of the university sector was the requirement that the universities abide by the requirements that this bill abolishes in relation to Australian workplace agreements. ‘Trust us,’ Senator Mason says, and yet it was the Howard government that introduced these arrangements involving Australian workplace agreements into the university sector. Why did they do it? I still believe they did it because they wanted to artificially pump up the number of Australian workplace agreements. It was nothing to do with good governance in the sector. These were requirements that forced universities to pursue the Howard government approach to workplace relations or suffer financial penalty.

The previous arrangements show that the Howard government thought it knew better than university leaders and staff how to run their institutions. The changes made by the bill will clear the way for the Rudd Labor government to develop healthy new relationships with our universities based on trust and mutual respect and the review I outlined earlier.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason interjecting—

Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason says these comments about Australian workplace agreements are not relevant, but I say they set the culture that has carried over into the government’s requirements. Senator Mason earlier quipped about a socialist approach to matters. Yet what could be a more socialist approach than prescribing the size of university boards, for instance?

The governance arrangements here, as I am sure Senator Carr will outline in a bit more detail, are all about the processes. They are not about measuring outcomes or performance on an outcome basis. This is what our review will ensure will be the case in the future. The end of the workplace relations requirements removed by the bill will clear the way for us to establish healthier and more mutually respectful relations with the higher education sector. This is vital if we are to improve the performance of the university sector. Full Commonwealth grant funding will now flow to the universities if this bill proceeds as it stands rather than as the opposition seeks to amend it. In the future, relations between government and universities should be based around negotiated funding compacts reflecting the distinctive missions of each university. We need that flexibility and we need that diversity.

Senator Mason says, ‘Trust us.’ I think the very nature of these requirements and the arrangements for Australian workplace agreements set the field so that, no, that trust could not occur in the first instance. He suggests an analogy with corporations, yet this could not be more different from the arrangements that would apply to corporations. Senator Mason accuses us of a socialist approach, yet these very arrangements are so interventionist and so prescriptive that they make that comment laughable. Senator Mason, I conclude my comments in this debate on the second reading with an interest in hearing you justify why these governance arrangements should remain, because they seem very contrary even to the principles that you have raised in your comments. I look forward to hearing you discuss them further, but my general point at this stage in the debate is that the previous government, now the opposition, have no track record here. Your form is appalling. The form demonstrated by what was established in both these higher education workplace requirements and the governance requirements is appalling.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason interjecting—

Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is not about accountability; this is about the Howard government seeking to impose on universities its view on how universities should be managed. This is all about the Howard government believing it knew better than any of the governance arrangements in the higher education sector—that somehow, sitting here in cabinet in Canberra, you knew what size a university board should be, and that is simply outrageous. I encourage other senators to look closely at the opposition’s proposed amendments, because I think, indirectly, they simply seek to keep alive the prescription and the intervention in the administrative arrangements of universities in a way which undermines trust and improvements in the productivity and outcomes of those institutions.

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to be able to take part in this debate today because it demonstrates a serious point about the difference between the way our government will approach the area of higher education and communication in this sector and the approach of the previous government. We have already heard a range of issues put forward today in terms of how this piece of legislation, the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008, will be enacted to ensure that there will be a change to an ongoing process. What we must understand is that the issue of higher education in our community is an ongoing process. This is but one step, but it is a very important step, as you would know, Mr Acting Deputy President Trood, coming from that industry yourself.

We have heard that we are particularly looking at two elements: the issue of the protocols and the issue of the workplace relations requirements put in place by the previous government around 2005. This was after some discussion with the community and the industry, but all too little, because what we have heard is that, consistently over the last few years, there has been discussion about what the impact of this imposition of process would be on the operations of the universities and, perhaps more importantly than just the operations—and universities are businesses in some sense—on the expanse, the enthusiasm, the energy and the creative elements of universities as educational institutions. In her contribution Senator Milne touched on the importance in our community of having the freedom of academic expression, the freedom of creativity and the freedom to allow people to operate in their own way and work with their communities to come up with an education outcome which is best for all of us but allows individuals to express their own views and their own ways of operation.

When the then government were talking about introducing these limitations and imposing these processes in the 2005 period they talked a lot, as has Senator Mason today, about the issue of accountability. It is very clear that no-one is running away from the element of accountability, because we know that it is a strong responsibility of government to provide public funding for our higher education area. There will be further input during this debate about exactly how effectively funding is made to universities. We know that there is so much evidence on record about the role of public funding in universities and we know that the Howard government, who were insisting quite publicly and strenuously on the issues of accountability, proper processes and effective operations, did not fulfil their own responsibility to the real economic needs and funding processes for education. No matter how you trot out the figures, Senator Mason—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—no matter how you do the graphs and no matter what processes you put in place, there were cuts to the funding for public education in the higher education field in our community over the last few years. That is without question. I do take the point, though, that Senator Mason made earlier about the need for private investment as well as public investment. There is no argument about that.

What we are talking about, however, is the government’s responsibility for the funding program. There has to be an acceptance that the government of the day must take on the responsibility for effective funding of the higher education area—however, not alone. We are not saying that it is either/or. We need to encourage effective private investment in this area as well. All too often under the previous government when we were talking about this area of higher education, and in fact in other areas as well, it had been put forward that you had to have one model or another. There was no availability for flexibility and there was no availability for cooperation. If you did not follow a certain pattern you were flawed and wrong and, depending on the day, you could even be accused of being socialist in your view.

What we need to understand is that we have to engage our community effectively so that there is a wider engagement, ownership and excitement about how higher education can work. That means not just public investment, although the core responsibility of any government in this area must be public funding for universities; we also have to admit that we need to engage other parts of the community so that we can get private funding. We also need a sense that there is a flexibility in models so that people can experiment to an extent to see what best suits the needs of their own region, the needs of their own students and the needs of their own professional areas.

Coming from a regional part of Queensland, I know that it has been particularly difficult to look at the range of university campuses in Queensland, which vary greatly. There is no way that you can say that one model, one process or one set of rules can be applied to all the university programs in Queensland, let alone the whole of Australia. Working in the Darling Downs area with the University of Southern Queensland, I know there have been great difficulties—struggling with reduced funding, with varying campus responsibilities, and also with a focus on pushing students into a number of particular professional areas. Having the flexibility to offer and expand a range of programs and courses would be an incentive to get more people into the higher education area. The imposition of single models of restrictive funding and of particular philosophical approaches actually makes it more difficult for university governance bodies, who are trying to ensure that they can put in place models which best suit their needs locally and encourage more Australians into higher education. It surely must be one of the aims of any government to have more people benefit from the education process.

I will not go on with the term ‘education revolution’ because I think we have heard that on a number of occasions in this place. Nonetheless, the term ‘revolution’ does encourage people to have a certain excitement about the process. I am trying to get across the message that the process in the legislation imposed by the previous government tended to restrict that excitement and that engagement. It put more focus on universities meeting those rules than on their being able to respond to their communities with effective education programs.

There will be discussion today about the range of industrial relations programs that were imposed on the higher education area as a step by the previous government, bit by bit, to ensure that their industrial relations program was rolled out across the higher education community. The higher education area was an easy target to pick on. The higher education area, as we know, has great dependence on the public purse for funding. It was a stroke of brilliance in many ways to say at that time, ‘As a government we have the responsibility to provide funding to the university sector,’ which was accepted, but at the same time use a sector of our community as an experiment in some ways—perhaps by using a scientific approach—in industrial relations policy.

There can be no doubt that the reforms that were rolled out in the higher education workplace relations legislation represented a list of core elements of the previous government’s industrial relations programs. There were snippets of the Work Choices program put in place in this industry. You could tick them off. You could have the focus on AWAs, the lack of flexibility in process, the lack of security, the lack of what was called by the previous government ‘intrusion of third parties’, which we all saw as the involvement of staff associations or workplace associations in helping members. That intrusion policy limited the number of people allowed on university governance boards.

I disagree, Senator Mason, with your assessment of the qualities that you brought to your role as part of a university governing organisation. I am sure that you brought great skills to this area—as indeed so many people did in working on the university governance panels. I know how valuable it was for a range of university areas to have people from the local community, such as local political figures—and local and state politicians were always involved in the universities—and student union people, involved in working on the governance of their university. It was ownership of their workplace.

However, that was one of the core areas that had to be reduced in the changes that the previous government imposed in their one-size-fits-all model. They told universities across the country what the size, shape, role, background and experience of their university governing panels must be. The same process of governance, ownership and imposition went through to the way that the workers were involved in those universities. This included workplace relations, conditions, how they could interact with their employer, whom they could involve when talking with their employer and how they could interact when developing workplace agreements—all those things that are part of the daily operations of a workplace.

Once again, the government of the day did that without any shame and without trying to hide it—there was no element of the previous government that tried to hide what they were doing. What they were doing through their workplace relations policy in the university and higher education sector was putting in place exactly what they hoped to do in the rest of the Australian community. However, at no time did we on this side of the chamber, the Labor Party, accede to that. We did not support it. We asked questions about the link between the workplace relations situation in universities and their funding. We consistently asked questions from the time that these reforms were first rolled out.

There is no surprise in this debate, either. We are working through exactly the same issues that we worked through when the previous government imposed this legislation. What we are saying is that there is a key difference in the way that we believe that universities should be funded and how that is linked to their governance. There is a clear difference in the way we believe that workplace relations should operate on university campuses.

The time has come to put this clearly into our legislation. We have listened to all the issues, fears and complaints that were raised in the range of Senate committee inquiries that went on when this legislation was brought in. What is on the agenda today is to once and for all break the key linkage between funding and people imposing from outside what they think should occur in governance and in workplace relations. That is not running away in any sense from the core issue of accountability. There is not a single university governing body or community in this country that does not acknowledge their obligation to the government, to the student and to the community to have responsible practices.

Senator Mason pointed out that the protocols were put together by many of the universities. That is laudable. The kinds of things that they talked about will be, as Senator Collins pointed out, considered in the ministerial council response. However, that is not saying that the protocols should be linked to the funding. This is not an argument as to whether there should be protocols or special arrangements at individual campuses for how they interact with their communities. We do not say that that is not right. What we are saying is that linking the imposition of a set of rules on workplace relations with genuine funding that enables them to continue their job is wrong. That stifles the ability of the universities to be effective in their own way and has a punitive element to it.

We have heard already in the discussion today the word ‘trust’ mentioned many times. The previous legislation made a public statement that there was no trust between the government and the university governing bodies and communities around this country. The government basically said: ‘We felt that they could not be trusted to effectively implement their own arrangements on governance and on workplace relations. We felt that there had to be an intrusion from the government such that if you do not follow our model you will not be funded.’ And the government clearly understood that these universities—as they have told us many times—rely almost totally on the effective use of public funding to continue their operations.

If the people who are running the budget tell the universities—which are desperately trying to continue to operate—that unless they fulfil these rules they will not be funded, it is pretty easy to see that the response would have to be compliance. And that is what happened. Despite the concerns that were raised, despite the worries of the people who were working in the institutions and despite the concerns of people who had worked at different times in the area and came back and said that they did not like what was happening or the constraints that were being put on them or the fact that they were not able to make their own decisions—despite all that—the universities had to respond. Despite the public concern, despite the evidence that came to the Senate inquiries and despite the concern of people writing in the international press about how education could be maintained in a free and effective way, the universities and the vice-chancellors—to maintain their existence and to be able to continue operating—had to respond.

The opposition maintains that that is an argument in favour of keeping them—because all the universities worked to the protocols and used the higher education workplace relations system. Of course they did, or they would not have been able to operate. It is an odd argument to say that they did it and so therefore they must keep operating in the same way, when you know that their only way of keeping their funding and continuing was to meet the requirements.

In terms of where we go next I think it is particularly important, as has been mentioned by previous speakers, that we maintain the professional respect that we have for the university sector in this country, that we acknowledge that they are effective managers in many cases and that they do know what the professional needs of their community, their students and their workplace are. That does not mean that we do not expect that there are responsible business operations and that people are responsible to the government for ensuring that they run their business well.

What we hope to have and what we hope we will be able to work effectively towards in a whole-of-government way is a dynamic relationship between the higher education sector, the government and the community. This means that we will be open to and that we will be encouraging wider community financing and wider community involvement, but that we will also recognise that the ongoing response of strong government is to ensure that there is an effective higher education sector in our community. If we do not do that, we are actually not fulfilling our responsibility to our community and to our young people. It will be a particularly challenging time so that our research, our education process and our ability to be a higher education nation can be done together not only with a degree of trust but also with an understanding that we are working together in this process.

In terms of where we go next it is important that there is an understanding that there is knowledge in our university sector, that they are not some kind of irresponsible group that do not understand how they should operate to ensure that they are doing their job effectively. If we do not have that trust, we will immediately go back to a situation where we are just issuing demands and orders and there is some kind of automatic response. That is not what we expect from the area that should be responsible for creative thought, creative industry and a dynamic future for our whole country.

It is important that these higher education workplace relations requirements and national governance protocols are removed from law. That is not to say that there is not an understanding that there need to be high results in the sector. What it says is that this punitive and, I think, very outmoded process of linking behaviour to money automatically—this constraint of individual and flexible approaches—should not be part of the education future for our country.

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to provide a contribution to the debate relating to the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008, which goes to the removal of the infamous HEWRRs—the higher education workplace relations requirements.

The main objective of this bill is to amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 by repealing section 33.17, although there are some other minor technical changes too. Under the previous government, this section imposed on all higher education providers various funding conditions, under both the HEWRRs and the national governance protocols. This section provided for the government being able to reduce the higher education providers grant for Commonwealth funded places under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme if that provider was found not to have meet the HEWRRs and the governance protocols by the compliance date specified in the CGS guidelines.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They are gone. I don’t want to keep saying this. They are gone. Legally, they don’t exist.

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason, I take your interjection. What we are actually talking about here is a future and a way forward under the Labor Party—under our government—now. I know it might pain you to have to talk about history and the past and the way in which you sacrificed higher education for the sake of your ideology in terms of workplace relations and education outcomes, but please at least give me the courtesy of providing my contribution in this debate.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a legal question—not that I’m a good lawyer!

Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Please continue, Senator Crossin.

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will attempt to continue. I understand how painful it may be for people now on the opposition benches to have to trawl through the past and the way in which higher education was gutted, defunded and disregarded under their policies, but now that they are in opposition they are just going to have to sit there and listen to us. Even though it might contain a little bit of history, that is just the way it is while we continue to push forward with our agenda. Sometimes we have to review the way in which policies were treated in the past in order to move forward.

Under the strong arm of the Howard government’s requirements under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, failure to comply by the end of each August would see higher education provider funding reduced by, in some cases, nearly 7.5 per cent. The repeal of section 33.17 removes conditions that were compliant under the CGS funding. It in no way reduces the higher education provider funding. They will retain their full funding but regain their former freedom in how they operate in the areas of workplace relations and governance.

The higher education workplace relations requirements were imposed on providers purely to support the previous government’s ideological workplace relations policies. At a time when they were espousing flexibility in the workplace, at a time when they were trying to abolish pattern bargaining and at a time when they were trying to impose Australian workplace agreements on workers and businesses in this country, they also decided that they would restrict what was happening in the higher education sector.

It is a peculiar sort of ideology here, where under the former government you had the hypocrisy of wanting to ensure higher education workplaces and universities conformed and were restricted in the way in which they could operate, but, out there in the big wide world of industrial relations, flexibility and individuality was being promoted. Quite clearly, Australian voters found this approach to be grossly unfair and unbalanced when they so soundly rejected that party in the November election last year. This government, however, is replacing past policies with a much fairer set of rules and a balanced system and is doing so at the earliest opportunity and removing the previous, unfair Work Choices laws.

The HEWRRs included the requirement that providers offer AWAs to all staff—they had to offer AWAs to all staff; there was no choice at all. If they did not, their funding was restricted. The HEWRRs were implemented along with a whole other set of criteria that universities were forced to offer in their bargaining rounds. Universities had to deal with staff with no automatic third-party representation. As with all the former government’s workplace relations legislation, this simply made it harder for employees to negotiate and bargain their terms and conditions with their employers. It meant extra work for university management too, but the negotiating balance weighed against the workers.

There is another, underlying story to this. This was not just about universities being compelled to comply with the previous government’s ideology on workplace relations policies, and it was not only about trying to offer AWAs across the board. We know, as Senator Collins has said, AWAs had been a resounding failure, since at that stage only one per cent of the employing population had taken up offering AWAs. So this was an attempt by the former government to push their workplace relations policy by force onto the university sector, hoping that AWAs would be taken up by universities and by staff.

The underlying message is that that was an attack on the National Tertiary Education Union, who has repeatedly represented workers very successfully in this industry. It was the third union that had been in the gun sights of the previous government. They started with the MUA with the waterfront dispute, they moved on to the CFMEU with the building industry royal commission and then they decided to move on to the National Tertiary Education Union through the higher education sector. All three attempts of course have failed. Those unions are now stronger, better and richer for that attack by the previous government. There is no doubt that all three unions have continued to survive and will continue to survive, and the National Tertiary Education Union has in fact gone from strength to strength. So the former government’s subliminal attempts to deregulate the workplace and to cut out the trade union movement so successfully representing workers in this area failed.

The removal of the HEWWRs means that there will now no longer be any requirement that higher education providers offer AWAs as a condition of receiving their full funding. Of course, they will not be able to offer AWAs because thanks to our government they no longer exist under law in this country. The previous government thought that this intervention in our higher education institutions would improve their flexibility, productivity and performance—that is the excuse that they gave, not based on any evidence of fact. We know that most universities found it to be a gross interference in the way in which they operated, both as academics and as researchers. Organisations of excellence in this country when it comes to educational and intellectual outcomes, they saw it as yet another attempt by the previous government to have control without responsibility and to try to get more from universities already severely stressed by the ongoing real funding cuts by the Howard government. Let’s remember that in 1996, the very first year of the Howard government, $800 million was gutted from this sector. It has never recovered from those massive funding cuts.

The national governance protocols were a set of standards mainly covering the size, composition and duties of the universities’ governing bodies. It was a one-size-fits-all model. The protocols made it more difficult for certain groups of people to get representation on a university governing body, through size limits and through requiring certain other groups to have representation. So politicians, students and of course trade unions found it harder, if not impossible, to get representation on governing bodies. Even though quite a number of universities still wanted them to be there, they were forced to not be there through the legislation the previous government introduced.

Removal of the national governance protocol requirements in no way indicates that we do not support good, sound governance. But I actually believe universities do operate on a model of sound governance, had done prior to the previous federal government coming into existence and will continue to do so. We will most assuredly continue to encourage the adoption of good governance policies. I am sure our higher education institutes will welcome this change in the way in which they can operate.

The removal of these two elements from the field of higher education funding reflects our public election commitments in this area. Our commitment to remove AWAs from the workplace will be and has been welcomed across the board, not only by higher education providers. In 2005 the AVCC, now known as Universities Australia, opposed HEWRRs, claiming they would be inflexible and intrusive and would increase administrative workloads. This was evident in their submission to the Senate inquiry into the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Workplace Relations Requirements) Bill 2005. Going back three years, even those who were in charge of universities—vice-chancellors around this country, through the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee—were not impressed and were not supportive of the moves of the previous government.

In the white paper of 2006 on higher education and research—you might remember the infamous Australia’s universities: building our future in the worldLabor promised to end government interference in the internal management of universities and reduce compliance and reporting burdens. So this has been on our statute for quite a number of years. The removal of the governance protocols was one such step towards implementing what was our policy from those years.

This bill reflects our belief that our providers of higher education know best how to operate their institutions and do not need and certainly do not appreciate heavy-handed interference from government in running them. Vice-chancellors are well-educated, very intellectually informed and are good and competent managers. The protocols’ removal will allow our universities to give their time and effort to where it is needed most, and that is in the delivery of good quality teaching and even better research. It is expected that removal of those requirements will also open the way for a more trusting, healthy and cooperative approach between government and higher education.

Let’s be honest; in the years under the Howard government that relationship had certainly not prospered, developed and come to fruition in the way that it would have if there had been a more genuine dialogue between the universities and the federal government. Clearly, we now see the demarcation of the extreme difference between this government’s policies and those of the last, which was increasingly prescriptive, with funding conditions being held over the providers like a big stick.

Our policies remove from our higher education providers the unwarranted and unfair Work Choices requirements and the bullying government interference. The policies remove the previous government’s ideologically driven workplace agenda, and adherence to an interfering, one-size-fits-all governance model.

As I said earlier, the Howard government had seemingly believed that their bullying intervention would squeeze more productivity out of our universities, which were already severely strained by funding cuts over many years. They believed that AWAs would enable university administrators to reduce the terms and conditions of staff. Let’s face it; that is what it was all about. It was not about better quality education or improving research outcomes; it was about reducing the terms and conditions of staff to employ more short-term or casual staff and to try and get more output for less input.

The previous government believed that universities were very inefficient administrators and wasted resources through poor management and governance. Unfortunately, while it was bullying our universities the previous government also presided over a huge decline in public funding for our universities. This is sufficiently well known. From 1996 to 2004, while most other OECD countries increased spending on tertiary education by up to 49 per cent, our government managed to buck the trend in an almighty way. It cut tertiary expenditure by four per cent, forcing universities to rely more and more on student fees for their income. We certainly saw the reduction in public funding in the university sector compensated for by an increase in student fees and a heavy reliance on third-party contributions from business and industry.

The minister pointed out in a speech to the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Conference in March of this year that world governments had been putting an increasing focus on all areas of education, particularly higher education—except here, in this country. Minister Gillard described higher education in Australia as having been ‘subjected to a seemingly random blend of neglect with occasional bursts of ideologically driven interference’, where overall public funding was cut. From my point of view that is a very able synopsis of the scenario over the last 10 years in the higher education industry in this country.

Our universities have had to struggle for the last decade to increase class sizes, cut tutorials and seminars, and cut out some courses altogether. Infrastructure maintenance has been neglected, leaving a huge backlog in this area. Financing has become chaotic and unsustainable, based on an ever-increasing fee burden and reliance on revenue from overseas students—a dangerous situation indeed as more countries invest in higher education and compete for these students.

Can I just say that my study tour to China some two years ago, where I investigated and researched the impact of the funding decline in higher education on Chinese students coming to this country, highlighted to me that the decisions that we have made in this country, to defund and neglect higher education, ripple around the world. I think it was a point that was lost on the previous, Howard government. Certainly Chinese public servants and credible representatives from their Ministry of Education were saying to me, ‘While ever you neglect higher education in your country it has an amazing impact on where our students choose to study.’ The students do not come to Australia because it is cheap. They want to come to Australia because the quality is good, and they will not come to Australia if they believe that they can get a better deal in other countries around the world. But the previous government failed to realise and appreciate that, of course.

The legacy of this is of course that our higher education system lags behind other OECD countries, and we are now faced with a massive skills shortage. We are falling behind our competitors in graduating numbers in science and agriculture, and even further behind them in engineering and manufacturing. Minister Gillard acknowledged—in her speech on 13 March to the AFR Higher Education Conference mentioned earlier—that, despite the Howard government, our universities have struggled through remarkably well, which is testament to the quality and commitment of our university leaders and the academic community as a whole.

Many of the problems, though, will ultimately require long-term solutions, and this bill before us today is not part of that long-term objective; rather, it is a quick solution to cutting the red tape and administrative work heaped on universities by the previous government. It will release staff for more time in teaching or research—the productive work—rather than in satisfying overly zealous government demands for more and more paperwork and proof of compliance with ever-increasing regulation. The Rudd Labor government will trust universities to manage their own industrial relations affairs within these laws. No longer will they have the threat of losing funds held over them—to the contrary, they will have funding certainty.

The other aspect I want to talk about very quickly is amending the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to make it easier for the approval of a provider to be revoked if or when they fail to meet the required criteria. While our universities are proven quality-program deliverers, this gives more assurance to the students that standards will be maintained by the multitude of other higher education providers which exist nationwide. The quality-auditing arrangements too are amended. The only audit body at present in this country is the Australian Universities Quality Agency. Amendments in this bill change that to allow the Commonwealth to designate additional audit bodies to carry out that role.

In conclusion, I say that the Northern Territory higher education institutions along with all the other higher education institutions in this country will have a major role to play in the long-term success of our education revolution package as we roll this out. In the meantime this bill, as I said, is a good start to representing an immediate improvement in the ability of our higher education providers to really run their affairs and concentrate on quality education. This bill represents a sound starting point for the Labor government to meet our higher education revolution commitments in this country and must be supported.

Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Acting Deputy President Trood. It is very appropriate that you are in the chair for this debate, because I understand you have a very distinguished academic record and are very concerned about the future wellbeing of Australia’s higher education sector. It gives me great pleasure to speak on this very significant piece of legislation today: the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008. It is quite a mouthful but well worth saying.

The bill, if passed by the Senate, will remove the Howard government’s extreme workplace relations agenda from our universities. No longer will our tertiary education sector be subjected to legislation which allows for unwarranted government interference. Most importantly, this bill clearly differentiates between the current Labor government and the former Liberal-National coalition government in the area of higher education and our commitment to the higher education sector. I think it is also timely to note that this bill is in the parliament for debate at the same time that there are, I think, 24 collective enterprise agreements in the higher education sector due for nominal expiry at the end of this month. In my life before I was a senator, I had some little involvement in negotiation of enterprise agreements in the higher education sector because I worked for one of the unions that had workers in that sector. I well know how, often, that activity in itself is very resource intensive for the universities. The last thing they need is to have additional government legislation on top of enterprise bargaining negotiations that they have to deal with. I certainly wish the sector well in its negotiations for its next collective enterprise agreements.

Earlier this year, the Rudd government set in motion the rolling back of the former government’s draconian industrial relations laws. Throughout the rest of this year we anticipate further legislation that will continue that great initiative of the government. But now it is time to focus on assisting the university sector, which was very, very hard hit by much of the previous government’s legislation. In April 2005, the former government announced a set of higher education workplace relations requirements for all of Australia’s higher education institutions. These were unheard of requirements, never before having been imposed upon the sector. They were requirements that were not asked for by the Australian public, let alone by the higher education sector, and certainly not wanted by the Australian public or the Australian higher education sector. It was another example of the former government using its Senate majority as soon as it could to impose its will on a sector that was already struggling because of the massive budget cuts that the former government had imposed on the sector.

It was an appalling day. I well remember when the first legislation was put into this parliament to impose these requirements on the higher education sector. Those requirements were referred to as the HEWRRs, as Senator Crossin mentioned earlier. In short, the HEWRRs were strict workplace relations criteria that universities had to comply with in order to be eligible for $280 million worth of assistance funding under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme. The first and key element of HEWRRs was that universities were required to offer Australian workplace agreements. As is now well known, AWAs allowed for the safety net to be stripped away from workers without a cent of compensation. Even after the belated introduction of the so-called fairness test by the former government, things like redundancy, long service leave, notice of change of shifts et cetera were not protected under the former government’s legislation.

I have cited these statistics in speeches in the chamber before but they are well worth repeating so I am going to repeat them. These are the statistics about AWAs and how they disadvantage working Australians, including workers in the higher education sector. As we know from the Workplace Authority’s own data, collected at a Senate estimates, 70 per cent of AWAs removed shift loadings, 68 per cent removed annual leave loadings, 65 per cent removed penalty rates; 63 per cent removed incentive based payments and bonuses, and 61 per cent removed days to be substituted for public holidays.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That’s not relevant to this debate.

Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Those statistics are of course relevant to this debate, because they affected workers in the higher education sector, they applied to the awards and the enterprise agreements, and they applied to the AWAs that were offered in the higher education sector which, I have to say, had a very bad take-up rate in the higher education system.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But they’ve been removed.

Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason, I am sure that you feel strongly tempted to intervene in this debate but I would be grateful if you would allow Senator McEwen to proceed.

Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. I appreciate your assistance in enabling me to put my position forward on behalf of the government. The HEWRRs also required that university agreements, policies and practices must be consistent with the freedom of association principles contained in the Workplace Relations Act at the time. This in practice meant that agreements in the higher education sector had to be stripped of provisions which the former government interpreted as encouraging union membership. It meant there was no leave to attend workplace meetings or to invite a union representative to come into the workplace to represent you in an industrial situation.

The HEWRRs system gave the ministers for education under the former government unprecedented power. It gave them the power to involve themselves in management of workplaces in the sector. I think other senators who have spoken in this debate today made the point very well—and it is worth making again—that the higher education sector is there to educate people and teach them things. It is not there, and not funded by the government, to impose an industrial relations agenda that it neither wanted nor asked for—and nor did the Australian community want or ask for it to be imposed in the higher education sector. It was disturbing for those of us who had a background in the higher education sector to see the amount of effort, time and wasted resources that universities were forced to use up in implementing the former government’s industrial relations agenda, at the expense of educating our young people so that they could gather those degrees that are necessary for them to have the best possible opportunities in life.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You should have come to my lectures; you would have enjoyed them.

Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have read your book, Senator Mason; that is as much as I can do with your intellectual activities. I am probably one of the few senators who did read your book.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You’re the first person I’ve met who did.

Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

All decisions on the HEWRRs were made directly by the minister, leaving no opportunity to review those decisions. Additionally, the minister was able to unilaterally change the requirements at any time. What an unprecedented level of government interference in the higher education sector! I imagine that someone who did not know of the Howard government’s regressive agenda in this sector would find it very difficult to believe that legislation which allowed for such a huge level of government interference in micromanagement of staff in Australia’s higher education institutions was created—and, further than that, passed—in this chamber. What an abomination it was that the government could use its Senate majority to get into the nitty-gritty of daily management and hiring and firing of staff in universities! Honestly!

When the original legislation establishing the HEWRRs had been created, there was widespread criticism. Of course, that criticism from the sector was ignored by the then government, just as they ignored criticisms of their Work Choices legislation and criticism about VSU, voluntary student unionism—because the sector knew full well what implementation of VSU would mean for it. Of course, the then government ignored criticism of Work Choices to their peril and detriment, and we saw the result of that particular piece of ignorance on the part of the former government in November last year.

I would like to reflect that when the original legislation was introduced in the Senate it was referred to a Senate committee, and there was fierce opposition to the legislation evident through many of the submissions and hearings into that legislation. Some of the criticisms raised at those hearings, particularly by the National Tertiary Education Union, were that the HEWRRs failed to address the real workplace issues being faced within universities, that they lacked appropriate accountability and parliamentary scrutiny, that they created uncertainty and confusion and provoked industrial dissonance within universities, that they gave the federal government unprecedented and unwarranted capacity to interfere in the operation of higher education institutions and that they did not assist Australia’s higher education institutions with respect to the quality of learning, research and outcomes for students and employees. They were specifically focused industrial relations initiatives designed on the basis of placing conditions on access to funding to allow the government to force its industrial relations agenda on the sector.

The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, now known as Universities Australia—which, of course, is the body that essentially represents the management and administration of the universities—also opposed the introduction of the HEWRRs. In their submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education, that organisation said:

The HEWRRs are very intrusive in terms of universities’ capacity to manage their internal affairs. The HEWRRs proposal constitutes a ‘one size fits all’ approach, whereas the AVCC takes the view that the focus should be on desired outcomes, rather than specific industrial processes and particular industrial instruments.

But, as I noted previously, this criticism and many others were completely ignored by the former government. The coalition was determined to implement its ideological industrial relations agenda in as many sectors as possible, and it saw the higher education sector as one where it could possibly have some success. I was pleased to note the vehemence of the opposition from the sector to the government’s agenda, and of course it came to fruition in the low take-up of AWAs in the sector. HEWRRs required universities to implement the Howard government’s workplace relations agenda. Failure to meet the HEWRRs and the protocols resulted in a reduction of the provider’s Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding. This bill will finally remove that requirement from the legislation.

It was outrageous that the former government forced universities to run workforce management in their regressive way or face reduced funding. Somebody before me mentioned bullying. A lot of people have mentioned bullying in this context, and it was bullying at its worst. It is a great thing that Labor is now in government and is able to clearly say that we will not stand for that sort of bullying and interference in the workplace. The removal of the HEWRRs legislation will not only put an end to this bullying and improve workplace relations in the higher education sector but also, very importantly, give funding certainty to the higher education sector. When they were restricted by the harsh HEWRRs, universities were unable to plan into the future for fear that they would have their funding cut and therefore be in a budgetary situation where what they wanted to do to improve educational outcomes for their students could not be done—because who knew what else the former government were going to foist on the sector?

I note that one of the key standing orders in our parliament is to make certain that bills that appropriate money contain no other measures. The reason for that was in the practice of early governments—in earliest times, I am advised—to tack measures to appropriation bills so that if those measures were passed they would necessarily bring with them other more unpopular measures that would not otherwise command the assent of the parliament. So, in the development of our parliamentary democracy, it was decided very early on that a spending bill could not have tacked onto it other kinds of measures.

Yet, it was seen fit by the former minister for education and now Leader of the Opposition, Dr Brendan Nelson, to tack measures that the universities would have rejected onto their funding allocations so that the only choice they had was to accept a level of poverty in terms of the courses and arrangements they could offer or to accept the ideological agenda of the government of the time. The universities have suffered under those arrangements for a considerable time—I think, for about five years—and it is not something they have been able to ignore. On 13 May this year, Universities Australia issued a press release stating in part:

Universities Australia supports the Government’s action in this session of Parliament to remove the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRRs) as a legislated condition of funding for universities.

“Universities Australia would welcome the removal of the HEWRRs as an indication from the Government that it is happy to loosen existing prescriptive requirements and allow universities to pursue their missions as self governing bodies” …

In addition to these significant changes that are supported by the sector, this bill also makes a number of technical changes. These include amending the act so that the approval of a provider that no longer meets certain criteria may be revoked. For example, if the provider no longer has its central management and control in Australia, this bill enables approval for that provider to be withdrawn.

The bill also includes the addition of a transitional mechanism so that existing funding commitments made to providers under the Collaboration and Structural Reform Fund can be honoured now that the new Diversity and Structural Adjustment Fund has been established. Arrangements for quality auditing of higher education providers will also be amended.

The bill amends the act to allow the Commonwealth to designate additional bodies to perform this role, such as state and territory government accreditation authorities. Further, the amendment will enable the Commonwealth to specify the higher education providers that those bodies can audit. The bill sets limits on the providers that can be audited. Currently, if a body were designated to conduct audits, it would be able to audit all higher education providers, including universities. By state and territory government accreditation authorities conducting audits at the same time as they currently conduct their normal registration and approval processes, the administrative burden on private providers will be reduced. This is a very practical initiative to enable the sector to manage itself much more efficiently.

Our approach has been subject to consultation with private providers and a trial process with two state accreditation agencies, those agencies being in Queensland and Victoria. That consultative approach, that suck-it-and-see approach, has been very well received in the sector and is indicative of the way the Rudd Labor government does business—that is, we like to make our policy based on evidence and we go out into the sectors to discover what they need and how best we can implement what they want to enable them to provide a better education system for our young people.

The Leader of the Opposition, Dr Brendan Nelson, was a disgrace as a minister for education. This bill is evidence of our attempt to redress the wrongs that the now Leader of the Opposition perpetrated on the higher education sector. He was part of the Howard government, who made it clear from the beginning that education would not be an area that would be prioritised. In his first federal budget in 1996, the former Prime Minister, Mr Howard, cut university operating grants by a cumulative six per cent from 1997 to 2000. That funding cut resulted in a significant $850 million loss to the sector, a sector that should have been supported by the former government because it is absolutely integral to the social and economic wellbeing of our nation, our children and working families.

I conclude by saying that, while I am very pleased to support this bill, I know that it is just one part of the Rudd Labor government’s education revolution, which is a multifaceted revolution designed to ensure that Australia has the best possible education system from childhood to adulthood. Every child in Australia will benefit from the Rudd Labor government’s investment in education.

Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Prime Minister for Social Inclusion) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak in support of the legislation before us this morning. We have had a long and informative debate about the features of this bill, and I hope that I can make a brief contribution to ensure that those who are interested in this area understand the import of the legislation that is before us.

The Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008 is one of several higher education bills that we have been debating in recent months, given the change of government and the change in direction that the Rudd government is providing in terms of, as Senator McEwen so rightly said, the education revolution that is going to change the face of Australian society in the next few years.

Much of the debate this morning has focused on the removal of those five elements of the higher education workplace relations requirements. We have had long discussions about the impact of those, and we have seen overwhelming support from the higher education sector for the removal of those features. We have had lots of discussion this morning about the impact that those conditions had placed on university funding.

Seriously thinking about this issue, though, and where the impact is going to be in the higher education sector, you can see that it really is going to enable universities to capture the innovation that is so important to the future of our economy and our society. We know that the Group of Eight universities have been incredibly supportive of this withdrawal and welcome the minister’s announcement that these conditions will be removed. The Commonwealth Grants Scheme guidelines are quite clear: we want our universities to be able to manage their own workplace relations and administration, we want to free them from the extraordinarily restrictive and directive requirements that we know exist. We have heard from the vice-chancellors how much time and effort was diverted from where we want them to focus their efforts, and that is on quality research and quality teaching. We want to make sure that our higher education providers are released from this nonsensical level of micromanagement and red tape that the previous government imposed upon them. In doing so we want to ensure that we free up the effort that is going into universities so they can deal with a new agenda, which is about a knowledge nation in the truest sense—a nation that is focused on innovation, lifelong learning and, as Senator McEwen so rightly said, a commitment to learning that goes almost from cradle to grave; certainly, from early childhood through to the University of the Third Age.

In my contribution to this debate today I want to focus on another important initiative of the higher education sector and why the removal of these conditions is so important. I want to focus my thoughts on the work that the higher education sector is doing in my very important portfolio area of social inclusion and the extent to which these changes are actually going to really free up some of the very innovative, creative and responsive thinking that is going on in the university sector around issues of social inclusion, philanthropy, social responsibility, social return on investment and these kinds of things, which were never really of great interest to the previous government but which we see as underpinning the quality of the society that we in the Rudd government want to ensure will be delivered for Australia.

In July I had the opportunity to speak at a forum at the University of Melbourne on this issue of higher education and social inclusion. The issue that has perplexed many of us, certainly on this side of the chamber, is that Australia’s actual equity performance in higher education has been pretty ordinary in the last few years—pretty mixed. Although we have had an increase in the number of tertiary students through the 1980s and 1990s, the actual socioeconomic mix of students has hardly changed in that time. So I was very pleased when I attended this forum to hear some of the innovative thinking that was going on about trying to raise the participation rate of tertiary students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Social inclusion is not just about low income families or families that might have serious disadvantage for various reasons; it is also about ensuring that quality of life changes for the whole-of-life perspective. So it is not just about early intervention with families to keep young people at school; it is also about ensuring that we are generating new opportunities for those young people who might not normally be participators in higher education to be there. We know that there are lots of reasons why we have had a fall-off in students from those backgrounds in higher education. Certainly, HECS is one of those reasons and cost-of-living and student accommodation pressures are extraordinary, to name just a few.

The changes we are making to higher education are now allowing universities to provide much greater flexibility in the way they respond to these new challenges. This is very important because the old tried and true methods of tackling the issues that prevent participation in higher education do not work and we need to understand why that is so. At the forum I attended, the Group of Eight were really trying to tackle this issue very seriously. I listened to some of the proposals that they had in place around the use of technology, and certainly around supportive financial and workplace mechanisms and learning environments for students. But I also saw that there was a lot of very new and creative thinking around the way in which universities are actually tackling this issue for themselves. For example, the University of New South Wales described their ASPIRE initiative, which targets students from disadvantaged public high schools who might have the potential to enter and succeed at university. That encourages students from year 8 to stay on. It is working with students right through from year 8 to year 11 to actually give them exposure to the kinds of opportunities that university can offer them. So we can see that the need for these changes to higher education is really about enabling this kind of flexibility.

The Victoria University has got a magnificent new approach to pathways and articulation, from TAFE to higher education. These are really important developments. We have got community engagement programs across the nation. The universities have actually reached back out into communities to engage them in this way, and the kinds of issues that we are addressing in our higher education reforms, as I say, allow this kind of flexibility.

We now have several universities, including the Macquarie University, the University of Sydney and the Australian Catholic University, actively encouraging volunteering within their undergraduate degrees, providing many exciting opportunities in partnership, for example, with Australian Volunteers International. We have the Australian Catholic University using the flexibility that they are now being encouraged to act upon to make early offers in many of their courses to year 12 students who can demonstrate that they have got a history of activism in their communities. These are the kinds of things that encourage universities to really draw on their strengths and their own populations to encourage social inclusion, and to that extent they are very important new initiatives.

Having said all of that, we need to invest in our higher education institutions. They have to lead on the issues of civic engagement, active citizenship, advocacy and debate. If we do not do that and we actually crush them with the kinds of arrangements that the previous government put in place, we are much poorer as a nation because of it. We need the intellectual powerhouses of our tertiary institutions to lead in this area and to facilitate change in our up-and-coming professionals. That is really where this government wants to invest. We want to harness the skills and expertise and commitment of our up-and-coming generations of professionals in these areas.

Getting back then to the issue of the reforms, the subject of this legislation, today I really did not want to go through the concerns about nepotism on committees or the issues that were raised by Senator Moore, for example, about pay inequity and unfair employment practices, which were part and parcel of the concerns about lower staff morale, the poor relationships between Australian universities and their staff and the diminished capacity for universities to attract high-calibre academic and general staff, and of course the fundamental issue of poorer outcomes for students. With this legislation today you can see that there is a very clear and purposeful intent in the way in which the Rudd government is reforming our relationship with the higher education sector by removing the workplace relations requirements and the national governance protocols. There has been a long debate on this legislation. It is very important. It is a significant piece of legislation before us that, despite the protestations of some, will generate a much more flexible, responsive and innovative higher education sector, and I will end my remarks there.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am grateful to Senator McEwen in this debate for pointing out that Senator Mason has written a book. That is something I did not know and I am very interested to look for it in the bookshops. I am sure that it has not reached the dizzying heights of The Latham Diaries or the soon-to-be released Costello diaries—

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I’m sure there is a second print run coming up!

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is a second printing coming up? If I can be of any assistance to you, Senator Mason, let me just suggest to you that you should get the second print run and release it on the same day that Mr Costello releases his book and you might get some flow-on effects in sales and it might boost your credibility in respect of this. Often we find that just because someone has written a book about a subject it does not necessarily mean that it gives them any authority to speak on it. Nonetheless I am indebted to Senator McEwen and I will look for your book, Senator Mason, with some interest. There are plenty of opportunities in parliament when we need something to help us sleep and I suggest that maybe there will be an occasion, Senator Mason, when your book might be very useful.

We have seen Senator Mason open the debate on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008 with a defence of the opposition’s position in respect of this bill. I know that he has told us that, if the amendments they are suggesting are not passed, they will vote against the bill in its entirety. That is an unfortunate position. I cannot help but think, though, that it is a little bit of a try-on by Senator Mason to come and run that line, because there has not been a single opposition senator come into this chamber to support the position of Senator Mason—not a single senator!

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They think that I am enough!

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That may be one explanation that they trust you with. The other explanation is that maybe you are a little bit lonely these days. I am a bit concerned about the numbers that you may be able to call on to support you, Senator Mason. I am personally concerned about that. I do not want to go into too much detail about the Liberal and National parties’ merger in Queensland, but I am just wondering whether that may have put you on the outer somewhat and you cannot encourage anyone to come and be seen in the chamber with you that does not have to be here, as does the Whip behind you. Nonetheless, I am worried about you, but I am convinced that it is a bit of a try-on, because this is really about a rearguard action in respect of Work Choices, isn’t it?

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, it is not!

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is what it is about, Senator Mason, and that is unfortunate.

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Marshall, please speak through the chair.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Through you, Acting Deputy President, that may of course be one of the other reasons why there are no opposition senators supporting Senator Mason in the chamber in this debate. It is about Work Choices, and the opposition does not know what their position is on Work Choices anymore. One day it is dead, one day it is up and running again; then there are different versions; then it has gone in name but it is there in substance. But it all comes back to the opposition not wanting to let go of forced AWAs. They just loved the concept of ‘take it or leave it’ and they wanted anything in place to suit that ideology.

It is a concern, not knowing what the opposition’s position really is with respect to these matters. Senator Mason says, ‘If we don’t retain these last elements of Work Choices we will oppose the whole of the bill.’ It comes from the problem the opposition have because of their ‘three stooges’ approach to their leadership—and it is very confusing for us all. We have got Mr Nelson, who cannot do the job as Leader of the Opposition; we have got Mr Turnbull, who cannot get the job as Leader of the Opposition; and we have got Mr Costello, who will not do the job as Leader of the Opposition. All of them have different positions with respect to Work Choices. In fact, Mr Nelson has three separate positions of his own. With all these positions, it is very unclear what position the opposition really has in relation to the very serious matters we are debating.

I want to go into some of these serious matters we are seeking to address with this amending legislation we have before the parliament today. This bill will amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 by repealing section 33-17 to remove a requirement that higher education providers meet any higher education workplace relations requirements and national governance protocols imposed under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme guidelines to avoid a reduction in their CGS funding for Commonwealth supported places. The dreaded HEWRR part of that—the higher education workplace relations requirements—was simply a way to impose the ideological Work Choices agenda on the higher education sector. It made it a condition that, for the sector to maintain all their funding, AWAs, individual contracts, had to be offered to all their employees.

We know that, under Work Choices, AWAs could be offered with a ‘take it or leave it’ approach. We know that one of the ways the previous federal government, now the opposition, implemented its Work Choices throughout the public sector and other bodies that relied on Commonwealth funding was by tying it to funding or by making policy decisions to forcibly implement its industrial relations agenda. For instance, DEWR, the then Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, as a matter of policy—as I saw over many years through the estimates processes—made it a condition of employment that you had to have an AWA. I remember many times asking the then head of the department: where is the choice in that? Where is the choice when you are offered an AWA on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis? The response was: ‘The choice is you either take the job or you don’t.’ That is the sort of choice that the Howard government put in place in this country. It was no choice; it was a fool’s choice.

They did the same thing by tying it to funding in the higher education sector: everyone had to be offered an AWA, whether they liked it or not—there was no choice in that. If they did not do it, universities would be penalised by, I think, up to 7.6 per cent—I may be wrong about that; I will get to some of the specific detail about that element a bit later. But they would be penalised substantial amounts of funding if they did not force the government’s ideological agenda on their employees, whether they wanted to or not. We know that there was a lot of resistance to that proposal. Nonetheless, it was a condition of funding. Faced with the penalty of losing substantial funding, universities were forced to implement government policy on AWAs whether they wanted to or not and whether that was the choice of their employees or not.

Universities were also forced to negotiate directly with their staff on industrial relations matters, prohibiting union involvement. Again, where is the choice in that? If the employees wished to have their union represent them and negotiate a collective agreement, or even an AWA, they were prohibited from doing so. Why? Because if they did so universities would lose substantial amounts of funding from the Commonwealth. What sort of way is that to introduce flexibility? How do you get flexibility and productivity when you have the management of a university being forced by the previous government to impose their ideological will on its employees? That is a confrontational approach. You do not get good productivity and good flexibility out of a confrontational approach. You do not get it out of a command and control approach. You get it through negotiation, cooperation and innovation, and all those things can be fostered when you allow genuine negotiations, and genuine involvement of third parties when it is required by the employees. We reject their philosophy; we have rejected it in the past and we reject it now. And now that we are in government we are going to act to take away those ridiculous elements of the previous government’s agenda. It was a direct attack upon unions and university staff, trying to eradicate union representation in this sector and to force all university staff onto individual contracts. Senator Mason, on behalf of the whole of the opposition, who were not there to support him, argued strongly that it is not about that.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am here representative of them all!

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am now getting an indication from the opposition’s deputy whip that she is here to support him. Strangely enough, though, I do not see your name on the speakers list—and I know that as deputy whip you actually have to be in the chamber right now. So I am not quite sure that I am convinced, Senator, of your overwhelming support for Senator Mason in this regard. Nonetheless, I suppose as we go down the path we will find many more different and frequent variations of the opposition’s Work Choices policy.

We have consistently and publicly said that these conditional arrangements were wrong and went against the concept of good university governance. In abolishing the HEWRRs and the NGPs, the government is fulfilling some of our most important commitments to the higher education sector, which we indicated in our white paper on higher education, Australia’s universities: building our future in the world, in July 2006. We will be removing only the conditions on CGS funding while retaining the full funding. Of course, funding is something that is crucial to this sector. Universities rely, on the whole, on a substantial amount of Commonwealth funding. They do, and it is not good enough for the previous government to apply those conditions that I have already talked about. And it is not good enough for them to try to apply them from opposition. It is not good enough for them to try to maintain their Work Choices agenda from opposition.

The government has a clear mandate on all of these issues, yet this opposition, as they are trying to wreck the budget—and, if I get an opportunity, I might talk about that for a moment too—also want to try and govern from opposition and maintain policies which they took to the last election and were defeated upon. That is what they want to do.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason interjecting—

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason can dress it up all he likes, as he has, because we know he can. He is someone who can argue very convincingly on a case that has no merit, and we have seen that often in this place.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, I think, Gavin!

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Through you, Madam Acting Deputy President, it was a backhanded compliment in some respects, Senator Mason, so I am glad you have picked that up and I am glad you are listening very closely to my contribution.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I always do!

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you. I hope it is not only closely but intently and that you digest some of the advice that I have given you. If you do, I am sure your support amongst your own party will grow and swell, and I will sleep easier at night knowing that, Senator Mason!

Finally, after the Howard years, there will be an approach by this government that encourages and supports good governance practices rather than simply imposing upon a sector a set of ideological conditions. And it has been clear from the response from the higher education sector that the removal of the HEWRRs and the NGPs as a condition of funding will be welcomed. And why wouldn’t they welcome it? Of course they would. Why would they not want to get rid of this ideological position being forced down their throats when they actually want to get on with the business and talk about proper good governance, proper flexibility and proper productivity with their staff in a non-confrontational approach, which we know and as all the evidence suggests, is the approach that leads to better flexibility and higher productivity?

Through the period of the Howard government we saw an average six per cent cut to the sector, representing some $850 million. That alone says it all. That is what the previous government’s commitment was to the higher education sector—it was to cut it and impose its ideological agenda. We on this side have a very different approach. We had a different approach while we were in opposition, and now we are in government we are going to implement our approach and support the higher education sector to the extent that it needs that support. It is absolutely crucial for the future of our economy, the future of our community and the future of our children that we have a well-supported higher education sector. It is a basis for innovation; it is a basis for our economic prosperity.

History will show—and Senator Mason may write a book about this—that the last 11 years of neglect of the higher education sector has led to skills shortages and will continue to lead to very serious problems for this nation because, even though we will start to fix these things right now, the lag of the damage that has been done by the last 11 years will continue to haunt us for years to come. The challenge left to us, to repair the damage of the previous government, is enormous. It is worth remembering that over their 11 years the previous government undermined the higher education sector. Their first budget, in 1996, slashed university operating grants by a cumulative six per cent over the forward estimates from 1997 to 2000, resulting in a $850 million cut to the sector, as I mentioned earlier.

When the new Labor government came to office, the student-staff ratio was 20 to 4 compared to 14 to 6 in 1995 just prior to the Howard government coming into office. Those figures are worth emphasising—the student-staff ratio on us coming to office was 20 to 4 compared to 14 to 6 in 1995. That is a massive backtrack on quality education, all happening under the previous government. When we came to office, Australia’s education system relied more on private funding than all other OECD countries bar the United States, Japan and South Korea. More than half of the cost of tertiary education today is met from private sources, with dependence on private sources increasing to 52 per cent now from 35 per cent in 1995. That just demonstrates again the enormous neglect of the previous government.

We are changing this. We are committed as a Labor government to changing this. As I said earlier, there is now a new government which encourages and supports good governance practices through cooperation with their staff. It is a government which thinks higher education is worthy of support for the long-term future of Australia and is not a playground for ill-conceived and vexatious industrial relations experiments—an experiment that was roundly rejected by the Australian people at the last election. We have already announced several packages of funding, such as the Better Universities Renewal Fund and the $11 billion Education Investment Fund, to start to repair the damage done by the conservatives.

I recall when I started as a senator in 2002 I was shocked that in the so-called clever country there could be degrees that cost $100,000. It made a mockery of the merit based system and led to our top universities chasing dollars by charging as much as they thought they could get away with in a system where they were encouraged to do this by the previous Howard government. According to the 2008 Good Universities Guide, there are now more than 100 degrees offered by public universities that cost in excess of $100,000.

In another blow to the conservative agenda, I am pleased that the federal Labor government will also ensure that, from 2009, full-fee-paying undergraduate places will be phased out. Universities will be compensated for the phase-out with funding packages that I have already mentioned. It must hurt those opposite to know that you cannot just buy your way in anymore, which is the truest of all conservative traditions. We believe in merit and we believe in equality.

Putting higher education neglect aside, we all know that the conservatives lived and breathed for the sole purpose of implementing Work Choices and eradicating unions, and that the amendment to be proposed by Senator Mason is a last-ditch attempt by this opposition—I hope it is a last-ditch attempt—to hang onto that ideological agenda. (Time expired)

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those senators who have spoken on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008. I understand that the opposition is not dividing on the second reading amendment today, although there will be a full debate in the committee stages, so I will make a few remarks in summing up the legislation that we have before us.

This is a bill which is part of the Labor government’s new approach to dealing with the issues that confound this nation in regard to higher education. This is a new approach being reflected by a new government that believes deeply that Australian universities are actually critical to our nation’s future. The government’s view is that universities are essential to our social, economic, cultural and environmental well-being. That essentially is the starting point at which we enter this debate. That is why in our first nine months of government we have paid such particular attention to revitalising Australia’s higher education system. In our first budget we established and distributed the Better Universities Renewal Fund of some $500 million. We set up the new Education Investment Fund of $11 billion. The government moved in my portfolio to double the postgraduate award arrangements and to introduce a new future fellowship program. Minister Gillard moved to double the number of undergraduate scholarships. There was an additional $249 million, if I recall, allocated to fund 11,000 new Commonwealth places to replace the full-fee-paying places that the previous government had pushed so hard. There were new measures introduced to provide a fee remissions scheme and other incentives to increase enrolments in maths and science.

The Labor government has moved to protect academic freedom and to strengthen the Australian Research Council. We have sought to internationalise our research effort. We have of course moved very quickly to abolish the notorious RQF of the previous government. There was a restoration of public benefit as a criterion for funding the CRC program. There was a pattern quickly established by the new government, which was in sharp contrast to the way in which the previous government operated, that universities play a major part in ensuring the well-being of this nation. That is of course in part why we established the Bradley and Cutler reviews to actually look at these systems in some detail to see what other measures can be taken to advance these fundamental principles that are so important.

Senator Mason in his contribution said that this whole debate that we are engaged in here with this particular measure was about accountability. That was the main thrust of the proposition that he advanced. In fact, what we have before us is a bill to actually reduce the level of red tape, to reassert the importance of universities in their decision-making processes and to essentially extend to universities a sense of professionalism that was denied by the previous government.

The new government takes the view that universities can be trusted. The Liberal opposition takes the view that essentially universities are hostile places and that they are run by people that they do not like and do not trust. It is a difficult task for Senator Mason to prosecute this case because he is a former academic himself. He feels so lonely on this issue because he knows the fundamental fallacy of the Liberal Party philosophy, which takes the view that the universities are hostile places for the Liberal Party. Universities have to be punished, according to the Liberal Party, because Senator Abetz and a number of other prominent members of the Liberal Party had bad experiences when they were at university. They were defeated in university politics and they have never grown up from that proposition and they have never been able to cope with the fact that universities might throw up different ideas from those that they see as dominant.

What this particular bill does is remove from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme guidelines references to the draconian industrial relations legislation, which the previous government took to its heart because it wanted to impose its highly authoritarian view of the way in which universities should be maintained. The national governance protocols imposed governance conditions on higher education providers, and these too will be removed.

In essence, this is a measure to reduce red tape. You would have thought that the Liberals, with all their assertions about the importance of the values that they subscribe to, would support this measure. But we now find that that is not their position. They want to maintain an authoritarian and draconian view of higher education, because universities, in their mind, are not to be trusted.

The position that Senator Mason tries to present is that the Liberals really do want to see the universities advance. But look at their history; look at what they did in government. We saw the previous government try on many occasions—and I am disappointed that Senator Mason did not identify this—to gag scientists and researchers. They also treated researchers who criticised the previous government’s policies or who publicised research findings or opinions that the previous government found embarrassing in a punitive manner. I recall one report from a group of labour market economists from various universities in New South Wales on the Work Choices legislation. They were decried as terrorists. They were associated with something illegal because they had a different view to that of the previous government. What you saw was a series of processes undertaken by the previous government, ranging from tacit intimidation to downright threats and even to blatant suppression, if they were not able to silence their critics in the universities.

Senator Mason looks at me as if in some surprise about this. He finds this puzzling. He presents himself as a great small ‘l’ liberal in the Liberal Party. I know how lonely he must be.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, I don’t.

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are not? I have misunderstood. You are even more lonely than that.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am all by myself, Kim.

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It would seem that way. Essentially, the problem is this: do you recall the interim Leader of the Opposition’s position—

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Through the chair, Senator Carr.

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Quite correct, Mr Acting Deputy President. I have no doubt that Senator Mason would recall the current interim Leader of the Opposition’s attitudes when he was the minister for education. It was Dr Nelson who vetoed 10 discovery grants that had gone through a whole independent peer review process through the Australian Research Council. When one particular PhD student, Sharon Andrews, made an FOI application to get the details of these vetoed projects, the former government fought right up to the High Court. And they lost. They want accountability. But in government the attitude of the Liberal Party was draconian and authoritarian. They attempted to suppress, through tacit intimidation or downright threats, academics who took a different view to that of the government.

If Senator Mason is having trouble with his memory on this point, the then chair of the ARC, Tim Beasley—who was the AWB chair, too—advised his close friend the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, and the public that the academics should not get their knickers in a knot about the level of repression that occurred under the previous government.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason interjecting—

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You might think that this is humorous, but the fact is that Paddy McGuinness, along with three other lay members of the ARC quality and scrutiny committee—which included a retired judge, a newsreader and Paddy McGuinness—insisted on going through all the applications, which you could understand. There was a view taken by this lay committee that 27 grant applications should be vetoed. As it turned out, three of those identified were among the 10 that were vetoed by Dr Nelson. So we have the sorry and shameful record of the previous government in attempting to silence critics and interfere in the legitimate scholarly processes.

What were these 10 projects that Dr Nelson sought to suppress? Three were in gender studies. Two were in feminist studies, one of which was so bad according to the government that it had to be rejected twice. There were two in Asian studies. There was one in conservation studies. There was one in media studies. Their projects were so terrible that their titles were changed and then they were subsequently refunded. This is the level of micromanagement and authoritarianism that they wanted to bring in. This is the level of contempt that these politicians have for our academic institutions. This is the real motivation behind the amendments that this opposition is seeking to present to this Senate today.

We are told that it is about accountability. What it is about is their obsession with their enemies among the intellectual groups in this country. What is clear to me from their history is the obsession that the Liberal Party have with trying to deal with people they do not like. They cannot cope with intellectual debate. They cannot cope with dissent. They cannot cope with people in our universities who might have a different view to that of the Liberal Party. That is why we had under the Liberals a shocking record of neglect when it came to the funding of our university system.

Under the Liberals our capacity to maintain our position with our intellectual institutions and research agencies was seriously undermined by serial and systematic abuse of our university system. We saw the funding capacity of our universities stripped away. We saw it in terms of our position versus the OECD. We were the only country in the OECD that actually reduced funding to its universities. As I understand it, there was a 23 per cent reduction in support for research and development throughout the Howard period—a 23 per cent reduction, as measured by GDP, in our contribution to funding for our university system.

What did we see in terms of our PhD students? What did we see in terms of our capacity to meet the challenges of the future? We had a government that looked on universities as being hostile, as being the enemy. Under the previous government that group had to be punished. We have tried to fundamentally reverse that philosophical position. We have taken the view that it is very important that we treat our universities as places that are critical to the nation’s future. Instead of a reduction in public funding for tertiary education, which fell some four per cent between 1995 and 2004 compared to the average rise of 49 per cent across the OECD, we have seen a fundamental commitment by this government to reinvestment because we were the only OECD country to cut the total level of public funding for tertiary education during that time. Our ranking on research collaboration between industry and universities went backwards.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not overall funding.

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mason, you know the evidence. On the basis of collaboration between industry and universities we went backwards. We went backwards on the number of PhDs in the workforce. When we look at the measurement of our capacity to meet the challenges of the future, under the previous government our performance went backwards.

We are no longer just competing with advanced industrial countries. The explosion in research and development investment in China and in India has transformed the global innovation landscape. Are we ready to face that challenge? Because of the previous government’s legacy, we are not. Patent activity in China increased by 470 per cent in the decade from 1997 to 2006. Between 1999 and 2005 India’s total R&D expenditure rose by 73 per cent and its higher education R&D expenditure rose by 180 per cent. What have we done? We have gone backwards. There has been a four per cent reduction.

That is why it is so important to undertake an education revolution in this country. That is why it is so important to get a whole new approach to the way we deal with universities. That is why we are embarking upon a whole new approach, a cultural change, to the way in which we deal with university governance and engage the university leaderships on the basis of trust and on the basis of respect for their professional abilities to manage their own affairs. Of course, nothing could stand in sharper contrast to the position we take now than the position that was taken by the previous government.

The opposition will say that we are stripping away measures and that of course means that there cannot be any accountability in any new system. That is just not the case. It is not the case in fact. Senator Mason, as a person with some interest in education, would have read the Higher Education Support Act and would know what the provisions of that act are regarding universities being subject to regular quality audits by the Australian Universities Quality Agency. He would also be aware that sections 19 and 20 of the act require a higher education provider to comply with any requirement imposed on the provider by the minister to implement recommendations of the quality auditing body. He would also be aware that, under the research act provisions, universities are required to deal properly with proper requests from the government. That is a provision that cuts across both the teaching and the research programs of universities.

The position you are arguing—that, unless your amendments are carried, there will not be proper accountability measures—falls to the ground because it is in defiance of the facts; it is in defiance of the legislation. The AUQA’s submission to the recent review of the national governance protocols indicated that the AUQA’s audits had not revealed that there was any clear evidence of ongoing poor performance and failure to meet the minimum expected standards for effective governing body operations.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So why oppose it then, Minister, given it is being complied with?

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator, you have this fundamental problem. It may be a question of self-loathing, given your comments about the Australian National University position. I do not share your contempt for yourself. My observation of your role in that body was that you were seeking to contribute in a constructive manner, unlike some of the other dills that you put on that committee over the years. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that consideration of this bill in Committee of the Whole be made an order of the day for the next day of sitting.