Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak in support of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies—or CPACS, as it is sometimes known—at the University of Sydney. The centre has a distinguished record of teaching and research, maintained over nearly 30 years. As Australia's only university peace centre, it represents a national resource and an important contribution to the intellectual life of the Australian community. CPACS runs a program of postgraduate coursework, preparing students to make professional-level contributions to peace. Many of its graduates get master's degrees. They go on to make successful careers in challenging contexts, including in agencies of the United Nations, non-governmental organisations, official agencies and departments with responsibility for aid and development, and many other settings of vital public interest. I have visited the centre on a number of occasions and know many CPACS students. Their achievements and those of the centre are most impressive.

The centre's research includes a consistent supply of major outputs on peace journalism, a field in which its scholarship is recognised as world leading. Former students and trainees have gone on to set up news organisations or media reform groups in many countries directly affected by conflict, including Indonesia, the Philippines and Lebanon. Unlike too many in our universities, the staff, associates and students at CPACS do not only look inwards. Instead, they share their learning and their insights with the community at large.

The centre is home to several specialist projects which have created resources of expertise that have been presented many times to members of this parliament and to the community via the centre's programs of advocacy and outreach. These include the struggle for human rights in West Papua, the prospects for global nuclear disarmament and how to achieve it, and important perspectives on conflicts affecting the peoples of Sri Lanka, Palestine and Israel. Through the work of its refugee language program, CPACS provides a vital public service, plugging a gap in the official provision for some of the most vulnerable people of our community as they struggle to gain a foothold in Australian society.

Yet, despite this record of success and these commendable contributions to our community, CPACS's future is now in jeopardy. University of Sydney management has threatened to wind up the centre. This threat stems from the financial pressures of working in a university environment that imposes ever-increasing emphasis on revenue-raising activities. For some reason, universities in Australia are much more expensive to run than their counterparts in many other countries. The costs of back office functions, such as management and accountancy, legal services and insurance, have to be met before a dollar is spent on actually teaching students. To this, at the University of Sydney, is now added the cost of an ambitious building program. It means that a so-called 'university tax' is levied, which amounts, on some calculations, to as much as 73 per cent. I note that the university branch of the National Tertiary Education Union has called instead for this university to invest more in its staff, their development and their wellbeing at work. But that debate is for another day.

CPACS is the smallest unit in the university's School of Social and Political Sciences, which is part of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. In the school there are several specialised programs of postgraduate coursework. Students can do a masters in development studies, human rights, international security or political economy. All of these programs do important work, but none of them enjoys the success of CPACS. Every year for the past five years the peace and conflict studies program has consistently outperformed all of these other programs. Every year there are more students studying peace and conflict studies than any of these other specialised degrees. Every year CPACS has more unit of study enrolments—which includes students on other programs who add the centre's units to their degree—than any of the others. Figures just released for this stage of the new academic year show a further increase of as much as 40 per cent in the centre's enrolments compared with 2015.

Why then is CPACS under threat? Across the School of Social and Political Sciences it is possible to subsidise the highly specialised activity of postgraduate coursework with teaching in undergraduate degrees, where student numbers are much higher. However, the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies is alone in not being part of a larger department, so this is not possible for CPACS. The apparent financial losses at CPACS, then, have nothing to do with the intrinsic viability of its program. Instead, they arise purely from where the University of Sydney chooses to put up its bureaucratic barriers and from the ever-increasing corporate costs loaded on to revenue raising activities in the form of the so-called university tax.

Cost-cutting at the centre is well underway. This time last year, it entered the 2015 semester with three full-time members of academic staff. Now there are two. The centre's director, Associate Professor Jake Lynch, is putting forward proposals to reform the way it operates in order to cut costs further without compromising the service to students and the public. I congratulate Professor Lynch on how he is managing CPACS under very difficult external circumstances. I urge Sydney university's vice-chancellor and senior management to accept these proposals and withdraw the threat to wind up the centre.

By any reasonable measure, this centre is highly successful. Some of the centre's supporters will believe that the threat to wind up the centre is based not on reasonable measures but on a hidden political motive to silence CPACS. It is in the nature of the centre's work and its commitment to the values of peace and justice that its messages and perspectives are not always palatable to those in positions of power.

If CPACS closed then it would undermine the principle of intellectual freedom that our universities surely should uphold. The centre should be supported as an important research centre and an important voice. The University of Sydney authorities should be assured that their treatment of CPACS is being closely watched both in this parliament and across Australian communities.

One in five of the world's poorest people are living with a disability. Surely that should mean that Australian aid has a particular responsibility to provide effective programs. Tackling blindness in the Indo-Pacific region has had a relatively successful track record. The challenge is to maintain and improve this record. Since 1999, blindness prevalence has actually significantly decreased in the Indo-Pacific region, with a 38.5 per cent reduction in the Pacific and a 43 per cent reduction in South-East Asia. These figures become even more significant when we understand that there has been a 23 per cent increase in the population across that region in the same period.

These results highlight the significance of Australian investment to coordinate global engagement in blindness prevention. I do congratulate Vision 2020 Australia Global Consortium for the work that they are doing in this area. Vision 2020 Australia members and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness are working hard to improve stakeholder collaboration in these countries, and working to adjust to the Turnbull cuts to overseas aid. They are working together to maintain momentum towards achieving the global targets, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region.

Vision 2020 Australia is working in low-income countries to ensure people of disability contribute to and benefit from all development programs. One aspect of the work of Vision 2020 that is very inspiring is how they involve people with disabilities directly in the work and in addressing the programs that are being delivered. This approach is critical to breaking the cycle of poverty and disability.

The Greens do support Vision 2020 Australia in their call on the Australian government to continue its leadership role in disability inclusion, and, further, we support their call for an annual funding commitment of at least equal to the 2015-16 allocation of $12.9 million, and this should also be extended for the life of the Development for All strategy until 2020.

Vision 2020 also advocates for five per cent of the aid budget to be invested in mainstreaming disability inclusion across all aid investments. When you consider the figure that I commenced with, that one in five of the world's poorest people are living with a disability, clearly we should be supporting that call for the mainstreaming of disability inclusion across all aid investments.

Vision 2020 Australia has also estimated that $45.2 million over four years from 2015 to 2019 is required to maintain the momentum towards achieving the global action plan across 10 countries in the Indo-Pacific region.

This aim is under pressure because of the Australian government's cuts to its aid budget. Vision 2020 Australia had plans to manage, channel and maintain momentum in three countries. I again very much congratulate Vision 2020 on how they have responded to the cuts in working out how the aid dollar can be most effective—surely work that the government itself should undertake.

I will share how Vision 2020 is managing this. This is a quote from their publication called Towards 2020: a shared vision of working in partnership for eye health and vision care. They state:

All three countries—

and they are Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam—

have benefited from Australian investment in eye health, have a strong stakeholder base and potential for significant impact through collaborative actions, despite receiving reduced resources from the Australian Government.

So this is a real-life example of how Australian dollars are being stretched—and stretched in effective ways. But clearly it also highlights how money, particularly to non-government organisations, can go so far in really making a difference to people's lives in low-income countries.

The Greens also support Vision 2020 Australia's call for the government to allocate investments to support sector-wide eye health coordination and strategic health system strengthening initiatives in Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. They are calling for an investment of $18.5 million over four years to achieve that. Again, these are programs that would go a long way to making a big difference to the lives of so many.

The offshore mining industry is inherently dangerous. The dangers are exacerbated through a failure of the Liberal-National government to ensure top occupational health and safety conditions for offshore workers. What the Turnbull government needs to urgently address is the fact that the safety of offshore oil and gas workers is treated differently to that of their onshore colleagues. Why that is so is a question that should be answered, and it should be answered in a way that ensures that health and safety is a top priority and that there is consistency.

The Greens support the call by the ACTU to the Australian government, the Council of Australian Governments and relevant authorities to embrace world's best practice for offshore occupational health and safety legislation by adopting specific provisions of the model act and harmonising occupational health and safety laws governing offshore industries with those governing onshore industries.

The principle of tripartism should also be seen as a way to advance the solution to this problem. Tripartism is when we have government workers and employers optimising workplace health and safety through collaborative regulation. This should be a given. It is 2016. For all the carry-on that we hear from the minister in quite an insulting way to workers and unions day after day, this is how workplaces can and should operate. This is what is happening in so many other countries. The fact that it is not happening here reflects very poorly on the Turnbull government. Tripartism should be the foundation of the occupational health and safety approach for offshore workers.

Workers are familiar with their workplaces. Workers in the offshore industry are clearly well acquainted with the conditions and responsibilities that they have to manage every day. This makes their input on occupational health and safety matters invaluable. Again, this should be common sense. But, again, what we are seeing from this government is worker safety so often being downgraded, and this is another example of it.

The Australian offshore oil and gas industry is lagging behind international best practice benchmarks in occupational health and safety systems. A critical issue in on-the-job safety is right of entry. Again, this is something that the federal Turnbull government disputes at every turn. Why do they do that? Why do they want to limit right of entry? It is because it will make it easier for the employer. It will make it easier for the employer to downgrade conditions. When you cut corners, when you do not address occupational health and safety with the detail that it requires, the company will make more profits. That is where there is a major contradiction here. That is why there is a clear role for government to step in and get the right regulations in place and not sit on their hands or sit on the sidelines, as was the style of the Howard and Abbott governments and is now the style of the Turnbull government.

It should be remembered that the International Labour Organization actually highlights the crucial role of unions in securing safer and healthier workplaces. They strongly advocate—and this is from the ILO—'a strengthening of collective voice as the primary means of improving workers' conditions and protecting workers' health'. So right of entry and the collective actions of unions is recognised internationally. It is time the Turnbull government recognise that this is the best way for industry and for corporations to operate rather than having occupational health and safety becoming a controversial issue, undermining worker safety, resulting too often in deaths and injuries at work. Working on offshore mining platforms would obviously be incredibly dangerous. Everything should be undertaken to bring consistency to offshore and onshore working conditions and to ensure that workers are part of a tripartism arrangement between industry, government and workers and workers' representatives to achieve that.