Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege to be able to speak on the day following the budget announcements of last night on a subject that was recognised as being of national importance. University sectors have been the subject of an ideological and quite malicious attack, albeit characterised by the former government as designed to increase access to tertiary education. The effect has been to require more and more Australians who wish to undertake tertiary studies to pay quite outrageous fees and to bind the universities into the ideological obsession of the former government with its industrial relations policy prescriptions which were so resoundingly rejected at the last election. Might I commence my remarks by springboarding off the budget last night, simply to acknowledge that one of the measures will directly benefit the University of Tasmania.

While other members might not see that as the acme of the budget, in my mind a most important and significant element of the budget is a special one-off funding measure of $11.5 million as part of a nationwide total of $500 million from the Rudd government for priority areas in information and communications technology, laboratories, libraries, student study spaces, teaching spaces and student amenities. To have the opportunity to be able to speak on a bill to which this matter is directly, the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008, relevant and to be able to express my happiness at this funding initiative directed specifically at the University of Tasmania gives me real pleasure, as I am a graduate of that university and a member of the parliament who has always taken a very direct interest in the wellbeing of that tertiary institution.

I come to the measures which are addressed most specifically in this legislation, and address what I think was a very wrong direction—that was to tie universities’ hands to the Work Choices agenda that the former government pressed, to its own destruction, over the last three years. What the former government did, through measures introduced by the now Leader of the Opposition, Brendan Nelson, was to require universities, as a condition of receipt of substantial levels of government funding, to offer all staff AWAs and to operate in what was called a ‘direct relationship with employees’ to preclude union involvement. This, of course, is a misuse of the power of the state to intervene in the managerial and operational conduct of the tertiary sector and not only undermined what had been a pretty effective and healthy relationship between universities and staff over a long period of time but guaranteed that those institutions had no choice but to accept an agenda that they were reluctant to adopt.

In our own parliamentary environment we learnt, at a very early stage of parliament’s development, to avoid those kinds of measures. In fact, 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 the practice of early governments, in monarchical times, to tack measures to appropriation bills so that if those measure 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—as a rejection of that tying of the hands, in a sense, of the parliament—that a spending bill could not have tacked onto it other kinds of measures. So you could not put forward a bill that would say, ‘The only way this particular spending measure can be approved is if it incorporates some other quite draconian measure that could not otherwise be introduced and gain the support of the parliament.’ That, of course, had been the way previously that governments had got away with very unpopular measures that would not have passed the parliament.

But it was seen fit by the former minister for education, in the time he occupied that portfolio—he now occupies the position of Leader of the Opposition—in a sense to tack measures that the universities would have rejected onto funding allocations so that the only choice they had was either 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, and some reflection of their present view can be had from the statement issued by Universities Australia last night. That media statement says:

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”, Universities Australia Chair, Professor Richard Larkins said.

The release continues:

Universities Australia looks forward to other restrictions being eased or removed across a range of Commonwealth funding and regulatory activity. Universities have been their most dynamic in areas least directed by government ...

The universities plainly are delighted that this measure that is presently under discussion in the House seems set to pass this House with a convincing majority. Whilst it is the case that the opposition still has the capacity to be malign, and to exercise such limited authority as it still persists in holding until the new senators come into office, I look forward to a clear indication from those opposite that they will not stand in the way of removing restrictions in university funding that have hitherto tied those universities to AWAs. I suppose it would be hard to expect otherwise, given the opposition’s complete acceptance of the abolition of AWAs in recent times and a belated recognition that they took industrial relations too far—that their views had been seen as unfair, had been characterised by the community as unfair and had played a very significant part in the defeat that they suffered.

Another measure that this addresses is the cost of degrees. The Higher Education Support Act 2003, which was the product of the now Leader of the Opposition, created a greater number of user-pays students through the FEE-HELP and OS-HELP schemes. I remember very clearly the contemptuous dismissal of the idea that university fees would reach $100,000, but sadly, in the course of the last three years, over 100 such degrees nationwide came into operation at Australian tertiary institutions despite the 1999 pledge to the contrary. So we now have a situation where we are starting to move towards the abolition of fee-paying arrangements for tertiary study for Australian students to make certain that access is on the basis of merit and not on the basis of who can afford to pay their way into tertiary institutions against the opportunities that would be open to students of greater capacity but lesser means. We are getting rid of a situation where over 100 degrees nationwide are now offered at a price of over $100,000. I have no doubt that that will be very welcome to those who look forward to entry into the tertiary education sector.

This debate is one of the oddest because it is characterised by many people who benefited from the openness of the university sector at a time when the Labor government under Gough Whitlam first reformed the education sector. It made it possible for people of limited means to enter the university sector, removed fees, saw the growth of the tertiary sector as something that was essential for Australia’s long-term prosperity and recommitted Australia, in a way that had not been done hitherto, to an expanded university sector where those who had come from backgrounds of limited means could enter. Those same people, having benefited from that period of innovation and openness in education, came forward and committed themselves to slamming the door shut and offering degrees that were open only to those who were wealthy or who had scores which were sufficiently high to get them into the limited number of places that were open access.

Universities responded, of course, to this new educational economy. They had to in order to support and fund themselves. Increasingly, fee-paying places became more important in overall university economies, and the distortion of the education sector began and continued apace. That distortion was also continued through the determination to link universities to an ideological agenda so that staff working in those universities would have to be employed on arrangements that were consistent with the views of the government of the day—that is, individual contracts—taking away the opportunity of representation through staff associations and unions and deliberately pursuing an agenda which was forced on the universities by reason of the funding clout that the Commonwealth had as their principal funding source. Labor, by contrast, has a commitment to supporting higher education which means making universities accessible to a new generation of Australians by phasing out full-fee degrees. This commitment builds upon federal Labor’s election commitments to provide incentives for young Australians to study and teach maths or science at university, to double the number of undergraduate scholarships, to double the number of postgraduate PhD and masters-by-research scholarships and to create 1,000 mid-career fellowships for Australian researchers. It sits within the government’s broad policy of introducing a compact model of university funding consistent with ALP policy dating back to the 2006 white paper produced by Jenny Macklin whilst in opposition.

These are healthy changes for the university sector. Most importantly, they are healthy changes for our community because they mean we go back to a merit based system of selection for entry rather than the capacity to pay. They mean that universities can offer and operate employment to staff by arrangements that are negotiated effectively with their faculty, and they remove the obligation that was imposed by the previous government of running internal management issues in industrial relations that were ideologically driven in an area where this government had the capacity. We have seen that the Work Choices legislation, whilst removed, still casts a real shadow over those that were forced into circumstances of employment where they had limited choice. There is a transitional process that will phase those things out. AWAs will no longer be offered, but this is a slow transition. We are making it plain that we have no desire to confront employers or employees with arrangements that need to dislocate settled employment contracts that have been entered into, but on the other hand we must make sure that we move forward with fairness.

This legislation complements earlier legislation introduced into this parliament and passed by both the House and the Senate to get rid of the Work Choices legislation. I imagine the spectre that this will be somehow resisted when it reaches the Senate might be merely that—a spectre of a ghost long departed but with little prospect of coming to reality—although there may be some on the other side who still wish to retain fees of above $100,000. I am not certain whether the letting go of the Work Choices demon has exorcised with it the $100,000-degree golem that sat with it. We will discover whether that is so when the matters hit the Senate.

I am very pleased to have been able to come forward in this parliament, in one of the first speeches after the budget, to recognise this important change and also to conclude, as I began, with the recognition that the work is only beginning and that there is a far greater financial contribution foreshadowed in the budget, in a $10 billion education fund, together with a very specific set of commitments, some of which have been earmarked for the tertiary institution where I studied and where I was formerly the President of the Tasmania University Union. I am certain that all those who are staff and students at the University of Tasmania will be very pleased to acknowledge the receipt of that additional $11.5 billion that was earmarked as part of the nationwide fund—$500 million for those priority areas that were identified.

I thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker Bevis, and commend this reform legislation to the House. I look forward to discovering whether or not the opposition still wishes to bat on with any resistance to a direction which the community so comprehensively endorsed at the last election.

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