Andrew Wilkie (Denison, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education and Training. Minister, universities existed before your reform proposal and must exist afterwards, regardless of your success or failure. Hence, you really should stop linking to the reforms the critical $400 million restructure funding for the University of Tasmania. So, Minister, will you now act in the public interest and commit to that funding, or do you intend to promise it closer to the next election, in a cynical move to try and save the three Tasmanian Liberal Party amigos?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Denison for his question. Quite frankly, I am rather surprised by it, because the very reforms that the member for Denison talks about are the ones that would have allowed the University of Tasmania to go ahead with its restructure of its university.

The University of Tasmania had plans, and hopefully will have plans in the future, to expand their operations. To be able to do so, they needed to lift the cap on the sub-bachelor courses—the very ones the member for Denison voted against in this House and helped convince Senator Lambie to vote against in the Senate. For the University of Tasmania to successfully restructure and fill those campuses they wanted to build, they needed to lift the cap on the pre-degree places that were going to be the reason for those campuses to exist. So I cannot understand the member for Denison's question.

The only link between the restructure and the government's reforms is that the reforms allow the University of Tasmania to secure its financial future by expanding by thousands and thousands of places—I think there were some suggestions that they would raise their pre-degree places by 10,000—to bring that revenue into Tasmania. That is why the member for Lyons, the member for Bass and the member for Braddon all lobbied so hard for these reforms—because they were the lifesaving measure that the University of Tasmania wanted. In fact, regional universities would have been the big winners from the government's higher education reforms, if they had passed the Senate. Scott Bowman, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Central Queensland, put it best when he said:

If regional Australia had any hope of ever catching up with city Australia in university participation … it would be through an uncapped student system in a deregulated market.

His university is exactly the same as the University of Tasmania in that it needs to be able to have an uncapped, deregulated market for the pre-degree places if it is to gain the extra revenue that it needs to invest in excellent teaching and research.

I would urge the member for Denison to change his position on the government's reforms and help convince Senator Lambie to change her position on the reforms, because their votes were against the very thing that they both say they wanted to expand. On that note, I thank the member for Denison for his question. I would ask him to reconsider the position he adopted on the government's higher education reforms.