Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise today to speak on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006. I note many of the comments made by the member for Lingiari and I certainly agree in particular with many of the comments made in relation to regional universities. Those of us living in regional areas know how important those universities are and how important it is for young people in regional areas to be able to access tertiary education. It is certainly an issue that I have raised in this House many times and will continue to raise. On so many counts, the Howard government leaves behind those in regional Australia. There is certainly a long list of things on which we have just been left behind. Without a doubt, access to tertiary education is one of those major issues.

The legislation that we are debating here tonight really does fail to address so many of those issues in tertiary education. It really does talk about so many issues that the Howard government has forgotten about in relation to higher education. I certainly support the amendment that was moved by the member for Jagajaga. I will list the points in that amendment. It says:

... the House condemns the Government for:

(1)

jeopardising Australia’s future prosperity by reducing public investment in tertiary education, as the rest of the world increases their investment;

(2)

failing to invest in education, training, distribution and retention measures to ensure that all of Australia has enough doctors, nurses and other health care professionals to meet current and future health care needs;

(3)

massively increasing the cost of HECS, forcing students to pay up to $30,000 more for their degree;

(4)

creating an American style higher education system, where students pay more and more, with some full fee degrees costing more than $200,000, and nearly 100 full fee degrees costing more than $100,000;

(5)

massively increasing the debt burden on students with total HELP debt—

that is, the Higher Education Loan Program debt—

now over $13 billion and projected to rise to $18.8 billion in 2009;

(6)   failing to address serious concerns about standards and quality in the higher education system, putting at risk Australia’s high educational reputation and fourth largest export industry; and

(7)   an inadequate and incoherent policy response to the needs of the university system to diversify, innovate and meet Australia’s higher education needs.

That amendment really does sum up how the Howard government has failed to invest adequately in our tertiary institutions. We have certainly heard many members speak in relation to this. This failure is really clear for all to see in the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2006. The rest of the OECD countries have increased their public investment in tertiary education by an average of 48 per cent. That is a huge amount. Australia is the only country in the developed world to see a decline of seven per cent in public investment.

I personally believe that it is just outrageous that we are seeing a decline in public investment in our tertiary education system. While the rest of the developed world is increasing public investment in higher education, what do we get from the Howard government? What are they are doing? This backwards-thinking government just slashes and decreases public investment. How does that make us look on the world stage when all other countries are increasing it? There we are, just slashing it. What does that say about the value we place upon tertiary education and Australians who want to access it?

This government has also cut $5 billion in grants to universities. I have spoken in this House before about how the universities have really been held to ransom over the Howard government’s extreme industrial relations laws. Universities are forced to rip off staff or they do not get their money. It really is a disgraceful situation. Australia as a country is being left behind as a result of the Howard government’s underfunding of our tertiary institutions.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this lack of investment is most keenly felt in our regional universities, particularly in the electorate of Richmond, which I represent. As I said, this government has abandoned the people of regional Australia in so many areas, but particularly when it comes to the areas of education and training. I strongly believe that regional students should not be disadvantaged just because they choose not to attend a metropolitan university or because they are unable to attend a metropolitan university for a variety of reasons, whether it is because they want to live and study within their community, where their family and friends are, or whether it is because they or their family do not have the resources for them to be able to travel to a metropolitan centre to study, with the added costs of having to move to a major city. The reality is that those students are being severely disadvantaged because of the policies of the Howard government.

In Richmond we are certainly very fortunate to have a campus of Southern Cross University based at Tweed Heads. We are also quite close to the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University, so many students in the electorate of Richmond travel to Lismore to access that university. In regional areas our universities are so much more than just an educational institution; they are indeed a part of the community. They are a major employer and they bring people into our area to live, study and work, and they provide a non-metrocentric option for our local youth to obtain a tertiary qualification. Better funding for our regional universities, like Southern Cross University, will of course inevitably lead to better resources and a better educational experience for all of our local students. Southern Cross University is very fortunate to have both an excellent management team and excellent staff. Of course, Southern Cross University, like all universities and particularly regional universities, is really suffering from years of underfunding by this government.

I quite regularly meet and speak with students from Southern Cross University on a whole variety of issues. I recently met with a group of social welfare students who told me how their university desperately needs many more funds. They are so concerned about the lack of funding for their university and how it impacts on their study lives and the people around them that they have actually formed their own action group and are quite committed to doing all that they can to see more funding for regional universities like Southern Cross. I commend the group of students, who are so committed to forming this action group and working really hard to get a better result for their university, but it is absolutely disgraceful that the students will have to concern and consume themselves with the funding issues because the Howard government has failed to invest in higher education. They have to spend all their time and concerns on this issue when they should be able to focus on their studies and plan for their future, but they are so distressed and concerned about what they can see happening to themselves and fellow students day by day that they have formed action groups such as this one.

I support amendment (3), condemning the government for massively increasing the cost of HECS and forcing students to pay up to $30,000 more for their degrees. The average HECS fee paid by Australian students has doubled under the Howard government. It really is a shameful record. The government should certainly be ashamed of that figure.

The HECS debt in the Richmond electorate area is almost $100 million—a huge amount. It is absolutely staggering that that amount will have to be repaid by students within Richmond. The OECD’s Education at a glance 2006 report shows that the Howard government’s HECS hikes mean that Australian university students are now paying the second highest fees in the world. That is a disgraceful record. Here we are at a time when Australia is facing a skills shortage, when there are not enough doctors, engineers and dentists, and yet prospective students are being actively discouraged from attending university because of the prospect of graduating with a huge HECS debt. The HECS debt is indeed a major burden to graduates, especially young graduates who are just starting out in their working career. Having that extra money coming out of their pay packet every week for HECS makes it so much harder for these new graduates to get ahead in life. It is a lot harder for them to buy a house, save money at all or be able to set themselves up in life.

I suspect that there are quite a few people in this House who have benefited from free tertiary education. Indeed, especially those from the Howard government side of the House could have afforded their fees up front when they were at university. HECS is a further debt for those who are less well-off in our society. This government is really moving to a position where only the very wealthy will be able to afford to go to university. I believe this government does not want an educated public. This government wants to reserve tertiary education for only the very wealthy. That is exactly where they are leading. On our side of the House we certainly believe that we should be relieving the HECS burden for our students, because that really is an important investment, not just in the students’ future but, indeed, in our nation’s future. That is the direction we should be going, not making it accessible for only the very wealthy. The HECS debt is just one of the many financial pressures felt by students. This issue certainly needs to be addressed.

On a recent visit to the Southern Cross University campus at Tweed Heads with the member for Jagajaga, many business students there told us how many of them were forced to work at least part time to be able to pay for their textbooks and fees. This government is not listening to students at all, particularly not on this issue. One of the key submissions from Southern Cross University to the government’s 2002 Higher Education at the Crossroads review was about the financial pressure felt by students. And, in their submission on the issues paper Striving for quality: learning, teaching and scholarship, Southern Cross University stated:

The University wishes to reiterate the need for income support for students … The University is also concerned that levels of debt for students should not be increased, as this will inevitably have a regressive impact on poorer students and their families.

It then, very importantly, goes on to state:

The University cannot support any proposals that would increase the existing financial burden on students.

I recently had a call from a student living in Byron Bay about the very poor support that this government provides to students. He was concerned because, he said, he could earn $70 more a fortnight on Newstart than on Austudy. I found that outrageous and I thought he had to be wrong, so I consulted the current A Guide to Australian Government Payments. It turns out he was wrong, because he would actually get $86.20 more a fortnight on Newstart than on Austudy. According to the Australian government payments booklet, the basic rate of Austudy is only $334.70 a fortnight, while Newstart is $420.90 per fortnight. So why give our students $86.20 a fortnight less? I am not being critical of the amount that people are getting on Newstart; the point I am making here is that we need to invest in our students. We need to make sure that their financial burdens are relieved, not increased. This is certainly a prime example of how tough they are doing it; that student in Byron Bay really highlighted that.

The current allowance really is an absolute pittance. So many local students tell me how impossible it is to survive, right across the board in their lives—how difficult it is. I had a student last week telling me that they virtually had to live on two-minute noodles whilst they were studying, as a result of not being able to afford to buy anything else. Now, I am not casting any aspersions on two-minute noodles but, for this particular student, having to consume not much more than that certainly made life very hard. I think that is a pretty outrageous situation.

Also, with textbooks in some subjects such as law costing as much as $300 per subject, a semester’s worth of textbooks can equate to almost two months worth of Austudy. That is a pretty large sum. So, even with students eating all those two-minute noodles, Austudy just does not stretch to cover buying the resources necessary to undertake a unit of study. I certainly do not mean to make light of this; I am just trying to say that so many students out there are doing it so tough all the time.

Of course, this situation does not improve much for mature-age or postgraduate students. When the member for Jagajaga and I met with the SCU students, one of the mature-age education students told us that she and her husband had to plan for years and years in advance to get ahead with their mortgage so that they could actually afford to go to university. If this is the situation that we are in now, if it is that difficult now for students, I really shudder to think what things might be like for our children and grandchildren in the future.

The financial pressure and the HECS hikes are an added threat to the educational prospects of the less wealthy in our country. In the last couple of years, there has been a decline in the number of Australian undergraduate places that are subsidised by HECS, and for the first time in 50 years there are fewer places available for HECS students. This side of the House has made it very clear that we will phase out full-fee places for Australian undergraduates at public universities. It has to be a basic tenet of any fair society that students gain access to higher education according to merit, not their financial means.

One of the measures in schedule 2 of this bill is to increase the FEE-HELP limit to $80,000 for most students and to $100,000 for medical, dental and veterinary science students. There are now almost 100 full-fee degrees in Australia costing more than $100,000. In reality, the increases in FEE-HELP are not sufficient to meet the real cost of these degrees. The Good Universities Guide 2007 tells us that a full-fee place in medicine-arts at the University of New South Wales costs $237,000; the same degree costs just over $219,000 at the University of Melbourne; medicine at Bond University costs $233,000; and medicine-law at Monash costs just a bit over $214,000. Of course, the average new mortgage these days is $222,000, so you can pay as much for your university degree as you do for your home. This really is an outrageous situation. It shows how the Howard government is Americanising our Australian university system. Certainly, federal Labor is committed to putting an end to that.

The cost of university, whether it be the HECS debt, the cost of living whilst studying or the full fee costs, really is often a deterrent to young people who want to go to university. This is having many negative consequences for the people of northern New South Wales, with one of the major ramifications for the area being youth unemployment. Currently, youth unemployment in Richmond is at 29.8 per cent, which is certainly a very high level. This figure is expected to rise as school leavers start looking for work, towards the end of the year. We need to make an investment in our children, to build a future for them and for our nation. We on this side of the House say we can address the skills crisis and the youth unemployment rate through training our young people. That is where our focus needs to be—on training those young people and providing a future for them. That is what is vitally important for our nation’s future and for our children’s future.

The amendment moved by the member for Jagajaga does highlight a lack of policy direction by the Howard government. But the future is certainly not all doom and gloom for our universities and for our students who desperately want to acquire a tertiary education, because we on this side of the House, federal Labor, are very serious about education and have a vision of the future for our nation and for our students. Federal Labor are designing very strong, practical measures to ensure our kids have access to affordable education and training choices.

Federal Labor’s plan includes proposals to stop the massive HECS fee increases, reduce the overall financial burden on students and provide HECS relief and extra university places for degrees in areas of skills shortage. This is an issue that I have spoken about before many times and that we all have: skills shortages throughout this country are massive and they seem to be getting worse day by day. Here we have all these impediments to people getting into university in our country, yet we are screaming out for more people with trade skills all the time. Again, those of us in regional areas, with those youth unemployment figures of about 30 per cent, need to see funds being directed to (1) alleviating that skills shortage and (2) providing a future for young people through training.

Federal Labor will support community outreach by universities, as we recognise that our universities are much more than providers of education. They are very important members of our local communities, as I said before in relation to Southern Cross University at Tweed Heads and Lismore. They do play an integral part in our community and we see throughout regional Australia what a vital role they play and how difficult and tough it is for them at the moment under the Howard government.

Under federal Labor’s funding scheme universities will be given regional loadings. Federal Labor will provide additional public money to our universities, and indeed all universities will be better off under a federal Labor government. Lifting our universities up is central to a Labor government’s economic agenda to build a prosperous future for all Australians. Federal Labor firmly believes in investing in higher education because higher education is the cornerstone of our nation’s social and economic prosperity. We need to see a lot more funding in that particular area to ensure our nation’s future.

As I have highlighted tonight, it is only federal Labor that is committed to providing that future. There are so many people out there, particularly in regional Australia, who desperately need to have a federal Labor government that can provide that future for their children and provide the necessary training that those kids need to be able to have a future. So many people I speak to are disillusioned and angry at the Howard government. They say that universities are not even on the radar for their kids because of the cost. It is an outrageous situation for a young person growing up in regional Australia that their families feel they cannot even access a university education at all.

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