Kelly Hoare (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006 includes a multiple and disconnected series of amendments to the higher education legislation. Labor will support the bill. However, the shadow minister for education, training, science and research, the member for Jagajaga, Ms Macklin, moved the following amendment, which I would encourage all members to support:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: “whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, 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 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”.

The Howard government has had an attack dog attitude to higher education since its election in 1996. With savage increases in university fees and HECS, the introduction of voluntary student unionism and funding cuts across the board, the Australian public knows that the further education and training of this country’s young people has not been an issue of priority for this government.

However, the government has at least in this bill of piecemeal legislative amendments included some positive news for Australia’s tertiary education system and our community. This bill seeks to address our critical skills shortage in medical and health services, a skills shortage which will only grow more acute as Australia’s population ages and our health as a nation deteriorates. This skills shortage is already biting in many hospitals and clinics throughout the country, with rural and regional areas particularly hard hit. There are hundreds of towns throughout Australia without a permanent medical service, forcing people to travel long distances or simply grin and bear their illnesses until a visiting doctor can make it to their town. This is an unacceptable state of affairs.

In the Charlton electorate there is a desperate need for more doctors and additional health professionals. Thanks to community campaigns, which I have been pleased to work with, we have seen additional doctors moving into the area and setting up practices, but for many towns and suburbs in my electorate such as Booragul, Blackalls Park and Morisset there is a continuing need for greater services. Urgent action is needed to address this and to ensure that the quality of Australia’s medical care, whether in the city or the bush, is not allowed to decline to the poor standards seen in other countries, where doctors and nurses are simply too overworked and too busy to give quality care to their patients. We therefore applaud the creation of nearly 1,900 more places in medical and nursing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, which this bill will allow.

But while the government is taking a positive step in creating these new places, it is missing an opportunity to really show commitment to the development of Australia’s health services. If the government were to make all these places Commonwealth funded, as the Australian Medical Association has called for it to do, we would very quickly see a rise in the number of trained medical personnel available to fill the gaps in the workforce. The prohibitive cost of a medical or nursing degree means that only those with money to burn or those willing to get themselves deeply into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt can afford to undertake these degrees. This should not be the case. If the government possessed any vision at all on this issue, it would realize that medical and nursing students are gaining skills which are essential to the future of this country, skills we literally cannot live without. Is it reasonable then to ask these young people to pay either up-front or for the rest of their lives when their skills and training will be put to use for all of our benefit? The government’s initiative in adding these new places is at best a half measure in addressing the medical skills shortage. It seems that while they want to be seen to be addressing this problem they do not want to have to pay for it. Typically, they seem to think it is better to ask Australia’s young people and their families to pay the price.

This bill also addresses the issue of FEE-HELP loans by increasing the amount that students can borrow to $80,000 for general degrees and $100,000 for medical and nursing degrees. It seems very magnanimous of the government to increase the amount of money it is prepared to lend our poor, impoverished students. But hang on a minute: why would a student need to borrow $100,000 to fund their university education anyway? Didn’t John Howard promise us that there would be no $100,000 degrees under his leadership? Why then is the government seeking to amend the legislation to make such a sum of money available?

Sadly, the answer is obvious: the government are seeking this amendment because the Prime Minister’s promise was so much hot air—and they know it. They know that there are already degrees which cost upwards of $100,000, and in some cases even upwards of $200,000. They know that degrees like medicine and nursing can now cost as much as a small house, while even non-medical degrees routinely blow out over the $100,000 mark—for example, a combined law and communications degree at the University of Melbourne now costs $104,400; at the University of Technology in Sydney, a Bachelor of Arts combined with economics can set students back $107,640; heaven forbid if you want to round out your medical degree with studies in another field, because a combined Bachelor of Medicine and arts degree at the University of Melbourne currently costs $219,100; and, at Monash University, a combined medicine and law degree can run to $214,600.

The government probably already know what the OECD recently reported in its Education at a glance 2006 report—namely, that Australian students now pay the second highest university fees in the world, second only to the United States. In this regard, we can see that even the proposed amendments are pretty inadequate in meeting students’ borrowing needs. But that is not really the problem here. The problem is that when the Prime Minister speaks we should be able to trust what he says. When he commits to something as important as the continuing affordability of tertiary education for all those who want and need it, this should mean something. But, like so many other promises made by this government, the promise that students would never have to pay $100,000 for their university degrees has been shown to be an entirely empty one. This is as disappointing as it is unsurprising.

We should be concerned about these prices not just because they show the Prime Minister up for the liar that he is but because they will very likely cause a decline in the number of students attending university.

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