Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007. The education measures were really the centrepiece of this year’s budget. I was very pleased on the Friday after the budget to be able to accompany the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training on visits to Flinders University, in my electorate, and the University of Adelaide, of which both she and I are graduates. As you would expect from a good education minister, she went with cheques and money and was well received by the vice-chancellors and chancellors and those acting for them.

In 2002 the then education minister announced that a review of higher education policy would take place over the remainder of that year. That was the Crossroads review. From that review came the higher education package Backing Australia’s Future, which was announced in the 2003 budget. With this year’s budget we are building on those measures. We need a higher education system which does a whole lot of things. We need to have some places which are focused on research and some which are focused on teaching. We need to have universities which are very much focused on preparing people for the workforce. The important thing in all of this is that we have a lot of choice and we encourage institutions to go for excellence as well. We need an education system that will deliver the workforce that Australia needs for our future prosperity. It is essential that we have a flexible system in which there is a lot of choice and which is responsive to the needs of students and employers, not one with numerous caps.

In the budget, one of the key things was the new $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund for Australian universities. There was also a $700 tuition voucher for children in our schools who do not achieve national literacy and numeracy benchmarks in years 3, 5 and 7. There are bonuses of up to $50,000 for schools that make significant improvements in literacy and numeracy. I have seen some remarkable results in schools in my electorate. Some of the schools use the Jolly Phonics program and swear by it. What you find is that things like this are driven by the leadership of the principal and a real commitment to improving results. I remember when we first wanted national literacy and numeracy tests that this was opposed by the Australian Education Union and, as a consequence, opposed by the Labor Party. It is very important to know how our students are doing and where our students are failing. But it is also important to encourage those teachers who are trying to lift people up and improve their performance. The budget also has a $5,000 bonus for teachers who undertake professional training at newly established summer schools. There will be a payment of $1,000 for first- and second-year apprentices, as well as a $500 voucher to help pay course fees. There will also be three new technical colleges, adding to the 25 already in place.

Returning to the Higher Education Endowment Fund, when you look at universities around the world, you see that Harvard University had an endowment of $US25.9 billion in 2005. They are the best endowed university in the world. Yale had $US15.2 billion. Other universities in the United States, such as Stanford, Texas and Princeton, all have endowments greater than $US10 billion. The University of Cambridge, which has been going for 800 years or thereabouts, has an endowment equivalent to $1.5 billion and college endowments of $5 billion. When we look at the Australian universities—which have not been going as long as Harvard or Cambridge—the greatest endowment any Australian university has is the University of Melbourne’s $800 million. The University of Sydney has $700 million. The University of Western Australia has a very good endowment. But a lot of universities do not have access to this level of endowment. The previous speaker mentioned the great expansion of universities under the Menzies government. A lot of those universities established in the 1950s and 1960s have not been the beneficiaries of bequests. Flinders University, which is central to my electorate, has an endowment of only $10 million. With the Higher Education Endowment Fund, universities will now have access to an endowment fund which, across Australia, is equivalent to what Cambridge University has—although it is still dwarfed by the top five American universities.

As well as providing an endowment worth $5 billion in an arrangement like the Future Fund, it is essential that we encourage a culture of individual and corporate philanthropy similar to that in the United States. There is a hope that we will get, on top of the $5 billion that we have contributed to the fund, more money contributed from businesses and individuals. There is provision for that. When we talk about corporate philanthropy, one of the great examples that I am fond of using is the Santos School of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Adelaide. It was announced in 2001 and at the time was the largest example of corporate philanthropy in the university sector. It was a great gift from Santos. It helped address a workforce need that they had, but it is a school that is for petroleum engineering and it benefits not just that one company.

The budget builds on a number of things that we have already achieved. In the electorate of Boothby, Flinders University recently received $2.5 million towards the cost of a new building for the faculty of health sciences, through the higher education Capital Development Pool program. The CDP program supports proposals that assist in new campus developments in suburban growth corridors and regional centres. There has been almost $94 million allocated to Australian universities in additional funding from the CDP.

Flinders University also received $2.6 million from the Australian government to expand its popular fitness centre, through the $58 million voluntary student unionism transition fund. This was one of 37 projects across Australian universities that have benefited from this fund. Most of the universities which benefited from this fund were regional universities, but Flinders University put up a very good case for why their fitness centre—which is well patronised—should be able to expand. This has been a win-win for university students. What they have been able to do is enjoy the facilities that the doomsayers tried to make us believe would disappear, but at the same time university students have more money in their pockets every year to spend as they choose. They no longer have to pay compulsory student union fees.

I take this opportunity to note that the Labor Party and their shadow spokesman have said that the Labor Party will not reintroduce compulsory union fees, so compulsory union fees are now a thing of the past. The university unions are going forward. They are delivering services, but they are now focusing on their core business and not spending money as they used to on political campaigns. There has also been more funding at Flinders University, with $2.8 million for various life projects in October 2006. This included a fauna study, a project on hearing loss and English as a second language, a child and trauma memory project and a blood lactose monitor project. There was a $2 million Australian government grant in December 2005 towards the construction of a science innovation learning centre to support industry focused group projects in innovation and enterprise and to be a site for the demonstration and promotion of science and technology.

The initiatives in the budget reshape the higher education landscape. One of the problems with the Dawkins reforms is that they made all our higher education institutions universities—they did not focus enough on the important, different roles they all played. Our vision for the future—and we now have this—is to allow more world-class universities to emerge in Australia to encourage excellence and diversity and to allow greater scope for universities to adjust to student numbers, to respond to student demand, to address skills needs, to give more support for structural reform where required, to address the capacity of universities to meet local labour market needs and, of course, to improve learning and teaching standards.

There are several measures in this bill which will help achieve that. There is a $209 million Diversity and Structural Adjustment Fund. There is also a revision of the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, which will be directed towards the disciplines of mathematics and statistics, allied health, engineering, science and surveying, clinical psychology, education, nursing, behavioural science and social science and medicine, dentistry and veterinary science. Student contribution rates are based on graduates’ potential earnings, and the government’s decision has always been based on this. Thus, reflecting the higher salaries that graduates expect to receive over a lifetime, the maximum student contribution for accounting, administration, economics and commerce disciplines will be aligned with law. It is the decision of each individual university whether to raise the student contribution for these courses.

There is no doubt that higher education providers and students will gain from the increased flexibility. By receiving additional funding for some disciplines they will be able to respond more quickly to student and employer demand that will help them address skills shortages. Students will benefit from additional funding as the quality of courses will be improved via smaller classes, better course delivery and materials and equipment. This bill will also allow for the relaxation of caps on Commonwealth supported places and domestic full-fee-paying undergraduate student places. Instead of penalising universities for overenrolments, universities will now be fully funded for overenrolments up to five per cent in Commonwealth support places—up from the current one per cent. Additionally, the amendments will remove penalties for overenrolments above five per cent. Higher education providers will now receive the full amount of the student contribution for all the Commonwealth supported students they enrol.

A productive education system is critical to building the future prosperity of Australia. We need an education system that is responsive to the needs of students and employers, increases skills and boosts productivity and increases the quality of teaching in the major disciplines of literacy and numeracy, English, maths, science and Australian history. The bill also removes the cap on the number of full-fee-paying places universities can offer, which until now has been capped at 35 per cent. Universities, however, will still be required to offer their Commonwealth funded places before offering full-fee places. The ALP may call full-fee-paying students queue jumping by rich students, but we call it giving young people the opportunity to attend university. Labor fears of an education system being flooded with wealthy students are nothing more than another blatant scare campaign. The University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor James McWha said, ‘I wouldn’t expect it to change by more than one per cent over the next two to three years.’

An additional question that is raised while debating this legislation is: how do Labor propose to compensate universities after they ban full-fee-paying students? A ban would leave the ALP with a compensation bill of $500 million for higher education providers, and that does not include private universities Bond and Notre Dame or postgraduate places. If the ALP propose to ban all full-fee-paying students, they will need to guarantee all universities will not be worse off. The University of Sydney’s Vice-Chancellor, Gavin Brown, said:

·              I am saddened that, for ideological reasons, thousands of students would be denied educational opportunities of their choice.

The budget is a vision for the future of an education system that encourages excellence and that has the flexibility to provide the workforce that Australia will need in the future if we are to see our economy in the future perform as well as it is currently. The Australian government investment in higher education has increased 31 per cent in real terms over the last 12 years. The budget provides $1.9 billion for higher education plus, as I said, an additional investment of $5 billion in a perpetual Higher Education Endowment Fund. The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee president, Professor Gerard Sutton, said the budget was ‘spectacular’ for the higher education sector. The government’s education blueprint for the future removes red tape and the constraint on flexibility. The number of those who want a place at university but cannot get one is at historically low levels. The policy on full funding overenrolments up to five per cent will effectively mean every student who wants a university place next year will be able to get one.

In my electorate are Flinders University and also the Waite Institute of the University of Adelaide. Both are excellent facilities. They will benefit from being able to access the Higher Education Endowment Fund and they may benefit from some of the increased flexibility that is now there, including the removal of the cap on full fee-paying places. As I said, we have recently made a number of funding announcements at Flinders University—$2.5 million for a sports centre and $2.6 million for a health sciences building. Similarly, at the Waite Institute we have recently announced money for the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and are working towards getting some Commonwealth money for the Wine Innovation Cluster, which is a very impressive facility. I support and commend the education minister for these budget measures.

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