Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be able to make a contribution to this debate on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007, which amends the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to provide for the government’s 2007-08 budget commitments, provide indexation increases and other technical adjustments for 2008 to 2010 and add maximum grant amounts for 2011. The bill includes higher education measures announced in the budget other than the Higher Education Endowment Fund. The bill contains amendments across several areas. The bill: reduces the number of CGS funding clusters; changes CGS funding levels across disciplines and specifies a revised maximum student HECS contribution for commerce, economics and accounting purposes; introduces three-year CGS funding agreements to commence from 2009; lifts the cap limiting the promotion of full-fee domestic undergraduate places; increases the total number of Commonwealth supported places; increases the number of Commonwealth scholarships from 8,500 to 12,000 per year, and allows them to be paid by the Commonwealth directly to students; introduces an Indigenous scholarship classification for up to 1,000 higher education Indigenous students; provides additional funding to universities to improve teacher education programs; creates a new diversity in structural adjustment funds for universities, including through the appropriation of an additional $67 million; and provides additional funding to the Australian Research Council for the period 1 July 2007 to 30 July 2011. The bill also amends the Australian Research Council Act 2001 to reflect updated caps on funding for 2007 and 2008 and to add financial year starting on 1 July 2009 and 1 July 2010.

Mr Deputy Speaker, through the shadow minister Labor has moved an amendment, as you observed in your introduction. That amendment reads:

Higher education has long been a cause for public discussion, public debate and, dare I say, public dispute, over the direction of policy, over the appropriateness of funding levels and over different philosophies about how to deal with the education sector in general but the higher education sector in particular. I come to this debate as someone who—I guess this applies to all my generation who would have been at university—was at university during the Whitlam years when fees were abolished. I was in this place when the Labor government, under Prime Minister Hawke, introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, and I understood the merit in doing that. However, then, as now, I was concerned about the impact it would have on the ability of young people to attend university. What we are seeing now, of course, as a result of current government policy, is that the cost burden on students has shifted significantly and has been raised significantly to make it ever more difficult for them to achieve a higher education outcome without very significant sacrifice and sometimes very often hardship.

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