House debates

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008

Second Reading

11:55 am

Photo of Greg CombetGreg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Procurement) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to speak on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Removal of the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements and National Governance Protocols Requirements and Other Matters) Bill 2008. The bill will remove the Howard government’s extreme workplace relations agenda from our universities. It will provide the universities with greater flexibility in their governance by removing unnecessary government interference in their management.

Today I will go into some detail about the system that this bill seeks to abolish, because it is very important that we understand exactly what the previous government was doing and offer some reflections on why the Howard government introduced this system. Having listened to the member for Casey it is interesting that the previous support by members of the former Howard government for the higher education workplace relations requirements appears to have collapsed.

On Friday, 29 April 2005, the then Howard government announced a set of higher education workplace relations requirements for Australian higher education institutions. They are referred to as the HEWRRs. In short, the HEWRRs were strict workplace relations criteria that universities had to comply with in order to be eligible for $280 million of assistance funding under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme.

The first and key element of the HEWRRs was the criterion that universities were required to offer Australian workplace agreements. As is now notorious, Australian workplace agreements, or AWAs, are individual employment contracts that were able to undercut important protections and safety net conditions contained in the awards and collective agreements that operated within the higher education system, in this instance, but of course they operated throughout the economy and all other industries.

The HEWRRs within this sector required universities to offer AWAs to all new staff employed after 29 April 2005 and to all existing staff by 31 August 2006. The HEWRRs also required universities to include a clause in collective agreements that expressly allowed AWAs to operate to the exclusion of any collective agreement. It is important to consider exactly what was being asked here by the former government. What we now know about AWAs from official data—data that the Howard government was not keen to see become public—is that 89 per cent of the AWAs, in quite broad surveys, removed at least one protected award condition. In fact 52 per cent excluded more than six protected award conditions. Employment was casualised under many AWAs and, as we have also heard from the Deputy Prime Minister on occasion in this House, the AWAs in effect were used to significantly reduce people’s take-home pay, often by very considerable amounts.

We know that the way in which that was commonly achieved was through the removal of award conditions such as shiftwork penalties, annual leave loading and other forms of penalty rates such as overtime pay. This was the regime, and it was the intent of the Howard government to force it upon the higher education sector by making funding conditional upon the offering of AWAs.

Another key element of the HEWRRs was the removal of restrictions on fixed term and casual employment. The HEWRRs stipulated that university agreements, policies and practices must not place limitations on the forms and mix of employment arrangements. In practice this had two consequences. Firstly, existing agreement restrictions on the use of fixed term and casual employment had to be removed. The effect was, unsurprisingly, a marked increase in fixed term employment in universities and a continuation of quite a rapid increase in casual employment across the higher education sector. In summary, employment security was undermined to a significant degree by the HEWRRs through this measure alone.

One individual example of the effect of these provisions involved a woman named Rosalie Bunn, who held a long-term casual teaching position in the Open Foundation and Newstep program at the University of Newcastle in the region that I now represent. She has now been a casual for more than 10 years, during which time she has had no access to sick leave, annual leave, long service leave or any other kind of leave, no job security and no incremental advancement. There was an effort at the time, several years ago, to limit casual employment at Newcastle in the light of experiences such as Rosalie Bunn’s. But these efforts to improve the employment security of someone such as Rosalie Bunn—effectively a casual for 10 years in what was a permanent position—and afford her community accepted standards such as annual leave were made completely illegal, unlawful and impossible by the imposition of the HEWRRs. As a result, Rosalie and people like her are still casuals—and it is not 10 years; it is now well beyond 10 years that she has been in that position.

The second consequence arising from this specific change was that job security and the management of change provisions in many agreements were weakened. That was an intentional element of the HEWRRs. Previous commitments in collective agreements—for example, to maintaining particular staffing levels or to providing job security through no compulsory redundancies—had to be removed because of the HEWRRs. Another element of HEWRRs was the removal of detail from agreements. Under the rubric of requiring collective agreements to be simple, flexible and principle based, avoiding excessive detail and prescription, as was required, some conditions which were previously included in agreements had to be removed. These included things such as position classification standards, award provisions relating to casual employment and aspects of leave, management of change and unsatisfactory performance, and misconduct procedures and processes. In the wake of the removal of detail such as that, it became harder for employees under the agreements to access things such as dispute-settling procedures to protect their rights, oftentimes in circumstances where unfairness may have been exacted upon them. It was also much more difficult to access union representation in those circumstances.

Another element of the HEWRRs required universities to implement performance management systems to reward high-performing staff and efficiently manage poor-performing staff. As a principle that is not controversial; however, in the circumstances of the HEWRRs the outcome was a push on the part of some of the management in the higher education sector to implement performance pay systems which were disruptive to the cohesiveness of staff and which encouraged an overconcentration on short-term results.

Finally, the HEWRRs required that university agreements, policies and practices must be consistent with the freedom of association principles contained in the Workplace Relations Act. This in practice meant that agreements had to be stripped of provisions which the Howard government interpreted as encouraging union membership. In essence it meant that there was no leave to attend things such as workplace meetings or to invite a union representative to come into the workplace to represent you in an industrial situation. The HEWRRs system gave the ministers for education under the former government unprecedented power, in fact, to involve themselves in the management of workplace relations in the sector. All decisions on the HEWRRs were made directly by the minister and there was no scope for review or repeal of those decisions. Furthermore, the minister was able to unilaterally change the requirements at any time. If you are to consider this, this is an extraordinary level of ministerial or government interference in staff management, as it would be in any sector but particularly in higher education.

At the time of the original legislation establishing the HEWRRs, there was understandably widespread criticism of the system, criticism that was completely ignored by the government. At the Senate hearing into the legislation establishing the HEWRRs, there was fierce opposition. Some of the criticisms raised at those hearings, particularly by the National Tertiary Education Union, were that the HEWRRs failed to address the real workplace issues being faced within the universities, that the HEWRRs lacked appropriate accountability and parliamentary scrutiny, that they created uncertainty and confusion and provoked industrial disharmony within the universities, that they gave the federal government unprecedented and unwarranted capacity to interfere in the operation of the higher education institutions, and that they did not assist Australia’s higher education institutions with respect to the quality of learning, research or outcomes for employees. They were specifically focused industrial relations initiatives designed on the basis of conditionality to the access of funding to allow the government to force on the sector its industrial relations agenda, which I think is now widely held throughout the community to have been one of extreme unfairness, lacking justification.

The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, now known as Universities Australia, essentially representing the management and administrators of the universities, also opposed the introduction of the HEWRRs. In their submission to the Senate committee, they said that the HEWRRs would be:

… very intrusive in terms of universities’ capacity to manage their internal affairs. The HEWRRs proposal constitutes a ‘one size fits all’ approach, whereas the AVCC takes the view that the focus should be on desired outcomes, rather than specific industrial processes and particular industrial instruments.

That was an extremely important criticism made by the vice-chancellors charged with the responsibility of the management, administration and governance of Australia’s universities. They did not want the HEWRRs imposed—and for good reason.

It is important to note for the record that the Howard government completely ignored all of the well-founded criticism of the system that it proposed to introduce, instead preferring to implement its ideological industrial relations agenda. To understand that agenda is to understand the wider intention of its form of industrial relations, embodied in the Work Choices legislation. That was what the HEWRRs were really all about: to impose the Work Choices type of philosophy on the university system. It was never about improving the higher education system. It was never about promoting flexibility, innovation or skills development within universities and it certainly did nothing to relieve the burden on university staff or students.

The HEWRRs system was about the fulfilment of the government’s ideological obsessions in industrial relations. It was a plan conceived at least substantially by the then Minister for Education, Science and Training—now, of course, the Leader of the Opposition—and several of his colleagues. It should give cause to consider exactly where the opposition may be going in relation to industrial relations. I note from the member for Casey’s contribution that, if the amendment that is proposed to be moved is defeated, the opposition intend to vote against this bill, which means that they will be voting in this circumstance to continue the imposition of HEWRRs within the higher education system, in effect.

The fact is that, when Dr Nelson was in charge of the nation’s higher education system, instead of concentrating on how he could improve the services of the universities or how we could make an investment for the future, there was a preoccupation with the imposition of this workplace relations agenda. Education is vital to the ability of individuals to fulfil their potential and to maximising the productive capacity of the country. Over the last 150 years the measure of a nation’s economic development was the number of tonnes of iron and steel it produced. In this century it will be the number of graduates that a nation produces, especially in science and engineering, that will be important.

Investment in education is the linchpin of our future economic potential and yet the last government failed in this area, particularly in tertiary education—the level of education that the Commonwealth has the most responsibility for. Australia ranks a mediocre 15th out of 28 OECD nations in terms of total spending on education as a percentage of GDP. In the decade since 1995, Australia was the only OECD country to cut public investment in tertiary education, by an amount of seven per cent. In dire contrast, the average increase in public investment by other OECD countries was 48 per cent. We are entirely against the trend of all other OECD countries, instead concentrating on imposing things like HEWRRs and completely losing focus on the importance of investment in quality tertiary education.

An important aspect of this is our failure to train engineers, and this is especially crucial in the defence industry, which is a portfolio area for which I now have some responsibility. Australia ranks 20th out of the 21 OECD nations surveyed in terms of the share of engineering graduates to total graduates. Only 10 per cent of Australian graduates are engineers, compared to an OECD average of 14 per cent. Imagine the impact on productivity in the country and the relief on inflationary pressure if we were able to improve that outcome. I am not just speaking as an engineer. I think it is actually critical to the future economic prosperity of the country that we improve the numbers of graduates coming out of engineering and science disciplines.

Coupled with the Howard government’s obsession with AWAs was a deep-seated and divisive attitude to those who work in higher education. I think this partly informed the former government’s approach to the imposition of the HEWRRs. Universities, under the previous government, were not necessarily seen as institutions that promoted creativity and built the productive capacity of our society. They were in part a battle ground to play out what has been described as some of the ‘culture wars’. In a well-publicised recent speech to an American conservative group, the former Prime Minister, John Howard, had the following to say:

Those who hold to conservative values continue to face a major ideological battle. The left liberal grip on educational institutions and large, though not all, sections of the media remains intense.

That is something of an insight into some of the previous government’s motives. It was this view of universities as bastions of supposed Left liberalism that made the Howard government, at least in part, eager to impose these kinds of constraints and conditionality on the availability of funding. If that were not bad enough, what better way to further punish the supposed Left liberals than by pushing universities to implement some of these changes? That is what the laws were about.

The substance of the bill is also concerned with what are called ‘the national governance protocols’ that the member for Casey referred to. These required or imposed, again on the basis of conditionality of access to funding, what could be described as a standardised governance approach to the management and administration of the universities. Under the current system, Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding was also contingent on adherence to these national governance protocols. The practical result of this has been an increase—in the Rudd government’s belief—in red tape and bureaucracy for universities as part of ongoing compliance checks. These checks are conducted despite the fact that all universities have already taken the necessary steps to implement these protocols—an important point in considering the changes contained in this bill. The Rudd government, in contrast, believes in greater flexibility and the encouragement of good governance practices within universities—we believe in encouraging that—and does not feel the need to impose standardised and excessive red tape and bureaucracy on the leaders and administrators of the universities. That is why the bill proposes to remove the conditionality related to the national governance protocols.

The bill amends the Higher Education Support Act 2003, the parent act, by repealing section 33-17. This section of that act currently requires that the HEWRRs and the national governance protocols are adhered to as a condition of Commonwealth Grant Scheme student places. The removal of this section will help remove the burdens, in the government’s belief, on our higher education sector while also granting them greater financial certainty.

I am pleased to be able to speak on this bill, given that I campaigned against the HEWRRs consistently in my former role as the leader of the ACTU. I am very proud to be able to support these changes. I campaigned strongly with the National Tertiary Education Union and other higher education unions in recent years before coming to this place, and I would like to congratulate them for the way in which they conducted what I think was a sensible campaign against completely unreasonable requirements imposed by the previous, Howard government. I am optimistic that the Rudd Labor government will be able to rebuild the relationship between the government and the universities that was disturbed by this unnecessary interference imposed on the universities by the former Howard government. I would simply like to conclude by saying that in today’s world, given the economic challenges this country confronts, the value of higher education cannot be understated. This bill seeks to help that sector of education by allowing for greater flexibility in their workplace relations and in their governance arrangements. I commend the bill to the House.

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