Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Earlier today I was lucky enough to attend a Smart Science Symposium held in his parliament where a hundred scientists, or so it seemed, from around the country gathered to talk about the future vision of this country. The cuts to parliamentary screening procedures must have kicked in. I am sure the government would not knowingly have let that many scientists into the building all at once to talk about what Australia's future might look like and the importance of putting money into research. On the very day that researchers and scientists came here to say that unless we secure the future of research in this country we are going to witness more brain drain as our best and brightest go overseas; that we are not going to secure the type of future economy for this country which would mean that in the 21st century we might have something to sell to the rest of the world, something which is not just coal but is, instead, based on our brains and on the things that people here produce; on the very same day those people have come here to say, 'Let's finally have a vision for a smart Australia where we respect education, where we respect research and where a job in research is treated as importantly as building a car,' this government comes along with a bill that will be a body blow to a smart Australia.

This is not only vital to our future but it is in the Greens' DNA to stand up for research and education. It is personal for me as well. My dad was the first person in his family to go to university. His dad before him worked in the post office as well as serving for his country. My dad's mum spent her life raising the kids, as many women of that generation did. My dad went to university because he could. It was an odd thing for someone in his position to do, but he went because it was affordable and he had the support—including from the government—to continue to study and then not leave with a crippling debt.

When I was at the university in the 1990s, the first campaigns I started getting involved with were on the rise in costs of education under the then Labor government. I still keep in my office a picture of me at a demonstration with a banner in the early 1990s in my best denim jacket with a Dawson's Creek haircut saying, 'Stop the ALP loans scheme.' I apologise to the students of today that we were not able to stop the Labor Party loans scheme. The point we were making then is the same as the point we are making now—that is, in a wealthy country like Australia we should have a higher education system where everyone can go to university no matter how much they earn.

I can see the cost of university rising to the point where people like my dad will not be able to go in the first place and this bill will hasten that trend. Secondly, it is vital to a functioning democracy that the population is as educated as they want to be and that everyone can continue to learn throughout their whole lives and not be deterred because they might graduate with a debt the size of a mortgage. If education becomes something only the privileged few can access or if some people start saying, 'Hang on, I don't know if I want to graduate with a $100,000 debt and, at the same time, have to find a house and a mortgage and then meet all the other costs of life,' then people who are highly educated will be the only ones who can afford to carry the burden of that debt and they in turn will govern and rule for themselves and for themselves alone.

An educated population is the cornerstone of a democracy, but over the years the pressures on our universities and on our students have been ratcheted up and up. Base funding has been cut under successive governments. Whether governments have been Labor or Liberal, university funding has not been increased to the level that it should, to the point where the Bradley review of higher education, when it was commissioned by the former Labor government, reported that universities need a 10 per cent boost to their base funding just to keep up. Of course, that never happened under either Labor or now under the current government.

The level of HECS increased. For me, it was something I was able to pay off within a couple of years, but that is not what students face now. The pressures on students have grown with youth allowance, Austudy as it was in my day, now not being indexed with other kinds of benefits. As an example, when I studied the income support I received was the equivalent of double my rent, sharing a three-bedroom place near the university. Now, if you want to rent near a university in a capital city you are lucky to have any change at all. Your full youth allowance pays for your rent. So students now are working 15 or 20 and sometimes even full-time hours while studying full-time, just to make ends meet.

On top of that, staff have been placed under more and more pressure. People may have an idea of universities being places full of tenured academics where people have life-long security, but only about 30 per cent of people working in higher education at the moment have ongoing secure employment. I spoke to people who worked in academia, who worked in research and teaching in university departments. I spoke to a woman who had worked there for 10 years without a day of sick leave in her life because she was on rolling contracts for those 10 years. You come to the end of every year and do not know whether you have another job. That affects university staff being able to plan their lives, to have a family or to buy a house.

Then of course in the last parliament we had the Labor government threatening to cut $2.3 billion out of higher education and putting that debt onto students. We took to the streets and beat that proposal but this proposal now, from a government which went to the election saying 'No cuts to education,' will be a body bl

Five billion dollars is the impact on spending on higher education, on research and on students. It is going to hit those researchers that the people here in parliament today, the scientists and the researchers, were saying are going to safeguard Australia's economy in the 21st century.

The bill proposes a 10 per cent across-the-board cut for the Research Training Scheme, and charges a fee of up to $4,000 a year for PhD students. So if you want to undertake research in the medical field—an area where Australia is leading the world in many respects, and an area we should be boosting—you could be facing a cost of up to $20,000 plus interest.

The interest component here is vital as well. We know that the government are governing for the one per cent in this country—I think fewer than a quarter of the members of the front bench went to a public school, and the others are private-school born and bred. What this bill will mean is that lower-income graduates could be forced to pay twice as much for their degrees as those on higher incomes, as a result of the compounding interest rates on their HELP debt. And it is going to be worse for women because, when women take time out of the workforce to raise a family, their debt is going to keep on going up and up at these higher rates. So women will find themselves at the end of their working lives with higher debts that have taken longer to pay off, thanks to this government.

This government says, 'We've got to reduce the debt and get rid of it,' but they are not reducing it; they are just shifting it onto students and people who have been to university. Plot the graph and you will find that in a couple of years the debt levels of students crosses over with the debt level of the Commonwealth, and you will see that the level of student debt, percentagewise, increases and the level of Commonwealth debt, percentagewise, decreases. That is because they are in a process of shifting debt onto the population, who are not in as good a position to bear it as the government. The government can borrow much more cheaply than students can. But that is of no concern to this government. 'Let's put people into more debt'—that is this government's mantra.

Then of course the bill allows for the deregulation of fees. Expect university degrees to cost you a second mortgage—especially in those areas like medicine or those higher demand areas where now, the government boasts, the market will rule. Well, if universities can charge as much as they like, they certainly will. And it will be of no concern to them that people like my dad would not be able to get in; that will be of no concern, because it will be, 'Let the market rule,' and they will charge whatever they like.

The minister says, 'It's okay, because we'll have Commonwealth scholarships'—taking an old term that used to mean something good and, in a move that would please George Orwell, turning it into something that will hit universities and students even more, because there is not one dollar in this bill for Commonwealth scholarships; the universities have to fund them themselves. These are the same universities that are being met with a 20 per cent funding cut. How will they fund them? They will fund them by putting up fees. And that is the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of this bill that the minister needs to come in here and explain. How can he say that there will be Commonwealth scholarships and that university funding will be cut but that fees will not go up? Of course they will. The universities are going to have to make up the shortfall somehow.

Lastly I will turn to something that slipped under the radar a little in this debate but which needs to be put up in lights: for the first time, Commonwealth funding is going to be redirected from universities to private providers. So universities are now going to have to compete not just against each other; they are going to have to compete against new private entrants who want to come in and make a quid thanks to a new government subsidy. I want our universities to manage their money properly, of course. But I do not want our universities to be businesses—that is not what they are. Businesses exist to make a profit, and some businesses go bankrupt and new ones arise, and it is a constant churn and a constant quest to make as much money as possible. That is all right; that is the business world. But that is not what I want for our universities. I want our universities to be centres of learning and teaching and research, where the people who work in them are well looked after and where students are able to go, regardless of their wealth, and come out without a debt the size of a mortgage.

This government talks about competition amongst universities as if it is a great thing. Well, I would much rather the money that universities spend on television ads and tram ads and glossy brochures went into teaching and research, and into helping us find the next cure for cancer or into creating the next Nobel laureate, because once we start saying, 'Our universities are just like businesses,' then we redirect money that could be going to students and to staff into the pockets of advertising agencies. And that is what is happening at the moment. Worse: if you take it to its logical conclusion, under this government's proposal we might see some universities fall over, not because the staff there are not good and not because students cannot go there, but because now we will have two tiers of universities in this country—we will have the wealthy ones that can charge as much as they like, and we will have the others, in regional areas or perhaps servicing smaller populations or offering smaller niche subjects, that will struggle under the might of the bigger universities that they now have to compete with.

I congratulate the efforts of the National Union of Students and the National Territory Education Union in bringing a national fight up to this government—this government that told us that there would be no cuts to education—because what is at stake is the future of this country and whether we will have an educated population and whether we will invest in research and education or whether we will gut them. This is being brought in by a bunch of people who had the benefit of a free education themselves, and who could probably afford to pay whatever was charged, but we will not let them pull the ladder up behind them. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

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