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

I rise to speak to this Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2018; and to the second reading amendment, which talks about how we should fund education and places that should be available and how we should have world-class research.

I want to remind the House that there was a time when university was free. Many of the politicians in this place are from a generation that received free education and graduated without debt. They went on, though, to reintroduce fees for university and saddled a generation with repayments.

People entering university today are facing a totally different reality, and young people are getting screwed over. If you're a young person you enrol in university or TAFE because you're told it's the pathway to a good job and to personal growth that will let you make a contribution in our community. You enrol for possibly years of study. Throughout this time, the fees, or HELP payments, keep building up, and your debts keep growing. Class sizes are growing, and teaching staff are increasingly stretched because of government cost cutting. You have to work long hours while you study, because you have to pay rent or other costs, and Austudy is low, and youth allowance is low and hard to access.

Then, when you finish studying, thousands of dollars in debt, you get told: 'Sorry, but you don't have enough experience to get a job. You're going to have to study more. You're going to have to market yourself to employers and take on unpaid labour just to get your foot in the door.' Just don't rely on Centrelink, though, when you're seeking work, because Newstart is below poverty levels and you might be issued an incorrect robo-debt. And you get told that it's your fault that the housing system is broken and that the reason you can't buy a home is cafe breakfasts—not the unfair system that helps investors buy their fourth, fifth or sixth home to rent to you at inflated prices. And by the way: not only do you have to pay off your debt, not only can you not afford a secure home, and not only will you be working casual hours in precarious jobs or taking on side hustles, but you're also going to live in a world with a hotter climate and more-extreme weather, and you're going to have to lead the fight against big coal because the last generations of politicians failed and left it to you.

This is what happens when government stops seeing education as a fundamental right and starts seeing it as a business. Australian governments over decades—Liberal but also Labor—gave into neoliberalism, and this generation of young people now is paying the price. We accept in our society that schools and hospitals should be free and universal. You can receive health care and secondary education no matter what your bank balance is—and that is one of the good things about this country. It would be a scandal if we were forcing people into debt to access these rights. But that is what is happening with TAFE and university. This is one of the reasons I got into politics in the first place. My dad was the first person in his family to go to university, and he was able to do it because it was free. When I was at university I got involved in the education campaigns, against a then-Labor government, because you could see the cost of education going up and up and up, and people being put into such debt that people like my dad might not have been able to go to university and might not have made the decision to go there in the first place.

That is why I am proud to be part of a party—the Greens—that have a plan to bring back free university and TAFE education. We will make TAFE and undergraduate uni free, and we'll pay for it by making the fossil fuel industry pay its fair share. No more unfair tax breaks, no more right to pollute for free; just start making them pay the same tax as everyone else on things like diesel fuel in the mining industry, and you will find that we have the money to pay for things like free education. We can increase youth allowance, Austudy and Abstudy by $75 a week so that students can get by while studying. Let's lift youth allowance by $75 a week. And we'll fix the government cuts that led to stretched staff and teaching. We have to boost university funding by 10 per cent per student. This bill talks about education quality. The only way we're going to restore quality back to the world-class level that so many of our institutions were at is by boosting university funding by 10 per cent per student. That call has been out there for many years. The first real funding increase for universities in decades, this would improve learning and teaching conditions, would reduce class sizes and would enable researchers to pursue solutions to the big problems of our time, because for too long universities have been asked to do more with less.

It has been decades since the last real increase in funding to universities. Our plan delivers an extra $16 billion over the next decade for universities to improve learning and teaching conditions, reduce class sizes and give researchers the resources they need. Importantly, we will work with universities to reduce casualisation in the sector and to reduce job insecurity and improve staff working conditions. Government must also link additional funding for universities with an increase in security of work for university staff. We must reverse the decades-old trend of casualisation and insecure work.

People have this idea that somehow universities are places where everyone has tenured positions for life. Well, you're looking at less than a third of people who work in universities at the moment enjoying that security of ongoing employment, which should be a right. People working in research, academia and teaching are facing the pressure of successive governments' failure in this area and the neoliberalisation of higher education and research. I know this, and I see it on a daily basis, because my electorate is home to major universities and research institutions. I have spoken to too many people in Melbourne who've always dreamed of working in research and teaching, and who've worked hard their whole careers to get there, who are feeling the pressure of competitive grant applications for a diminishing pool of funding, administration, growing workloads not related to their core research, casualisation and the insecurity that comes with not knowing whether you're going to have a job after the next grant round.

We looked into this a couple of years ago. I introduced a bill into this place to wind back casualisation in our workforce, with a special focus on the university sector—a bill that, at the time, didn't get the support of either Labor or the Liberals, but I'm hopeful the tide might turn on that. When we introduced that bill and had an inquiry into it, we heard from a woman who had worked for 10 years in the same area and for the same institution but had not been entitled to a period of sick leave or long service leave during that time because she was on rolling contracts and treated as a casual. This must stop.

We are always going to have universities, and we will have better funded and more jobs in those universities if we lift funding. Because we're always going to have universities, people there should have greater rights to secure employment. Good people at the moment who are experts in their field or on the way to becoming experts in their field are being pushed out of research because of the insecure conditions and lack of funding in Australia.

The tragedy is that this is entirely preventable. It's a consequence of government decisions to cut costs and to treat research and universities like money-making businesses instead of something contributing to the public good. If only, for example, we could say to universities: 'You don't have to spend more money advertising on billboards or the side of trams, trains or buses. You can put that money into research and teaching, because we're not going to make you compete against each other. Instead, we're going to encourage collaboration.' Most staff around the country would breathe a sigh of relief. The advertising companies might get a bit worried about it, but that money could go back into supporting staff and students.

Let me say it clearly: education is not a product, students are not consumers and university is not a factory. The Greens will fight for free education and a thriving research sector. I'm proud that we're putting free education on the agenda, and I believe that sooner or later the other parties will follow us as they have on so many other issues. I call on everyone in this place to get serious, join us and back the plan to push for free education in Australia again.

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