Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What an opportunity to talk about the tertiary education sector hit hard by COVID. Australia's reliance on international students was taken away from us just 12 months ago. We lost not only 10,000 skilled visa arrivals each month, but our share of international education. That's a quarter of the $150 billion international education sector. It rubbed further salt into the wound with countries like Canada, the UK and the US were able to take international students into their universities, where COVID was at high levels within the community, while Australia did the right thing to keep COVID under control. The universities bore a lot of the brunt of that, which the previous speaker referred to.

I too regard Griffith as my local university. But I do sort of have some divided loyalties to QUT, which is equidistant. And for an extra couple of kilometres across the pedestrian way I also claim UQ. But enough of that sharing of our love for university campuses. We know it was hard. We knew that jobs were going to be lost, because what the universities were doing they were no longer doing through COVID. Many of those workers found work. There was an absolute demand for workers, even if they moved off a campus, when we weren't doing what we were doing 12 months earlier. They found work elsewhere and will find their way back.

What's more important is that Australia still has the most universities in the top 100, after UK and the US. So we have a high level of tertiary education. In every major city you'd be proud to go to every university, and they found their way through COVID—not without some help from the federal government of course. We had the JobTrainer initiative. There were 30,000 additional places working to focus on those STEM areas. As an engineer once said to me, it's hard to work out how many engineers you're going to need two years from now, let alone to start projecting how many we need to train. But universities do their best.

We also know that they're thoroughly reliant on the impact of their research and that the crossfunding of research done on our campuses has predominantly been coming from a reliance on international education, both that done within the universities and the significant amount of education that happens outside of universities. I recognise Troy Williams' ITECA and all of those great providers who provide 80 per cent of the education. They, not just TAFEs, provide 80 per cent of vocational training in this country, so we need to remember that very important sector.

Tonight, though, we are talking about universities. They've had the Job-ready Graduates Package, which has made sure there are another 32,000 places, because we know the greatest demand is for health care and professional services and in technical areas, and this is where maths is an absolute prerequisite. It is a no-brainer. We've been told by the society of scientists that these new positions have 77 per cent more reliance on numeracy. It doesn't happen overnight, but you have to transition towards it, so we need to make sure that there's maths as often as possible in high school, particularly for young women, who are often convinced they're not good at maths. We need to break the stereotype and take senior students through to the highest levels of maths and science possible.

My great bugbear in this area is that, once we think someone's heading to a vocational path, then it's all 'put the tools down and don't worry what maths you're doing—it's all competency based'. That's not right. It's not right that a third to a half of senior students don't worry about the maths they do because they know they either can get in to a tertiary facility or don't need it for what they think they're going to study. That's wrong. While we have these students at school they need to do the highest level of maths that we can take them to on that journey, and this idea that, because they're vocationally directed, they don't count is completely unacceptable.

This complete obsession with ATAR scores and OPs has led to this ranking of schools based purely on what they achieve in tertiary rankings, and that's very unfortunate. We need a postsecondary system that blends vocational and tertiary education. I see a day when people go to university but do a TAFE course because it's a better course than that offered at their university campus. I've seen Central Queensland attempt to do this. We need to have no more sitting on the haystack, protecting our universities and refusing to cooperate with vocational education. That isn't the future. A huge amount of innovation happens in vocational education. They need the maths there. We need the highest standards in vocational education, not just in our universities.

It has not been easy, but it hasn't been easy for universities all around the world. The blip, the significant jump in youth unemployment, that we saw through COVID has come back again. The fall in workforce participation from 65 per cent to 59.5 per cent during COVID is coming back again. The previous contributor to this debate was right to say that these things can take decades to repair, but we're learning one thing through COVID: these things are springing back very quickly. We do it by having an agile tertiary education sector that can respond to threats. We have a competitive process for medical research and for the funding of ARC grants. Those systems will stand us in good stead through COVID.

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