Katie Allen (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in this chamber to support the member for Reid on her motion to recognise the Morrison government's continuing support for the higher education sector. The government understands that we as a country need to pivot to a job-ready workforce with job-ready skills. The reason we say that is that we know that the jobs of the future are in health, they are in engineering and they are in areas where people need science and mathematics as core skills. So I'm very proud of the fact that our government is providing job-ready graduate packages, with 39,000 new university places by 2023 and 100,000 by 2030. We'll provide additional support, importantly, for students in regional and remote Australia. We know that students like to live and work in the regions where they grew up and not have to go to the big smoke necessarily, so I really congratulate the government on the extra $500 million that it is providing to regional universities to allow people to stay in the regions, support where they come from originally and help grow those wonderful, diverse regional and remote areas of Australia.

The government's JobTrainer fund will provide up to 320,000 additional training places that are free or low fee in areas of identified skills need for jobseekers and young people. This is the follow-on from the extra university places that are being provided. We know that, when unemployment rises, the biggest impact is on the young, and we know that, when we have a recession, it's the young that are affected. We know that universities are countercyclical—that is, when economic recessions hit, university places go up—and that is because people understand that they need to be able to get extra training in order to be more competitive in the job market. Youth unemployment for 15- to 24-year-olds increased from 10.7 per cent in November 2019 to 14.7 per cent in November 2020, and that is because COVID has hit us. We understand that higher education is needed to help people get better skills so they can get better jobs, and that is why we are turning to supporting this sector as we go forward post COVID.

We've incentivised students to make job-relevant choices. This is important because students who are already enrolled will not be affected—the scheme is grandfathered—but we want to encourage new graduates to take on the jobs of the future, and we want to ensure that they are taking on the training of the future. This means that the Commonwealth supported students will be studying in key growth areas and will see significant reductions in their student contributions in those units. We've seen this before with Labor. Kevin Rudd himself incentivised an increase in STEM students by decreasing the cost to those students, and that resulted in a marked increase in science, technology, engineering and mathematics students when he was Prime Minister. Students enrolling in teaching, nursing, clinical psychology, English and languages will pay 42 per cent less for their degrees, students who study agriculture and maths will pay 59 per cent less for their degrees, and students who study science, health, architecture, environmental science, IT and engineering will pay 18 per cent less for their degrees.

I know that students need to understand that they can actually decrease the cost of their courses by taking on individual subjects, including subjects like English and clinical psychology, in order to diversify the skill set of their degree to ensure that they're ready for the jobs of the future. Our job-ready initiative also complements our government's modern manufacturing initiative. We know that modern manufacturing will rely more and more on different ways of doing things, more innovative ways of doing things and smarter ways of doing things. We need job-ready graduates who are ready to embrace the future of work. We know that data will be at the base of many of these sorts of artificial intelligence and automated intelligence type jobs of the 21st century. So Australia's labour force needs are currently changing very quickly. Subsidies offered by the government to students need to reflect the national interest and align with the whole-of-government approach of ensuring Australia's future prosperity, which means an employed workforce with job-ready degrees. Sixty per cent of taxpayers don't have a university education. Therefore, it's not unreasonable that, if the taxpayer is subsidising university places, this support should be directed to incentivise students to the jobs of the future. This targeted approach to funding by the Morrison government will leave a lasting legacy that ensures students already in the system aren't disadvantaged but that current students are supported into futureproofed jobs of the future.

I thank the member for Reid for her motion, and I support her motion.

See this speech in context