Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes that the Government's actions on education:

(1) have damaged Australia's world-class university sector, loading up students with a lifetime of debt;

(2) are placing thousands of university jobs at risk; and

(3) will make it harder for Australia to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic".

Labor supports this bill. This bill makes administrative changes to the Higher Education Support Act and to the Education Services for Overseas Students Act designed to fix uncontroversial and recognised issues in the existing legislation. The bill amends the citizenship requirements within the Higher Education Loan Program to ensure that students on humanitarian visas do not lose access for travelling overseas after spending five years in Australia and empowers the minister to extend the availability of HELP from 1 January 2022 to students who have previously held permanent humanitarian visas. It's a worthwhile change that improves access for visa holders to Australia's world-class higher education system.

The bill also contains a number of other technical amendments which remedy the nomenclature of the university funding clusters, where Indigenous languages are classified as foreign languages; streamline the operation of grant funding; clarify the operation of grandfathering arrangements under the Liberal's increased university fees; and, finally, extend the ESOS Act to former registered providers to strengthen the operation of the Tuition Protection Scheme.

Of course, Labor does not oppose any of these measures. The government have passed more than 10 pieces of legislation on higher education and, in instances where they have made sensible decisions, as is so here, Labor has been pleased to support them. But, as a whole, when we look at what's happening in higher education policy under this government, it's responsible for massively increased student fees, with thousands of young Australians locked out of university education. So it's all very well to be working on these small, minor technical amendments, welcome as they are, but at the heart of this government's university policy is a policy that makes it harder and more expensive for Australian students to go to university. It's sad that when young Australians are facing an uncertain future, with wildly increasing house prices and uncertainty around their future careers, caused by the COVID recession and its aftermath, that the best this government can do for uni students is to jack up fees and lock people out.

What we saw in last night's budget was a continuation of this policy to make it harder and more expensive for young Australians to get a university education. The budget papers confirmed for the first time that the Liberals are saving money. There was all the smoke and mirrors last year about some fees going up and some fees going down. The budget papers show in black and white that this government is cutting government funding for universities and that it's jacking up university fees. Students are paying more. Page 170 of Budget Paper No. 1 says:

Expenses under the higher education sub-function are expected to decrease by 8.3 per cent in real terms from 2020-21 to 2021-22, and decrease by 9.3 per cent in real terms—

So almost 10 per cent—

from 2021-22 to 2024-25.

At the same time, HECS debts will jump by $1½ billion over the next three years as many students take out much bigger debts—much bigger loans—to pay for the new higher fees that this government has imposed upon them.

Our universities educate over a million Australians and employ over 100,000 more. This budget is saying to them, 'Nothing to see here, nothing for you here, just move along.' Labor doesn't want Australia to become like America, with student debts that will last a lifetime and hang like an albatross around the necks of our young Australians. We're now talking about our young Australians graduating with university debts of $60,000. An ordinary three-year bachelor's degree with a honours year will have a $60,000 debt. Those students are graduating into a less secure labour market. They're graduating into a housing market where they will be trying to save a deposit for an increasingly-out-of-reach family home. They're graduating into a world where wages are flatlining but expenses are going up. Childcare costs are going up, if they're thinking about starting a family.

I really feel for this generation of young people. They had the year from hell last year, trying to finish high school in the middle of COVID lockdowns with remote learning, and they've hit university with, in many cases, course costs that are double what they had anticipated when they made the decision about what they wanted to study when they finished high school. Scott Morrison's huge university fees and huge university debts will rob young Australians of the jobs of their dreams. The Prime Minister is not setting kids up for success; he's loading them up with a lifetime of debt.

Last year the government brought forward some research funding due to the massive shortfall in revenue, driven by the fact that international students, who subsidise a great deal of our university research, were not able to come to Australia. Billions of dollars was lost from university revenue, and the government brought forward about $1 billion in research funding. Seven months later the borders are still closed, and there is no indication of when international students might be able to come back to Australia. Of course we believe that Australians should be brought back safely first, but, with the vaccine rollout as it is and the hopeless lack of commitment from the federal government to federal quarantine facilities, who knows when that will be. The fact is we can't get Australians home safely and there are still 40,000 stuck overseas, desperate to get home, despite the fact that the Prime Minister said they would be home by Christmas. That failure to get Australians home has the knock-on effect of holding up international students in returning to Australia. The flow-on effect for universities and for research in particular is catastrophic.

We have seen from our universities a desperate struggle to keep up their research functions. Around the country universities are giving up on things that they used to do well in research, because they can't afford to do them anymore. It's ironic that last night the Treasurer was talking about this new patent box. He spoke about Australia's world-leading innovations—wi-fi, the bionic ear, the Gardasil vaccine. Where on earth does the government believe that the basic research, the breakthroughs, the innovation, the discovery, the invention, comes from if not from our brilliant university researchers, thousands of whom have lost their jobs because of budget cuts to research from this government? You can't gut university funding, trash our academics and then imagine that we'll somehow have world-leading research to commercialise and turn into the jobs that will drive Australian prosperity in the future.

The lack of funding for university research is directly linked to lower prosperity for this country in the future. We've seen more than 17,000 jobs lost at universities because of the pig-headed decision to stop universities having access to JobKeeper when other businesses had access. Remember, this government changed the rules three times deliberately to exclude universities from receiving JobKeeper. The impact of that is at least 17,000 job cuts at last count. What's bizarre about it is that it was okay to fund our big casinos to get JobKeeper. Apparently, it was okay to fund companies that had made record profits. They got to keep JobKeeper. But our universities that are teaching the next generation of engineers, nurses, teachers, accountants, lawyers and doctors, the universities that are discovering and inventing the things that will make us a richer, safer, smarter and healthier country, don't get JobKeeper. So, of course, we have lost academic and teaching staff, affecting the research output of our universities and affecting their ability to teach Australian students. We have not only lost academic and teaching staff and researchers; we've also lost groundskeepers, librarians, admin staff and the cook in the cafeteria.

Every time one of these jobs is lost, a family loses a secure income. When those job losses are in regional centres, the impact is huge. If you take a few hundred jobs out of a regional community, we all know what the impact of that will be on that regional community. I could give you examples from around Australia, but let's just take Central Queensland. The campuses at Biloela and Yeppoon are closing. Of course that impacts on the ability of students in that region to get an education, but what do those job losses do to those towns? Universities support 14,000 jobs in regional Australia. When you start closing campuses and sacking staff, I would think the Nationals, at least, would understand the catastrophic effect that that has on regional communities. And courses have been cut—courses in engineering, creative arts, chemistry and agriculture. Across universities no faculty has been spared.

I don't get why those opposite were prepared to extend JobKeeper to businesses like casinos—successful companies making record profits and paying huge executive bonuses—but were not prepared to extend JobKeeper to Australian universities, leading to researchers, teachers, groundskeepers, cafeteria workers and librarians losing their jobs and losing their ability to support their families. Let's look at the job losses, and these are the ones we know about. This is just a taste of the regional job losses: Central Queensland University, 296 jobs; Charles Sturt University, 145 jobs; Deakin, 400; RMIT, 200; UNSW, almost 500; New England, 210; Monash, 277; and Melbourne, 450. The list goes on and on.

Labor's record, in contrast, is a record of opening up university education to more Australians. A lot of people a little older than me know they have the Whitlam government to thank for their university education, and they stop me on the street and tell me that. 'I came from a working-class family,' they say. 'We would never have been able to afford a university education if Gough Whitlam hadn't opened it up to people like me, to families like mine.' That's my family's story. It's the story of a lot of people on this side. My dad was a plumber; my mum—

Debate interrupted.