House debates

Monday, 24 May 2021

Private Members' Business

Higher Education

6:27 pm

Photo of Fiona MartinFiona Martin (Reid, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that the Government is:

(a) supporting universities through the COVID-19 pandemic and creating more opportunities for young people to study; and

(b) investing $20 billion in the higher education sector in 2021;

(2) recognises that $1 billion has been provided to university research this year;

(3) acknowledges that the Government has provided $903.5 million over the next four years for more domestic places and to ensure our universities are financially stable; and

(4) congratulates the Government for its Job Ready Graduates package which is providing up to 30,000 additional university places in 2021.

Some of my most formative years were spent at university, for university education is not just about earning degrees; it's about forming lifelong friendships and networks and about a sense of community. The school graduates of today are the leaders of tomorrow, and it is our responsibility to ensure that they are well equipped with the skills and knowledge that they require. COVID-19 has resulted in a dramatic downturn in university numbers. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, about two-thirds of school leavers would have continued on to further study, with around 50 per cent engaging in higher education and 15 per cent engaging in VET. Around 25 per cent would have worked and the remaining 11 per cent would not have been working or studying.

The government is working hard to provide additional options for the 35 per cent of school leavers who previously had found pathways to the labour market. The job-ready graduate reforms provide funding for up to 30,000 additional places for young people to engage in higher education in 2021. Additionally, the government's JobTrainer Fund will provide up to 320,000 additional training places, which are now free or low fee, in areas of identified skills need for jobseekers and young people. In Reid, there are already 1,405 local apprentices being supported by wage subsidies. Australia's economic growth has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with young people bearing much of the pain. 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.

Australia's labour force needs are changing quickly, and the government must be prepared to adapt in order to provide our young people with the best education. For some young Australians, university will be the answer. However, for many others their post-schooling years will take other forms. The National Skills Commission projects the healthcare workforce to make the largest contribution to future employment growth, followed by professional, scientific and technical services; education and training; and construction. These four sectors are projected to provide 62 per cent of total employment growth over the next five years, going into 2024.

The Australian Academy of Science has predicted that Australian workers will spend 77 per cent more time using science and maths skills in the future, and the Job-ready Graduates reforms reduce student contributions in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, health and education to provide an additional incentive for students to consider careers in these priority fields. As someone who has studied science and psychology and has a PhD from the University of Sydney, I can personally attest to the highly rewarding nature of work in that field. Under the reforms, a young person studying nursing or teaching will have their fees reduced by 42 per cent, from $6,804 to $3,950 per equivalent full-time student loan. Science, information technology and engineering students will have their fees reduced by 18 per cent, from $9,698 to $7,950.

Longitudinal graduate outcome data shows that students who graduated from STEM, health and education related subjects have better salary rates and full-time employment rate when compared with those graduated from society and culture studies. Additionally, they will have, on average, earned around 30 per cent more across their lifetime than someone with a society and culture degree and over 40 per cent more than someone with a year 12 qualification.

The package aims to incentivise students into STEM and other national priority areas to ensure higher education is delivering the skills needed by Australia's future workforce. The package's grandfathering arrangements ensure that no student who was enrolled in a course prior to 1 January 2021 will be charged more for the study in that course. This program is about encouraging students to take up education in a STEM field, which is what our society needs more of.

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

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

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

6:32 pm

Photo of Graham PerrettGraham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion submitted to the parliament by the member for Reid. In doing so, I want to note that I'm wearing my Griffith University tie, from a university that's in my electorate. It is perplexing that this motion notes that the government is 'supporting universities through the COVID-19 pandemic'. I thought the word 'not' might have been missing or was written in invisible ink or something, because nothing could be further from the truth.

Let's look at the facts. Firstly, the Morrison government changed the rules three times to stop universities getting JobKeeper during the pandemic. Already more than 17,000 jobs at universities have been lost. There was no mention of that from the member for Reid. The jobs include academics, cleaners, admin staff, tutors and everyone who keeps the university up and running. Our regional universities have been hit particularly hard, with some campuses already closed. I think the University of the Sunshine Coast or Central Queensland University had to close one.

Secondly, let's look at the budget handed down just recently, the 'MorrisonKeeper' budget. The Morrison government is happy to put billions of dollars on the nation's credit card for a political fix, but it will not lift a finger to help universities. The Nationals have been either muzzled, muted or missing when it comes to speaking up for bush universities. Rather than supporting our universities, which educate over one million Australians and employ over 100,000 more, the coalition have cut funding at a time when universities need it most. The member for Reid should turn to page 170 of Budget Paper No. 1 where it clearly says that funding will decrease by 9.3 per cent in real terms from to 2021-22 through to 2024-25. That's one university dollar ripped out of every 10 going to universities.

Last year in the face of international students being locked out of studying in Australia—remember where the Prime Minister said, 'Go home'—the government provided some extra funding for research. Obviously it would've made a lot of sense for that extra funding to be continued, particularly when the budget revealed borders are likely to remain shut until mid-2022. No international students can start another academic year. But instead the Morrison budget had nothing for universities. It's not only negligent but short-sighted to neglect our third largest export. Yes, I said that correctly: our third largest export.

New research from the Mitchell Institute has found that a third academic year of no international students would cost Australia about $20 billion a year, that's half of the pre-pandemic value of the sector. These losses might snowball beyond the forward estimates once Canada, the US, and the UK steal our students. This isn't just a problem for our universities. The economic value of international students is far wider than the university sector. Most of the economic value from these students is from them spending foreign money in the wider economy. They go on tourist trips. They bring their family over. Of course the international student sector would be healthier if the Morrison government had not failed in its responsibility to set-up successful quarantine for arrivals in Australia during the pandemic. Quarantine is clearly a federal responsibility. It actually says so in the Constitution.

There are still around 10,000 Australians stuck in India after dealing with the threat of jail just to come home. They now need flights. There are tens of thousands more Australians in other parts of the world wanting to come home but who are unable to. That's a massive failure from the Morrison government. For the international education sector—as I said Australia's third biggest export—the coalition's failure to set-up safe quarantine facilities is a disaster. Our nation risks losing the research sector as well—almost altogether. After the budget was handed down, the Vice-Chancellor of ANU, Brian Schmidt, reportedly said: 'I am worried that we are going to lose huge capacity in the research sector that will take decades to recover.' Professor Duncan Ivison, deputy vice chancellor for research at the University of Sydney, is concerned about 'the long-term viability of research endeavours as a sector because once it goes it's very hard to get back'.

The Morrison budget has nothing for students. The job-ready graduates program has already made it harder and more expensive for Australians to go to uni. Overall kids will be paying seven per cent more out of their own pockets to go to uni. A few people will be better off but overall seven per cent more will be coming out of Australians pockets. I don't want Australia to become the America of the south where kids end up with a lifetime of debt. For a basic degree young Australians will end up with a debt of around $60,000. How can they ever save for a deposit for a house with that debt before they even get a job?

6:37 pm

Photo of Andrew LamingAndrew 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.

6:43 pm

Photo of Kate ThwaitesKate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

The motion that has been put forward is an insult to our universities and to our university students. The claim that this Morrison government supported universities through the COVID pandemic is just nonsense. I actually don't know how members opposite can keep a straight face through this level of hypocrisy. The Morrison government has gone out of its way to hurt universities and students at a time when they have needed support the most. There was no JobKeeper for universities, a decision that has forced job losses both last year and now. There was no support for international students, and of course this government has hiked up university fees for students.

This government is jeopardising the future of our universities and jeopardising the future of us all by failing to ensure that we will have the skilled and educated workforce we will need for the future. The Morrison government made a deliberate choice to leave university workers off the JobKeeper support payment, and that had devastating consequences. My community's local university, La Trobe University, was forced to ask staff for expressions of interest in voluntary redundancies and pre-retirement contract programs. According to La Trobe, access to the JobKeeper scheme would have provided them with $50 million to mitigate the impact of the COVID crisis. But this government deliberately moved the goalposts for eligibility to JobKeeper, deliberately excluding universities from support. Instead of saving jobs, too many staff at La Trobe University, too many people in my community, have been made redundant.

These job losses continue to have a significant impact across our community. La Trobe is a significant employer across the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and these are jobs that have not come back and are not coming back, because this government is not providing the support that is needed. Last year La Trobe experienced a revenue downturn of $90 million. That's a 10 per cent reduction compared to their pre-COVID forecast. Their final end-of-year operating result was a deficit of $51½ million. In order to break even this year, La Trobe needs to find the financial equivalent of around 250 to 300 jobs, and this is after the two voluntary redundancy rounds they already held last year. This is more jobs to go in my community, and this government has the gall to stand up here to say they supported the higher education system through this pandemic? These job losses are hurting our community, they are hurting our universities and they are hurting all of our futures.

This government is, of course, responsible for trashing one of our largest exports: higher education. Rather than support international students through the pandemic, the message from the Morrison government was 'go home'. The international students who did decide to stay in Australia lost their jobs. They went without meals. Many of them were living in poverty, relying on the goodwill of restaurants that gave them handouts and charities who could help with free meals and accommodation. The people who did decide to return home overseas will likely not return to Australia to complete their education.

In January last year 30,000 international students arrived at Melbourne Airport for the academic year on Victorian campuses. This January there were 70. And this government has no plans for quarantine and has a broken vaccine rollout, so there is no timetable for bringing international students back, no timetable for our universities to know how they look at their future, how they budget for a future and how they get back into this market where they have been incredibly successful.

Of course, it's not just universities that the government's been trashing; it's students and their futures. The government's job-ready graduates bill passed in a dodgy deal done with the Centre Alliance and One Nation senators—a deal that's forcing young people who are already coping with the pandemic and recession to pay more for their education. This government decided to make it harder and more expensive for young people to go to university. Young people who want to study the humanities or commerce and communications now pay more for their degree than doctors and dentists. The fees for people studying humanities have more than doubled, jumping from $27,216 to $58,000 for a four-year degree. What a ridiculous level of debt to be saddling young people with. I, like many people in this room, have a humanities degree. It has stood me in good stead. But I certainly would not have been able to cope with being saddled with that level of debt coming out of university.

You can't trust this government when it comes to our universities. They fail to support them. They have forced job losses. They have made attendance expensive and unattainable for too many young people. This government should be ashamed.

6:48 pm

Photo of Jason FalinskiJason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

I thank those opposite. I think I should start off by, firstly, setting the record straight. The first matter is that we on this side of the parliament did not trash our third-biggest export. There was a little thing called a global pandemic that did that. I must say that I'm getting just a little sick and tired of the hypocrisy of those opposite.

Photo of Kate ThwaitesKate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Aw, diddums.

Photo of Jason FalinskiJason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Indeed diddums. Diddums is quite true. It is hurtful when it happens, and it should not occur. The fact of the matter is that, when we would say here on this side of the parliament that we were worried that universities were becoming too reliant on overseas students and that they were scaling—

Mr Hill interjecting

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Order! The member for Bruce.

Photo of Jason FalinskiJason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

When we said that we were worried about that, those opposite would cry that we were racist. They would claim that we were racist for raising this as an issue and saying that our universities had become too reliant on overseas students.

Ms Thwaites interjecting

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

The member for Jagajaga.

Photo of Jason FalinskiJason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

When we said we were worried about the spread of a virus in China, and did not wish to allow students from that area to come to this country, where undoubtedly they would have spread that virus, those opposite, along with, I might add, the World Health Organization, criticised us for doing so.

Opposition members interjecting

Photo of Graham PerrettGraham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | | Hansard source

Can't you see over that glass jaw, Jason?

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

I would remind members that the debate has been conducted quite respectfully thus far on both sides. The member for Mackellar should have the opportunity to deliver his speech in relative peace. The member for Mackellar has the call, and the clock is restarting at 3:05.

Photo of Jason FalinskiJason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy Speaker. Whenever this government made decisions that saved lives, those opposite were critical of those decisions that we made. And now they apparently seek to hold us responsible for, in the words of the member for Jagajaga, 'trashing our third-largest export earner' because we closed the borders to international students. Now, we didn't do that for no reason. We did that because there was a global pandemic. And if those opposite can tell us there's not going to be an outbreak in any other country, as there recently was in India, then we will happily provide them with a road map that has a great degree of certainty. But if they're unable to do that, then I think it is entirely and wholly unreasonable for those opposite to somehow criticise us for not knowing what the future holds.

I think it is also entirely unreasonable—and job losses in any sector are not only regrettable, they are something we work very hard in this place to avoid. However, when they occurred in the university sector, this wasn't something that we took any joy from whatsoever. But we did, on many occasions, worry—and this is not something we did last year or the year before; this is something that goes back 10 years. We have worried with the vice-chancellors that they were putting too much reliance on income they were receiving from international students. So for those opposite to suggest we are somehow not supportive of universities is not only hypocritical, it's an appalling allegation to make. It is not substantiated by any of the facts that are on offer, unless they are accusing us of commencing a global pandemic. To date they have not done that, but I'm sure, if we give them time—

Opposition members interjecting

The fact of the matter is that youth unemployment in Australia is now at decade lows. Underemployment in Australia is at 10-year lows. Our unemployment rate is falling. We stand for working Australians on this side of the parliament. We want to make their lives easier, more affordable and better. We know that the only way to get them sustainably increased real wages is for them to be able to get the skills and education that they need for the workforce of the future. And the fact of the matter remains that is why we have invested so heavily in job-ready graduate programs and packages. That is why we have provided students who have been leaving school, both last year and this year, the sort of support that they need to make sure that they are ready for the jobs of the future, and that our universities are ready to provide that level of education.

6:53 pm

Photo of Julian HillJulian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

It will be hard to pick the silliest bit of that previous speech, given by the member for Mackellar, but I think the funniest bit was the claim that the government were concerned about the overreliance of universities on international students. This is coming from the government where the Prime Minister, when he cut $2.2 billion from universities only three years ago—another little cut that he snuck into the budget—said, 'Well, they can go out and recruit more international students.' The government literally said only two or three years ago, 'Go and recruit more international students,' and now they're saying: 'They're a bit reliant on international students. We couldn't have that.' It's nonsense!

I saw this motion on the Notice Paperyou know when you're flicking through thinking, 'What's up for debate?'—and I thought it had to be a joke. It must be April Fools Day. But, no, this is trolling the parliament. Government MPs congratulating themselves on what we are seeing as the decimation of the university sector. It's a waste of debate time, and I notice the member who moved the motion is not even here. She ran away. No wonder. To paraphrase the motion: 'Congratulations, government, on supporting universities through the pandemic.' There was no JobKeeper. Just about every other sector in the country got JobKeeper but not public universities. In fact, they changed the rules three times to make sure that public universities didn't get a cent of JobKeeper. The latest level of job losses is 17,000. That's just the jobs from position descriptions that were on org charts. Probably—I'm not exaggerating—tens of thousands more jobs, if you look at the ABS labour force statistics, have been lost, including those of casual teachers and researchers. We hear government speakers going, 'We care about STEM.' Well, they don't care about the hundreds and thousands of laboratory researchers walking out of science labs because they have no funding. Scott Morrison, or the Prime Minister, as we call him, did nothing to stop the job losses. I would hate to see what the mob opposite think supporting universities looks like.

Dr Allen interjecting

Then the motion says, 'We gave $1 billion this year.' I have to say that, this year, the billion dollars has been cut in the budget that they just handed down. There is a crisis in research, as the member for Toorak over there should well know. There's a crisis in research. International students have lost billions from universities.

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Is the member for Higgins wishing to make a point of order?

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

Yes, please. I would like to make a point of order that I have been incorrectly referred to in this chamber, and I think it's quite offensive.

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

The member for Higgins will resume her seat. The member for Bruce has the call.

Photo of Julian HillJulian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

It's about recession and recovery. We are in a recovery from a recession. Surely even this mob of incompetent Neanderthals understand this is not a culture war? Universities are not an elitist thing. They are critical to the national economic recovery. They are critical. It's actually about improving our productivity. You fund research to improve economic outcomes. And yet the government's removing $1 billion in this budget. Shame on them.

This motion talks about giving $903 million over four years for domestic places. What hypocrisy. The government wouldn't need to do that if they hadn't capped places in the first place and cut billions of dollars from universities. Then we hear them talk about the job-ready graduate program. They don't talk about the fact that the latest figures from Senate estimates point out that, by the government's own admission, fees for university students in this country will rise 16 per cent over the next three years because of the job-ready graduate program. They have lowered the repayment threshold so young people have to repay their university debts earlier, making it harder to climb up that ladder of opportunity when they are saddled with debt.

We hear about the destruction of our fourth biggest export sector. Gas actually overtook it. That's $40 billion, but it's more than just money. These are human beings. The Prime Minister's showed a shocking lack of empathy. He stood up and he said to students, 'If you don't like it, go home.' Of course I understand there is a pandemic. Of course it's not easy to get students in at the moment. But you don't have to tell them to go home. You could show some empathy. The lobsters got their own plane to send them to China. The students got told to go home.

Quarantine and vaccine are Commonwealth responsibilities. The Commonwealth has taken no responsibility for quarantine. The vaccine program is an embarrassment globally. It doesn't matter how much the Prime Minister spins it. Imagine if Labor had presided over this vaccine mess? There wouldn't be enough black ink to print the newspapers with the banners. The government should treat international students better and stop congratulating themselves on the decimation of universities. (Time expired)

6:54 pm

Photo of Katie AllenKatie 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.

7:04 pm

Photo of Peta MurphyPeta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

The debate on this motion comes against the background of the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University saying that universities have been left to bleed to death. He said:

Harder to understand is why the university sector has been left to bleed, given what most might expect to be its pivotal role in the future growth of the … economy.

Quite bizarrely, the current settings under this Morrison government mean that the worst affected degrees are science and engineering, according to someone who you'd think would know a bit about science and engineering and degrees: the Vice-Chancellor of the ANU. So you can imagine the surprise of those of us who know what's going on at universities when we saw a motion on the Notice Paper congratulating the Morrison government for supporting Australian universities through the pandemic. It's like being in cloud-cuckoo-land. It's like being Alice in Wonderland.

Monash University, which has a campus in my electorate, the Peninsula Campus, had its revenue slashed by about $350 million as a result of this government deliberately and repeatedly—not once, not twice but three times—amending legislation to prevent public universities from having JobKeeper when foreign students couldn't come here. Private universities are fine, as are, apparently, incredibly rich megacompanies and private all-men's clubs, but, as to public universities, this government did everything that you could do to make sure that they didn't get JobKeeper.

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Order! The member for Dunkley is reflecting on the chair when she uses the term 'you'.

Photo of Peta MurphyPeta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

I apologise, Deputy Speaker. The Morrison government and all of its members did everything they could, by supporting the legislation, to stop public universities from getting JobKeeper. Monash University had to scramble to keep operating. It had 7,000 personalised study plans to retain students. The university cut capital, cut non-salary expenditure, used up its resources, borrowed money and put $30 million of its own money into a hardship fund for international and domestic students, because the Morrison government abandoned them. Executives took voluntary pay cuts. The university worked with the union for 277 voluntary redundancies and for deferrals of pay increases. If any university, any public institution of higher learning, got through the COVID-19 pandemic, it's not because of the support of the Morrison government; it's because of the work they did, their students did, their workers did and their unions did to get through that challenge.

As if it weren't bad enough that the Morrison government have walked away from all of these people and their jobs and their future, they are, of course, yet again contributing to undermining the Australian economy, because we know that universities drive economic growth. We know that, before the pandemic, international education was Australia's fourth-largest export industry. In Victoria, my home state, it contributed $12.7 billion a year. It supported 250,000 jobs across the Australian economy. Every dollar invested in higher education, research and development is linked to a $5 return to GDP. Every dollar invested in university teaching and scholarships contributes to $3 of additional tax revenue. Every person who gets to experience university life and get a higher education has a greater opportunity for success and fulfilment in work and life. Yet we have a sector that is losing $3.8 billion in revenue across last year and this year. We have a sector that this government has abandoned. Members of this government should spend less time with ridiculous motions saying that black is white and more time lobbying the Prime Minister to provide the funding that Australians need to get education for the economy and for the wellbeing of our people into the future.

Photo of Andrew WallaceAndrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate is expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.