Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Employment (Senator Abetz) to a question without notice asked by Senator Carr today relating to higher education.

What we heard today should alarm every single family and every single person in this country interested in the benefits of higher education for this nation. What we heard unabashedly declared by Minister Abetz when he was asked about this next change in policy for higher ed was, 'Yes, we are committed to deregulation.' He said it again today; it is clearly on the record. In that commitment to deregulation, he is representing a government that is committed to removing the opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Australians to access universities and degrees, and the opportunities that that will present for them and this country.

Make no mistake: we have had mark I of their disgraceful higher education 'reform' package. We have had mark II of their destruction of the higher education sector. This is now mark III. It is the same for all intents and purposes, approved by that great triumvirate now of Mr Abbott, Mr Hockey and Mr Pyne—the three of them colluding to take away the future of young people and mature age students in this country who want to access higher education. Today, they have come out with their tricky campaign for No. 3, the third go at trying to get this disgraceful piece of legislation through the parliament. This time they are going to split it apart so it looks a little different. I used to try to hide the vegetables in the cooking that I did for my kids by camouflaging it, but in the end they were able to figure out that I was hiding the vegetables. This government think they can camouflage the same package by presenting it in a different shape. This time they have 20 per cent cuts. They are trying to pretend those cuts are off the table, but they are absolutely a part of their package. They also say that they are still committed to deregulation. With those two things, they create the context for $100,000 degrees.

On 6 March we heard evidence in the Senate Education and Employment References Committee about exactly how destructive and chaotic this government is—not only with their legislation but with the absolutely disgraceful way they have tried to bully the Senate. They are holding to ransom an entire sector of the Australian education and innovation industry. The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, or NCRIS, has some of the best and brightest in the country. We heard from a number of representatives of key elements of NCRIS, including Professor Goodnow. People in the gallery and people listening to this debate today would know about the great work being done in genomics and immunotherapy. Professor Goodnow told us about the time he spends at Westmead's children's hospital and in particular about one young boy—how they were able to find out that this boy had a mutation of a single element of his entire genetic blueprint.

Professor Goodnow explained how critical the work was. He said:

… it depends on: being able to bring together the doctors in the hospital and in the university sector with big DNA genome sequences, which is NCRIS; having big pipelines for moving huge files of data around, which is NCRIS; having experts to run that through the biggest supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, which is NCRIS; being able to model that in a laboratory in mice, which is NCRIS; and then bringing that together with all of the pharmaceutical development and biotech, which is NCRIS.

That is the kind of work this institution is doing, along with a lot of other fantastic and innovative scientific work. That is the institution that this shameful government—the shameful triumvirate of Mr Hockey, Mr Pyne and Mr Abbott—want to put over a barrel. They are threatening to take away NCRIS's $150 million in funding in order to get the Senate to vote for their disgraceful higher education bill.

They are a desperate government. The chaos they are trying to inflict not only on the scientific community but on the higher education sector is writ large in everything they are doing this week. This backflip—another one from a government that cannot deliver what they said they would but who have instead delivered a shameful list of travesties—shows that they simply do not understand the damage they are inflicting on the country. We have had many representations from people in the sector telling us that we need to stand firm with Australians who believe in higher education. Labor will never abandon those Australians. (Time expired)