Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The government's spin machine would have us argue that this was a budget about the future recovery. In fact, if you look at the detail of the budget, you see that it's nothing to do with recovery; it's about the government preparing its election strategy. This is a budget that's really about getting the government through the next election, not about getting the country through the next 10 years. The budget reflects the political judgement of the government trying to overcome a series of problems of its own creation and seeking to persuade the Australian public that it doesn't really need a long-term strategy; what it needs to do is re-elect a group of Liberal politicians.

What we have is no strategy, no coherent plan about the investment in science, no investment in research, no investment in the industrial capabilities of the nation and no approach that would lead us to have any confidence about building Australia's industrial capabilities to forge a stronger nation past this pandemic. There is no understanding of what it takes to have the skills, to have the resources and to build sovereign capabilities in manufacturing to secure the future of the nation.

This is a budget of wasted opportunities. This is a budget that has no substantial investment in the future of higher education or in science and research and only tweaks at the edges of various little programs to say, 'Oh, we've attended to this problem or to that problem.' There is no attention whatsoever to, for instance, the substantive questions about the 32 per cent drop in research and development by private sector companies, which is reflected in the 2015-16 science tables and which the government itself, through its department of industry, acknowledges as the actual research and development expenditure by business. There is no attempt to deal with the substantive strategic approaches that its own reviews have highlighted—for instance, the 2016 FFF review about what could be done to develop a long-term strategic vision for the nation.

If we turn to the universities, we see that this is a government that once again is silent when it comes to our public institutions such as the universities. The small handouts, I acknowledge, are there for the private higher education providers, but for the universities it's a $400 million reduction, a reduction that saw the loss of 17,000 jobs from our universities. And there are some revenue falls in the order of $2 billion. What we're seeing is the government forcing upon the universities no plans in terms of future research funding. At least there were, in the last budget, measures to have temporary support with a billion dollars in research funding; that, of course, is not continued in this budget.

What we see is a glimmer of hope, some would say, about the measures such as the half a million dollars a year over two years for a PhD completion for industry placements. Do you know what that amounts to? It amounts to 36 PhDs in a country and economy of this size. Thirty-six PhDs—that is the sort of measure this government claims is its contribution to try to understand how serious our problems are.

When we deal with the issues of our science program we note, for instance, that it's where the universities are major contributors to our research effort. They undertake some 35 per cent of all research in Australia, which makes them amongst the highest in the world in terms of the OECD figures. They perform some 43 per cent of all the applied research in this country. They, in fact, provide more research support than the private sector from industry. They provide some 90 per cent of all the discovery—that is, the basic research in this country.

Now, it's a pretty fundamental proposition: you cannot have commercialisation of research without the development of basic new discoveries. There can't be commercialisation without new discoveries. But this is a government that seems to have lost sight of that simple proposition. It's a simple proposition that anyone who has any real understanding of the way in which higher education works, how research policy works, how we actually talk about understanding the relationship between the government of this country and such an important sector as our tertiary higher education sector—what it should be doing in the circumstances such as this.

You would have thought that with the amount of money this government is throwing around to secure its own political survival it might have been able to develop some understanding in the time. What have they done instead in terms of science innovation? They put Mr Porter in charge. They reckon they can hide him in plain sight to try to deal with the difficulties the government have faced on that front, rather than develop the types of coherent programs that are actually needed to secure the future of our industrial capabilities in this country. I would have thought this was an opportunity that's gone begging, an opportunity where the government should have been able to address the fact that our universities are facing this revenue shortfall of some $2 billion, rising to $3 billion. The government should have faced the fact that 17,300 jobs have been lost, as the universities said would be lost. Rather than reducing the support for universities, one would have thought the government might have paid attention to what the cost is to the university system of such blatant neglect.

Professors Frank Larkins and Ian Marshman at the University of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education have reviewed the annual reports of Victorian universities, and have tabled that in the state parliament. They've indicated that 7,500 jobs have been lost in the last year in Victorian universities alone. That's a total of 14 per cent of their staff. The cuts have been heavily concentrated amongst casual staff and staff on fixed-term contracts. They're the staff in the lowest incomes. They're the staff with the least protections in employment. Three universities, RMIT, La Trobe and the uni of Victoria, have cut staff in excess of the loss of revenue. Professor Larkins and Professor Marshman expect there will be more job losses. How many more will depend on how long the borders remain closed.

We know the situation is very simple: international education is worth an enormous value to this country. We see that in terms of the long-term investment to the universities. We have as a parliament, across the board, said to the universities, 'We're not going to be able to fund you to the extent you need.' This has been on a bipartisan basis since the late eighties. We've said, 'You have to rely on your own sources of income to make up the difference.' Now, because of the pandemic, the situation has arisen that international student numbers have dried up. So the universities are now faced with a situation not of their own making but of a policy decision that this parliament has made. They've been left in a very parlous position. And what do they get in terms of support from this government? Nothing. They get, in fact, reductions. They get hostility. They get abuse. And that's not just in terms of financial support; it's attacking them for their international connections.

On the one hand universities have reductions in funding, but on the other hand other government agencies and companies, like ASPI, are able to secure funding with no qualms, no competitive tendering, no arrangements made for a proper assessment, no peer review of their research and no performance appraisals. They produce low-quality, non-peer reviewed research, which, of course, is then used on the front pages of various Murdoch newspapers to run assaults on academics and to run McCarthy smears. Circumstances have arisen where ASPI now has some 35 per cent of its funding from the Department of Defence, 32 per cent from various other federal agencies, and then other funding is provided for various events that it undertakes, all without any questions being asked—and, of course, it gets substantial sums of money from foreign governments. It is allowed then to use that money to attack the universities because of their alleged associations with other governments. This is a tap that's not turned off, but, when it comes to the public universities, we see a very, very different approach indeed.

We note the situation in other science agencies. There is minimal support there. There is minimal support for ANSTO and some capital moneys for the CSIRO and for the other science agencies. It is very much at the edges. But, with the cultural institutions, there is money for just about every one of them, except the National Archives. There is not an extra cent there, despite the fact that the National Archives are now faced with a situation where they are clearly in breach of their statutory obligations because they're not able to fund their activities, where extraordinarily significant historic records are under threat. What has the government done in response to this? Nothing. Why? How do they explain that? How can they provide even an elementary explanation of their failure in that regard? What, there are no votes in the National Archives? Or is it just part of our history that we don't mind seeing wasted, demolished, removed? I think it is an extraordinary dereliction of duty. Given the amount of effort that has been put into the Tune review, I find it an amazing proposition that the National Archives are not able to be provided with any support, particularly in the context where every other cultural institution under the Commonwealth's responsibility is able to secure support. But there is nothing for the National Archives.

So I say in general terms that this is a government that, frankly, is only interested in securing its future, not securing the future of the nation. This is a government that is not seeking to address these fundamental problems like, as I say, the fact that the percentage of our gross expenditure on R&D, at 1.8 per cent, is roughly half that of our major competitors. We see a situation where the People's Republic of China are increasing their R&D to the point where they will be able to double their efforts within 10 years, but we are languishing behind countries throughout this region because we have no coherent plan, no strategy to deal with what the government says is its interest in building a national capability. We have no strategic plan to be able to develop the manufacturing capabilities of this nation. Surely we should have understood this when we went into the pandemic and we couldn't even get enough face masks made in this country, we couldn't build the ventilators, we couldn't build the elementary and rather simple devices needed to secure the health of this nation. We can't now see anything from the government to demonstrate that they've learned anything from that failure, and yet we've got our competitors around the world grasping the opportunities that present themselves, and they are dealing with these problems in an entirely different way.

This government is obsessed with marketing, with electoral fortunes, with ensuring that it is able to overcome political problems by throwing large sums of money at any particular matter. It has no plan, however, for the long-term future of the nation and has no real interest in institutions like our universities, the National Archives or the many other agencies that we require to build that future and secure the capabilities that the nation desperately needs so that we can ensure prosperity for the people of this country and can ensure that we do take our rightful place amongst those international competitors that are clearly moving ahead of us in leaps and bounds.