Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Charges) Bill 2021. I am very pleased to be speaking on this this evening, because the university sector is terrifically important to this nation. Prior to COVID impacts, Australia enjoyed 1.5 million enrolled students, of which 31 per cent were international students. In the 2017 economy, this accounted for $38 billion. That is a significant sector for the Australian economy. Not only does it bring dollars to Australia; it brings lifelong relationships.

In fact, I can tell you an interesting story of an engineering firm in the Gatton area which creates stock crushers, crates and other agricultural machinery equipment. They would get students down from the Gatton university. These students would come from all over the world. Now this engineering firm exports to all over the world and, not coincidentally, to the very countries where these students came from. These students went back to their own nations and agricultural industries and talked about the terrific work that was being done by this business. So now they export to probably every country that you can imagine. This relationship with students can't be overvalued. It is terrifically important to the relationships that we have as a nation with a small population. Those students come here, they learn about us, our culture and our values, and then they take those back home, and Australia remains somewhere they speak about as a warm place with great relationships and great businesses. Those opportunities are something that we should value as we export those education opportunities. We also have six top fields of education in Australia: management and commerce, 266,989 students were enrolled; society and culture, 197,988 students; health, 181,453 students enrolled; natural and physical sciences, 88,013 students; education, 86,915 students; and engineering and related technology, 84,875 students. This industry also provides 63,469 jobs in the higher education sector. This is a terrifically important sector.

I congratulate the minister on the changes that were made recently to the structure of fees associated with different university degrees. We made a very conscious decision to realign fees against jobs that were needed in Australia because we know that the amount of HECS debt sitting on the Australian nation's balance sheet has been growing. That's a reflection of the number of students who are finishing but not ensuring a job in their chosen field or generating the income that would allow them to start paying back those fees. If we're going to invest in people and in their education—the most important thing we can do for anybody in their life—then it's important that we match them with an industry that they're going to be able to work in. So I think that is a terrific change. As somebody who has children of university age, who are going through the process, it is something that I have reflected on and watched a great deal. I'm delighted to see more young people enrolling in degrees that will take them to a purposeful life, because that is what we wish for all of our children.

Education provides more than that. It provides the ability for people to transcend wherever they may find themselves starting off in life. Whatever position their families have, whatever their circumstance or geographic location, education can provide them with a pathway to transcend their original life and reach their full potential. Isn't what we want for every person in Australia that they reach their full potential through education, whether it be starting out on distance education, because they're a geographically isolated student, or ending up at a university somewhere in this nation?

In northern Australia we are incredibly fortunate to have some terrific universities. Whether it be James Cook University, the University of Southern Queensland, Charles Darwin University or Curtin University, they are all incredibly valuable education institutions. The JCU medical school in particular populates northern Australia not just with medical students but then rural GPs through its training program. It is recognised as being one of the best in the land, particularly because it achieves its core purpose, which is to educate and then populate medical practices in northern Australia and regional Australia. It does a terrific job in that regard. The other thing that JCU has is that it is the only university in Australia which can claim to be the No. 1 university in the world for a training program, which is the marine sciences faculty. It is No. 1 in the world, the only Australian university that can make that claim. It's something that I am terrifically proud of and something that we have been providing funding and support for over generations. One of my grandfathers was the first chancellor at James Cook University. As a mining engineer, I reflect on the number of mining engineering courses at JCU, and I have made this observation to the faculties there: being so close to the North West Minerals Province and all of those terrific rare earths and that traditional hard rock mining of copper, zinc, lead, silver and gold, all of which are so important in modern economies, we should have more mining degrees at James Cook University.

So northern Australia is somewhere that has some really unique expertise, and I certainly look at the place that northern Australia holds in the geographic centre of relevance, the tropics around the world. Some of the biggest cities and population densities around the world sit within the same band that Cairns, Townsville and Darwin sit in. So our natural expertises in tropical medicine, tropical architecture and mining in the tropics are things that I think we should be continuing to invest in and that northern Australia has a real advantage in. It would be terrific to see us encourage those expertises in those universities, to see more students come to Australia, a stable and welcoming nation with a real expertise in educating people from around the world. In fact, we bring around 3,000 overseas students every year to train in medicine at JCU and other universities in Australia. What a terrific education to be providing, and what a terrific skill set to be sending back around the world.

Listening to some of the debate this afternoon and this evening, I have heard a couple of unusual comments, but, of course, I'm putting it down as just another Labor lie. I will put the claim about reducing uni funding in the same bucket as those other Labor lies, such as the one about the cashless debit pension card. In the Senate vote, it was the coalition that voted against a cashless debit pension card and it was Labor and the Greens that in fact voted for a cashless debit pension card. Yet that is the current Labor lie that they're spreading on social media at every opportunity.