Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I draw to the attention of the Senate the situation with the state of Western Australia’s leading agricultural education institution and voice the fear that what we are experiencing in WA may in fact befall other states in Australia. I speak of the Muresk Institute of Agriculture being the agriculture and agribusiness wing of the Curtin University of Technology. For those unfamiliar with it, it would be the Roseworthy, the Dookie, the Gatton or the Hawkesbury of Western Australia.

After 85 years from 1926, Muresk is flagged to be closed as a place of higher agricultural education and learning. I had the privilege of being a member of the faculty as a veterinarian between 1975 and 1988, so have a keen interest. The stimulus or the catalyst for the closure, whilst I do not wish to dwell on it, has been the fact that the Curtin University with some 40,000 students on its Perth campus would see that education in the city is core to its activity and that the inconvenience of a limited number of students 100 kilometres from Perth is less so. Indeed, whilst I pick up on that, the Kalgoorlie school of mines, again a place of enormous distinction in the mining industry over many, many years, also conducted by Curtin University, faces I fear a similar fate.

Muresk was the first institution in Australasia to start agribusiness degree training and the qualifications in the 1980s recognising, unlike agricultural science, which is well performed by the University of Western Australia, that beyond the farm gate to the customer’s plate is a critically important part of the cycle of agriculture. It was in that area that the agribusiness degree and its graduates over many years now since the mid-1980s have forged outstandingly successful careers in agricultural banking with the stock firms, stock marketing, animal marketing and other agricultural and agribusiness products: food, retailing, transport, logistics to name but a few.

It was only today that friends of Muresk presented a petition to the parliament of Western Australia urging that the Muresk institute not be closed but that a new opportunity be found so that it can continue 85 years of a proud tradition offering agricultural and agribusiness education.

The Hon. Hendy Cowan, a past Deputy Premier of Western Australia, had been commissioned by the minister for education and the cabinet earlier this year to investigate all opportunities associated with higher agricultural education with a particular reference to Muresk. Quite correctly, Hendy Cowan started with an approach to employers to find out from them the quality of Muresk graduates. As we expected, he found that the employers are strongly of the view that it is the practical education they receive in the agricultural environment linked of course to the science, the economics and the business management of agriculture and agribusiness that is the essence of the quality of that particular qualification. As an aside, so do the miners in Kalgoorlie form very firmly the view that in that context it is the education within the mining community rather than in the western suburbs of Perth that is the value to those students.

I submitted my thoughts to Hendy Cowan because Western Australia and the people within those communities, similarly to those in the other states, are facing enormous challenges. I speak of the whole challenge of biosecurity and the availability of foodstuffs—and water, for that matter—going into the future. If you reflect just for a moment on what those challenges are, we will be feeding another two billion people in the Asian region alone by 2050. We are facing a scenario where we do not now actually provide sufficient fish product for Australia’s community, and we are going to have the challenge of feeding our own community as well as that of the Asian region. Where are the challenges? In the future we will have to achieve this with less land, less water, less input of finance, less fertiliser and fuel and fewer nutrients—and at this time we are facing the challenge of a rapidly ageing population of farmers. The average age of farmers and their wives in this country now exceeds 60 years, and that is something that we should be reflecting on. I made the point in my submission to the Cowan review that, if ever there was a time when it is essential that we be promoting agricultural and agribusiness education, it is now. We should not, on the other hand, be diminishing it or constricting it.

So not only are we faced with the scenario of students from agricultural communities who will not adjust, in most instances, to a large, city based university campus and therefore the need to be able to offer that sort of education in a rural climate—and that extends right around Australia—but we are also faced with the prospect that students from urban areas will not be experiencing the agricultural environment if we are in fact to withdraw from agricultural areas. I make the point that in Western Australia, and I suspect it is the same in the other states, we just do not have the luxury of the competitiveness that exists between the higher agricultural universities and institutions. We must have a far more complementary rather than competitive environment and share the resources. The point that I have made to the Hendy Cowan review is that this institution needs—and perhaps others around Australia facing a similar demise also need—an overarching institute of higher agricultural education which can embrace all postsecondary training from TAFE level right through to the postdoctoral sphere, seamlessly allowing students to come from agricultural colleges and the high schools into agriculture and agribusiness education.

I will conclude my remarks, if I may, with the observation that over the last half-century in Australia those students who have been most disadvantaged in achieving a tertiary education have not been those from the low socioeconomic areas of cities—although I applaud the moves taken to ensure that students from low socioeconomic areas do get the chance to achieve what they will at the degree level and in higher education—but students from rural and remote areas. I applaud the announcement of the last few days that, in government, the coalition will invest up to $1 billion in a regional education fund to bridge the education gap that I speak of between the cities and the regions. Whilst that of course applies to primary and secondary education, I make the point that with our demography and our geography there are significant challenges confronting parents in rural and regional areas, be they farmers or townsfolk, in ensuring that their children receive adequate education at the tertiary level. My final comment, my final plea, is that what we are seeing at Muresk, I fear, is not confined to that institution in Western Australia. We see the pattern around Australia and I certainly think it is time that this chamber address the needs of higher agricultural education in this country.