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Transcript
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW OF THE HON
DR BRENDAN NELSON MP AND ALAN JONES 2GB RADIO
16 October 2003 MIN 487/03
JONES:
Minister good morning.
NELSON:
Good morning Alan. And, you’re right about the complexity of it Alan. It’s very hard.
JONES:
I mean, why, to explain what tertiary education is to be, do we need a bill of over 260 pages?
NELSON:
Well, unfortunately what we are trying to do is to reform not just one part of Australian universities Alan, but the length and breadth of it. And, the reason for doing this is, firstly, that universities need more money and they need a lot more of it in the long term Alan. And secondly, it’s the way in which we run, regulate and administer with crippling bureaucracy, which is much a part of the problem. I am trying to make sure that our kids go to universities that enjoy not just good reputations in Australia but outstanding ones internationally.
JONES:
But see, what if you’re wrong, I mean Dawkins saw every high rise building from Cape York to Wilson’s Promontory, made it into a university, which has been an utter failure from which we are all suffering today. What if Brendan Nelson does a Dawkins?
NELSON:
Well, Alan, Barry Jones who I think has one of the best intellects in the country described that decision to amalgamate the then 17 universities with the 73 colleges of advanced education as the single worst decision of the previous Labor government. Unfortunately I can’t unscramble that egg. But, what we did Alan was we spent a year going through quite detailed negotiations and a review, not only with the business community and universities, but the broader community. And we’ve developed a package which is based on putting more money into the system, creating more publicly funded HECS places, trying to allow the universities to start to rationalise some of the courses they’re offering, to simplify their offerings, and especially to put more money into regional universities and give scholarships to kids to help them with their living expenses.
JONES:
Ok. Let me just ask you a couple of simple questions. 20,000 students missed out on going to university this year. And, they wanted to go. How can that be a satisfactory system?
NELSON:
Well, look, I agree with you. And, one of the many issues I am trying to deal with in this Alan is what we call ‘eligible unmet demand’. You’re right – there is about 20,000. A decade ago, by the way, it was in excess of 50,000. One of the things I am trying to look at, at the moment Alan, is 40,000 kids got a place in university this year who will not be in university by the end of the year and who will never return. In other words, the drop-out rate in the first year alone is twice the ‘eligible unmet demand’. So, I could take out your listeners’ cheque book and say to the universities and say, right, I’ll write a cheque for whatever you want to create extra places. But unless we deal with quality issues, unless we deal with the issues about kids being rammed into lecture theatres like sardines into a tin, at the same time we’ve got lecture theatres only 15% full across the lawns, you know, where we have low demand courses. Unless we deal with the complexity of all of that we’d be wasting your money.
JONES:
But then, what does it mean when 20,000 students are ‘over-enrolled’? How can you be ‘over-enrolled’?
NELSON:
Well, what the universities have done Alan is, because they need extra money, and in some cases they’ve had demand from students that are knocking on the door to get in, what they’ve done is enrolled above their target. And, there is more than 25, 000 which are ‘over-enrolled’. And they attracted only a quarter of the public money that the students attracted up to enrollment. So what we are proposing to do is to put $347 million of your listeners’ money into fully funding those places. So, in total over the next 5 years, we are going to fully fund ‘over-enrolled’ places. We are also going....
JONES:
...Just come again. What’s an ‘over-enrolled’ student? I’ve never heard of this. But, I keep reading about it. What is an ‘over-enrolled’ student?
NELSON:
What happens there Alan, for example, Charles Sturt University is 40% over-enrolled. Let’s say for argument's sake....
JONES:
...3,900 over-enrolled. University of Sydney 13% over-enrolment.
NELSON:
Yep. Let’s say for example, for argument's sake, a university is fully funded to enroll 1,000 students. A university when it hits the 1,000 mark can say, right, we’ll take in another 100 students. But those extra 100 students who will be ‘over-enrolled’, instead of attracting an average of $10,000 -$12,000, under the current arrangements they get only $2,700. But the universities are grabbing the extra kids, grabbing the extra money, even though it’s less, and that is reducing the quality of what finally comes out the other end of the university.
JONES:
But surely it must mean that the universities have got some problem with finances. Because 8 of the 40 of them are in deficit. Another 4 on the brink. I see that Newcastle University’s in debt to the tune of $3.7 million. Western Sydney $1.2 million, the Royal Institute of Technology in Melbourne $17.2, ANU $11.8. But the old fashion universities, Sydney, Queensland, Melbourne and Monash have got surpluses of $494 million.
NELSON:
You’re absolutely right Alan. And, again, this is one of the reasons why we are trying to undertake reform. We’ve got to get more money into the universities. But on behalf of the tax payers, many of whom have never seen the inside of a university but respect what happens inside them, on behalf of them, we are saying look, before we actually handover another $10 billion extra public money in the next 10 years and $1.5 billion in the first 4 years, we are saying, look, there are things we want to happen. We want to see they are better regulated, better managed. We want rationalisation of courses. Why for example are your listeners, Alan, paying for places in a course like the ‘application of make-up to drag queens’, surf board riding, aromatherapy, a whole range of courses in golf course management. You can even do a degree in the paranormal. At the same time Alan we are bleeding in physics, chemistry, maths, literature, philosophy and sociology. We need to be starting to focus our resources on the things we need as a society and we to improve the quality of what is provided in education.
JONES:
So, if we’ve got a shortage as we do have today in Australia of good teachers and a shortage of nurses and a shortage of science teachers, why are we making it more difficult for people to enter those faculties, which we are?
NELSON:
Well, firstly Alan, we need to make sure we have people of quite a high quality. I mean, obviously we don’t ever want teaching and nursing to be as hard to get into as say medicine or vet science. But I think it needs to be reasonably academically rigorous. But in fact at the same time Alan what we are doing is increasing the number of places for teaching and nursing. We are increasing by 9.7% the money we give for the training of the teachers in the universities to improve the quality of what they actually receive in teaching. 7.1% increase in the funding to train the nurses. And for the very first time Alan, what the Government’s also proposing to do is to offer loans to students who want to go to the private universities. It’s a bit like the schools.....
JONES:
....So people can pay to go to an Australian university. But what about their entrance marks?
NELSON:
The entrance marks are determined by the universities. But, Alan, what I am doing is I am going to require the universities before the end of each year to publicise what they believe is the minimum academic score required to do the course. I mean, you don’t actually have to have an entry score of 99%.....
JONES:
...No and nor should you. I mean, people are late developers and so on. They might have greater application when they go to uni than when they went to high school.
NELSON:
You’re absolutely right. And, what’s happening at the moment is we’ve got kids that are bright, they work their tails off, they go through all the agony of year 12 and the HSC. They get a score of 95%, they miss out on the course they feel they really want to do in their hearts. And, at the moment, if they don’t have the money, they are being forced to go and take the place in a course they don’t want to do.
JONES:
But you’ve put an official limit, or there was, of 25% of full fee paying. Supposedly that could be 50%. But only 9,700 Australian students have taken up that option. So is that not being solved properly or.....
NELSON:
...Well, the problem is at the moment Alan, is that there are 531,000 undergraduate students in the universities. We’ve said to the universities for the last five years, look, if a kid gets 99.3% and desperately wants to do Arts Law at the University of New South Wales and doesn’t get in, we’re saying well look, you can offer them a full fee paying place, just like a foreign student, but if they come out of my electorate in the Upper North Shore of Sydney Alan, they can probably afford to pay for it. But if they come out of the Western suburbs Alan they might as well be offered a ticket to Mars. So, what we’re saying is, look, we, the Government, will lend your listeners’ taxes, we will lend you the money to pay for the full fee paying course if you want to do it. And I just say to your listeners we are increasing the number of publicly funded HECS places in the system. And then at the same time we are saying look, if you are academically good enough and the university wants to offer you a full fee-paying place, we the tax-payer will lend you the money. You don’t have to pay a cent back until you’re earning more than $30,000 a year once you’ve graduated. So, at least it gives kids who come out of low income backgrounds a choice they might not otherwise have. Alan, if we banned, and the Labor Party is proposing to do this, if we banned it and said right, we won’t have fee paying Australian students in Australian universities, the only way an Australian could actually go and be a fee paying student in an Australian university would be to go overseas, sell their passport, and come back as a foreigner, which to me is absolutely ridiculous, bordering on outrages in fact.
JONES:
Good on you. Ok. Leave it there. You seem to be on top of the issue. I wish we could simplify it every other day. 260 pages seems an awful mess.
NELSON:
Alan, one other thing on this strike, all we are doing is saying to the universities is, before you get $404 million of extra public money, could you please make sure that the employees in the universities have the choice of being represented by the union or make sure they are free, if they choose to, to negotiate an individual agreement. If nobody wants to sign an individual agreement, I will be happy, as long it has been offered to them.
JONES:
Good on you. Thanks for your time.
[Ends]
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