MEDIA RELEASE
LABOR NEEDS A POLICY NOT A RE-WARMED MEATBALL
5 July, 2003 MIN 399/03
The ALP has today insulted the higher education
community, and undermined almost 9,500 young Australians by making
an announcement which is less a policy prescription for higher
education than a re-release of a single dot point from its failed
“Knowledge Nation” – “spaghetti and meatballs” document.
Labor says it is announcing that Australian fee
paying students will no longer be accepted in Australian
universities.
Labor has been promising for months that it would
throw the 9,500 undergraduate Australian students who have accessed
fee paying places out of lecture theatres and onto the street. Labor
does not however believe that the same treatment should be meted out
to fee paying students from overseas – effectively meaning the ALP
is discriminating against Australians.
Fee paying students access places which universities
create over and above the HECS places provided by the taxpayer. They
do not impact on HECS students – except to provide more resources
for the universities to service HECS students. Labor wants these fee
paying Australians out.
Labor’s policy would also cost universities more
than $70 million in lost revenue, which will need to be replaced,
discriminate against Australians who want to pay their own way in
favour of students from overseas, and create even greater unmet
demand.
It should not be forgotten that under Labor policies
for universities, in 1992 unmet demand was in the order of 140,000.
It is today between 18,700 and 25,700 according to the Australian
Vice Chancellors’ Committee.
Labor has also ‘announced’ today that the fee paying
students it is planning to remove from universities will not be able
to access a loan – an irrelevant announcement because Labor plans to
bar fee paying Australian students anyway!
Australian universities risk sinking into a
quicksand of mediocrity and need a comprehensive policy framework of
transformational change.
Labor’s ‘new’ policy announcement amounts to one dot
point - the raising of the HECS repayment threshold to $35,000. The
Government has already committed to raising the threshold to
$30,000. This is not a ‘new’ policy but a re-warmed ‘meatball’ from
‘noodle nation’.
Labor’s Education spokesperson, Jenny Macklin has
supposedly spent 18 months doing the hard policy work for Labor.
There is no evidence of that.
The Government’s higher education reform package
provides, as many Vice-Chancellors of universities have said, an
historic opportunity to reposition Australian universities for a
vibrant future.
Labor’s hypocrisy becomes clear when it is
considered that Simon Crean has had nothing to say about the NSW
Government’s decision to raise its TAFE fees by up to 360% for 40%
of TAFE students – with no loan scheme.
Simon Crean and Jenny Macklin have also endorsed (by
their silence) the Victorian Labor Government’s introduction of full
fee paying places for Australian students in the Victorian TAFE
system.
What is the difference, Mr Crean, between an
Australian student doing a fee paying degree in a Victorian TAFE
(which you support) or a fee paying degree in a Victorian university
(which you oppose)?
Simon Crean’s Labor Party is prepared to use cheap
political opportunism and scare-mongering at every turn.
Australians deserves better.
Media Contact
Dr Nelson’s Office: Ross Hampton 0419 484 095
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