TRANSCRIPT
Senate Inquiry into Higher Education/TAFE Fees in NSW
Date: Wednesday 25 June 2003
Well, the government has spent much of last year
reviewing Australia’s universities and the future of higher
education in Australia. We engaged the entire university sector, the
business community and the government this year in its budget
announced a one point five billion dollar package of reforms for
Australian universities.
Now, the Australian Labor Party in the Senate has
announced, having deliberately decided not to participate in the
review of higher education, the Labor Party has now announced that
it’s going to have a Senate inquiry. That inquiry will not report to
the parliament, at least until the end of the year, and yet the same
Labor Party says it’s announcing its own policies in relation to
higher education in a few weeks time.
It’s important that the Labor Party understands that
Australians, Australian students, need a resolution of the higher
education issue now. The Australian vice-chancellors themselves have
come out unanimously and called on the Labor Party to scrap this
idea of a Senate inquiry; that we’ve already had a significant, wide
… wide … we’ve already had a significant and widespread review of
Australian universities and the vice-chancellors themselves are now
saying to the Labor Party, for goodness sake support the
government’s plan for higher education and get on with it and no
more inquiries.
REPORTER:
Surely it’s fair enough but … I mean, the review
checked out the higher education system as it was. Surely it’s fair
enough for the Senate to look at what your policy … what impact that
will have on the system?
NELSON:
Well, of course the Senate examined and is already
examining the impact of the government’s higher education program.
It does not need, however, to run another inquiry the length and
breadth of Australia to frustrate the process of reform and to see
that Australian universities have to wait, possibly even years,
before any change at all is implemented. They don’t have to have a
committee running around Australia reviewing already what’s been
reviewed at length in Australian universities. Instead, what they
need to do is to take the advice of Australian universities and get
on with the process of reform.
REPORTER:
You say the vice-chancellors have welcomed the
reforms; the students almost unanimously haven’t. What … how do you
explain that?
NELSON:
Well predictably, National Union of Students, the
leadership of Australian student unions, of course, they’re not
going to support nor do they ever support, anything that is
undertaken by the Australian Government. I mean, they’re even not
supporting twenty-five thousand scholarships for students. I mean,
what needs to be understood here is that this government released
seven discussion papers; we ran forty-nine focus groups; we invited
eight hundred people, including student unions, into the process of
the review. The students were actually participants in the review,
over two hundred hours of one to one meetings.
I mean, there is no point in further reviewing
something which has been reviewed to death. We know what the
problems are facing Australian universities. We’ve developed a
comprehensive package for reform and now it behoves the Australian
Labor Party to do what is in the interests of Australia, to consider
in a constructive way what the government has put forward and which
is supported by Australia’s university vice-chancellors.
It does not need to run another inquiry which will
run all over Australia, which will effectively mean that for another
two to three years there will be no changes to Australian
universities. There’s ten and a half billion dollars waiting to be
invested in Australian universities and now it seems the Labor Party
decides it wants to have another review.
REPORTER:
Do you think they’re … the parents and students are
confused with this debate, they’re confused about how much more
their children will pay, they’re confused about what you’re arguing?
I mean, there’s a lot … there are heaps of numbers being thrown
around.
NELSON:
Well, what’s happening is that the Labor Party and
the senior representatives of the Labor Party are deliberately
seeking to deceive and mislead Australians, and Australian students
and their families, in relation to what these reforms are all about.
The reforms are quite clear in that what will happen is the
government will invest another one and a half billion dollars in the
first four years; there will be significantly more money for
teaching and nursing; thirty three and a half thousand extra fully
funded places in the first five years; additional support for
regional universities; a focus on teaching and nursing and in
relation to HECS which, of course, you do not pay back until you’ve
graduated and you’re working, students will not have to pay a cent
back until they’re earning thirty thousand dollars a year. And the
universities, for the first time, will themselves set the HECS
charge from zero to an upper limit, which will be set by … and has
been set by the government.
I mean, it’s fairly clear, we’ve spent an enormous
amount of effort and time and we’ve invested taxpayers’ moneys in
spending more than a year looking at Australian universities. The
last thing we need now is another review.
And on … in relation to the issue of fees, it is
rank hypocrisy for the Labor Party on the one hand to be totally
opposed to any increase … possible increase in HECS charges for
universities which were argued for by the universities themselves,
where students don’t pay a cent back until they’re working, with all
of the HECS money going to universities and then on the other hand,
the Labor Party in New South Wales announces a three hundred per
cent increase in TAFE fees; no loans to support them. It was never
lobbied for by the TAFE directors and the poorer students in the
country end up at TAFE.
I mean, how on earth do you expect students to turn
up to TAFE, pay sixteen hundred and fifty dollars a year, when they
come from the poorest families in the country. If the Labor Party
has any kind of policy consistency, let alone decency at all, it
will stand up today and oppose and criticise the changes to TAFE
fees, not just in New South Wales, but also Victoria and more
recently South Australia.
ENDS
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