Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

The impact of the government's reforms to higher education will be that more young people will get the opportunity to go to university—a lot more, at least 80,000 more. That was the question asked by the member for Perth, and that is the answer. Eighty thousand more people will get to go to university and get the opportunity to improve their standard of living, their health, their longevity and their sophistication, if you like, through education, and they will get a 75 per cent, on average, increase in income. The taxpayer provides, at the moment, about 60 per cent of the cost of educating a student. The student provides about 40 per cent. After our reforms, the impact will be that we will be asking students to contribute about 50 per cent of the cost of their education. As Fred Hilmer, from the University of New South Wales, said, the government will not set these fees. The government will not decide how the universities determine their budgets, their costs and their fees. The universities will decide that.

The member for Perth wants to continue to infantilise the universities. She wants to continue to run the universities from Canberra in terms of the demand-driven system. She probably wants to return to the old system of caps on undergraduate courses. She wants to tell the universities how they can much they can charge and how many students they can enrol. The government's view is that we want to give universities the freedom to make these decisions themselves, to set their own fees and to enrol the number of students that they want in sub-bachelor courses and undergraduate degrees. The effect of that is a massive reform of higher education that will have two very significant impacts. Firstly, it will let more young people into higher education. This will particularly help low-SES families and first-generation university goers, because they typically use the sub-bachelor courses as a pathway to an undergraduate degree.

The second big impact, which the Labor Party is also opposed to, is that it will give our universities the chance to achieve excellence. It will give our universities the chance to compete with their Asian competitors, the Asian universities, which are improving in quality all the time. We have an international education market, which at the moment is worth $15 billion per annum. It was $19 billion under the Howard government. Labor managed to shrink that to $15 billion—quite an achievement in a growing economy—because they do not really support international education. We want to see our universities compete with their Asian counterparts. Five years ago, there were no Chinese universities in the top 200 universities in the world, in the Shanghai Jiao Tong index—none. There are now five universities from China in the top 200. Of the Australian universities, one more has entered the top 200, but all the others' rankings have fallen.

If we do not give our universities the chance to achieve excellence, to compete with their Asian competitors, our international education market will fall and it will dry up. I am not prepared to be the minister that knows that danger is looming and not do anything about it. So I have made the decision to reform higher education to give more students the opportunity to go to university and to free our universities to be the best they possibly can be and to have the best quality higher education system in the world.

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