Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Polley, Universities Australia sees that there are issues and we are talking about that. The minister has set up working groups to work through the level of detail on what we do with the cluster arrangements, how we structure Commonwealth scholarships to ensure they meet our targeted goal of opening up equitable access to higher education so the very brightest students from regional Australia will not be held back by financial barriers anymore. We need to ensure that student mobility increases so that the communities I represent within regional Australia can benefit from an influx of young people from urban centres and right around the country who want to study at providers where the research specialisation is in their area and they are connected in a way you can only be on a regional university campus and in a regional town, so they can experience a world-class education in the regions with a low cost of living. What we are trying to do is ensure that the options available to young people right across Australia are transparent, open and flexible, because that is exactly what our higher education system needs.

Australian universities are dropping in the world rankings—not that that would worry everybody who just wants a lowest-common-denominator approach to education: 'That doesn't matter; let's just make sure that everyone is on a C. We don't want anyone at an A; everyone is a special snowflake and everybody gets a prize.' That is actually not how the real world works. There are winners and there are losers globally, and I want to make sure—and I know that the minister wants to make sure and that our government wants to make sure—that there are more winners in Australia than not: that we are able to compete against the best in the world when it comes to research that is going to drive future innovation and competition, that is going to create the industries we will need to underpin our economic advancement going forward in the 21st century and that is local research.

We do not want to have to import our brains; we do not have to—we are such a creative, innovative people. We need to be able to have institutions available to our great thinkers in order to grow and compete. I just do not know why those opposite do not want to get onboard. I look at Senator Carr's decisions on terminating programs that he had in place: there were things like our fundamental research infrastructure. Senator Carr actually halted funding on that. We have stepped into that gap and funded that program so that our physicists can use the research infrastructure they need to do the world-class research they are currently doing. I commend the minister. (Time expired)