Federal treasurer Joe Hockey has reaffirmed the Government’s intention to reintroduce into Parliament in the forthcoming February session its Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill.
This Bill was narrowly defeated in the Senate in November 2014, but the Government obviously expects that over the intervening three months it has been able to convince a couple of the cross-benchers of the acceptability and inevitability of its reforms.
There have been suggestions that the Government might have been persuaded to amend some of the more radical elements of its proposed reforms, but the responsible Minister, Christopher Pyne, has been adamant that such negotiations will not be entered into.
This is not surprising. He only needs a couple of cross-bench votes for the Bill to pass the Senate, and he has the almost unanimous support of the Vice-Chancellors of Australia’s thirty eight universities. Nonetheless, on Wednesday there were some indications that the Government might be willing to amend some of the provisions of the Bill to make doubly sure of Senate approval.
Once can sympathise with the Vice-Chancellors. Over many years Government financial support for higher education has been eroded in real terms, and uncapped student numbers (for which, let it be said, the Vice-Chancellors themselves agitated) have put further strains on already very tight operational budgets.
Faced with a cut of 20 per cent in Government funding, one can understand why the Vice-Chancellors, with one notable exception, capitulated to the Government’s demands, especially since the stick was also accompanied by the carrot of deregulation of undergraduate student fees. This also was a development for which the Vice-Chancellors had agitated, indeed even more enthusiastically and over a more prolonged period than they had for the uncapping of student numbers.
Further, they could claim that there was a certain logic in deregulating undergraduate student fees. International student fees and most domestic graduate fees were deregulated – it was inevitable that sooner or later undergraduate fees should follow the same path. Why not sooner, especially since, with a 20 per cent cut in Government funding, they could wash their hands, Pilate fashion, of responsibility for this added financial imposition on students?
And finally, of course, access to this unregulated source of revenue would not only remedy operational budgets. It would also enable the universities – especially the G8 major universities – to maintain their quite remarkable international rankings, even though their rankings are based on research performance and only indirectly, at best, on student welfare, the constituency from whom this additional revenue is to be derived.
But accepting a 20 per cent cut in funding without a whimper, being accomplice to at least a 25 per cent increase in student fee-debt, and, in most cases embracing at least a 30 per cent increase in the cost of degrees in the various disciplines – how could the Vice-Chancellors swallow these pills? It is important to appreciate just how radical a funding cut the Government legislation proposes.
Just imagine if there was a 20 per cent cut in Government funding for primary or secondary education, for health, for welfare or tourism. What an outcry they would be! And remember, higher education is our third most significant export industry even in financial terms, let alone in cultural impact, especially in the Asian context.
The Minister, Christopher Pyne, has sought to justify the reforms by suggesting that higher education is elitist in character. Why should the rank and file taxpayer, he asks, pay for 60 per cent of the costs of students attending university? This, of course, is a highly contentious argument. It relies on four questionable presuppositions. It ignores in the first instance the whole nature of taxation where we all are taxed for benefits in which only some of us participate. Secondly, it ignores the intergenerational nature of support for education.
One generation through taxes pays for the education of the next generation, which in its turn pays for education of the following generation. Thirdly, it ignores the fact that university graduates not only subsequently extinguish their tertiary fee-debt but also, particularly if, as the Minister suggests, they become members of wealthy professions, they pay substantial taxes over their professional careers. And finally it ignores the social benefits of higher education. Where would we be without our doctors, engineers, social workers, lawyers, nurses and architects, to say nothing of our artists, poets and educators?
As I have suggested above, Australian universities perform remarkably well in the international rankings, and that even though they are competing with small elite universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Princeton, often with very substantial philanthropic endowments.
It is to maintain these rankings that the Vice-Chancellors are willing to embrace fee deregulation, the most radical change since the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s. But, if we are performing so well, why are we embarking on such a radical reform, in effect further privatising higher education?
Why not? No Government funding cut, a modest increase in student fee-debt, and some sacrifice in the international rankings? But not fee-deregulation. Otherwise, at least for the major metropolitan universities we will be returning to the financial elitism that characterised the early history of the Australian tertiary education system which over sixty years Commonwealth scholarships and the Whitlam and Dawkins reforms endeavoured to mitigate.
Fr Bill Uren SJ AO is Rector of Newman College at the University of Melbourne.