Extract from The Guardian
Opposition will give universities access to Labor’s $15bn job creation fund if it wins the next election.
Labor’s education minister Tanya Plibersek says if elected, Australia’s universities will be given funding to ‘translate your brilliant discoveries and inventions into new Australian businesses and new Australian jobs’.
Last modified on Thu 3 Jun 2021 03.50 AEST
Tanya Plibersek says Australia’s universities will be restored “to their rightful place” if Labor wins the next federal election, after the “economic vandalism” and the “trashing” inflicted on the sector by the Morrison government.
The shadow education minister will make the pitch at a conference convened by Universities Australia on Thursday, noting the Coalition had treated “our best services export, and our fourth largest export industry, like a fifth column”.
Plibersek will confirm if Labor wins the next election, universities will have access to Labor’s $15bn national reconstruction fund to “translate your brilliant discoveries and inventions into new Australian businesses and new Australian jobs”.
There had been concern in the higher education sector that universities would be excluded from Labor’s off-budget fund which was marketed as a manufacturing and sovereign capability initiative when it was unveiled by Anthony Albanese in March.
While Labor is yet to address funding for the sector substantively, Plibersek’s speech also contains a hint on uncapping places.
She will note access to places is a “growing problem” that Labor will work with the sector to resolve because “every Australian kid who works hard and gets the marks should have a chance to go to university – if they want to”.
According to a copy of her speech distributed in advance of the conference, Plibersek will argue Australia’s future prosperity depends on the health of Australia’s education and university sector.
She will note both Labor and Liberal leaders in the past have understood the central role universities have played in reconstruction after crises. Plibersek says after World War Two, leaders understood Australia needed more specialists in fields such as economics, science, planning, engineering, agriculture, and foreign affairs, and a much stronger research capacity.
She says the post-war reconstruction was characterised by an unprecedented period of university investment, with a doubling of research grants, the establishment of the Australian National University in Canberra, expanding the Csiro, and establishing the commonwealth reconstruction training scheme.
“The contrast with today could not be more disheartening,” Plibersek will say.
“Instead of recognising the value of education to our economic recovery, instead of growing access and expanding capacity, this government is systemically trashing higher education in Australia”.
She will note the government spent the coronavirus pandemic “ignoring your cry for help”.
Australia’s higher education sector is estimated to have shed more than 17,000 jobs during the public health crisis according to data from Universities Australia. Universities Australia also estimates the sector lost $1.8bn in revenue in 2020, and was projected to lose a further $2bn in 2021.
“As thousands of university workers were losing their jobs around the country, as thousands more were worried about their future, the prime minister deliberately excluded you from jobkeeper wage subsidies,” Plibersek will say on Thursday.
“No other industry of your size received such a pointed silence. Businesses with soaring profits got millions in wage subsidies. Casinos got wage subsidies. But universities didn’t”.
Plibersek says as well as the exclusion from the wage subsidy, course fees were doubled, with the changes “targeted, quite viciously, at disciplines the government dislikes”.
She will argue the “dawdling” on vaccination and quarantine slowed the return of Australian citizens caught overseas, “which then pushed the return of international students even further down the road”.
“And now, in this year’s budget, when the government has been spraying billions around to solve its political problems, racking up a trillion dollars of debt – hardly a dollar for universities”.
The May budget shows funding for universities will decline by nearly 10% over the next three years, while Tafe funding will be slashed by 24%. An emergency $1bn grant for research, handed to universities last year during the peak of the pandemic, was not renewed.
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