Mr HATTON (1:51 AM) —I note that it is late in the night or early in the morning, and one could expect members to speak for 20 minutes or so on a bill of this significance and I will do my best to do that. Higher education under this government has effectively fallen by the wayside when you take into account the fact that the first minister, Dr Kemp, spent most of his time as minister, almost on a daily basis, berating this parliament about literacy and numeracy standards. He had very little concern for, and hardly concentrated on, higher education as such or on what was happening in the TAFE area, apart from propagandising and berating about New Apprenticeships and what was happening in literacy and numeracy. We did not see much else of substance from him, apart from a quite wonderful juggling act in terms of the numbers involved in the higher education debate. Obviously Dr Kemp thought that it was important to approach what was happening in higher education from that point of view. Unfortunately we have already seen evidence with the new minister that the same kind of propagandising approach is going to be taken.

Some fundamental problems are deeply embedded within the higher education system. I do not think that any government yet has tried to deal with them adequately. I want to spend a few moments considering the question of literacy and numeracy, as it has had a compounding effect over two decades or more now. That compounded effect has occurred in the infants, primary and secondary schools and then in higher education, at both TAFE and university levels. It has happened because more than two decades ago one of the educational fashions that ripped its way through Australia was the notion that you could simply get rid of phonics and, in its place, you could bring forward 10 or 15 different ways of teaching children how to read.

I do not share the philosophical approach of President Bush, a Republican president; but seemingly because he was influenced by his wife, a librarian, one of the most important things he has done in his first period as president is to legislate that children must be taught through the phonics method in every school in the United States. By and large, most Australian schools have returned to that. That is important for the future, because real literacy has been under attack for decades because people chose very unscientific approaches to teaching reading at the fundamental levels in infants school.

The compounded effect of that attack is that, whereas in the past Australians were rightly proud of our education system and proud of the fact that we could export that education system around the world and bring students in to benefit from it, there are a number of structural problems in that system. One of those structural problems relates to the fact that we have had effective illiteracy over a couple of decades, and not only within the school system. As it has gone on, it has burned its way into teacher education and into almost all parts of the curriculum.

The effect of that is felt in the higher education area, where people teaching first-year students have the problem that they have to confront the lack of literacy and lack of capacity to deal with the language, not only in students of subjects where you might expect there to be less concentration on such things—for example, in mathematics, the sciences, engineering and some of the social sciences, such as geography and commerce—but also in students studying subjects that should be based on a strong literacy standard, such as English, history and so on. That fundamental problem has been created because the wrong direction was taken. Where we had an extremely exportable education system, there is now a fundamental problem at its base.

It has not helped that, during his period as education minister, all Dr Kemp could do was propagandise about it and try to make political capital out of the fact that there was a problem in Australia. We need to have a government that will seek to redress the wrongs done in the past and address the problems of teacher education development, in particular in regard to the literacy problems of current teachers. Given the fact that they have been hamstrung by this over the past 20 years or so, that compounding effect has led to the point where we have people teaching literacy skills in schools who are not literate themselves. We have seen enough evidence on the floor of this parliament to know some of the problems that have occurred over the past two or three decades.

More broadly, the Higher Education Funding Amendment Bill 2002 covers, in part, the Catholic University. It does so because of the way in which Commonwealth funding has been restructured over the years. In 1974, the Commonwealth assumed full financial responsibility for higher education. At that stage, there were 13 non-government teachers' colleges around Australia, 11 of which were Catholic. One of the chief colleges was run by the De La Salle order at Oakhill College in the scholasticate. People who intended to be De La Salle brothers, after having gone to De La Salle Cronulla, to the juniorate, or after coming through the novitiate at Burradoo, would start their educational studies in teacher education at Oakhill College in the scholasticate, where they were under the direction of Brother Ambrose Payne, who ran the curriculum at Oakhill College for many years and established a reputation as one of the greatest educators in New South Wales. He is currently the principal at Lasalle Catholic College, which was formerly Benilde College and which combined with my old years 7 to 10 school of Bankstown De La Salle with Benilde High. He was effectively the founding principal of the new Lasalle Catholic College.

Brother Ambrose Payne should have been the person to run the Australian Catholic University because of his capacity and because, over the years, for virtually 2½ decades, he drove not only the amalgamation of the teachers' colleges but also the curricula and the innovations that were made to build a stronger education sector so that teachers who chose to be educated at the Australian Catholic University could have the strongest foundation possible to enable them to go into the Catholic school system well trained and well prepared to do the best job they could to look after those people in their charge. I would like to commend Brother Ambrose for the fabulous job that he is doing at Lasalle Catholic College now, and also for being a pioneer in Catholic education, a pioneer who actually laid the foundations for the strength of the Australian Catholic University that provides not only Catholic teachers but people in a series of different professions because the university system is now much wider than it was.

I want to note the extension of the Postgraduate Education Loans Scheme. It has been pointed out by a number of members of the government and also by members of the opposition in this debate that that is effectively an extension to the postgraduate area of the Higher Education Contributions Scheme. It applies to people doing coursework in the postgraduate area. That essentially means that where a person otherwise would not have been able to undertake postgraduate study because they were impecunious, that person is able to take out a loan, the loan to be repaid as and when the person is in a position to repay that loan, possibly over a number of years, as is the case with people under HECS. This is an important measure because for many years now, particularly in recent years, as the HECS has been restructured we have noted that there are some significant problems in terms of the incentives provided for people to take on a science education and go into careers based on science because under HECS there is a higher relative amount of money that they are required to pay. That is the case for lawyers, doctors, people in the engineering profession and so on. The central argument is that if it costs more to run those courses then those people should be paying back more in HECS fees over time.

The other argument in that regard is that we have needs in particular areas of expertise in almost all of the sciences. As Dr Washer, the member for Moore, pointed out, in the biological sciences we need people who are as well prepared as possible because that science is one of the key drivers of our future prosperity. Not only do we need people to be smart, well trained and effectively allowed to become strong professionals; we also need to ensure that the capacity is there for them to sustain and increase their knowledge through a number of different programs. As an undergraduate you cannot just expect that that will be it at the end of your course. Increasingly we have seen, because of economic pressures and the increased financial demands of this government—and the fact that people have not been able to access it properly—that not enough people have been doing higher degree courses, whether by coursework or by research. In some areas that in fact has been the case, but in other areas there has been a great deficiency.

The PELS and the extension of it should actually have the effect that more people will be able to enter postgraduate studies and pursue those effectively, and to have that broaden out from primarily the teaching profession. If you go back 10 or 15 years, the great driver in the teaching profession was for people who were three-year trained to go on and undertake further education so they could convert that into full four-year trained status. At that time we had the fine situation that they were the key people going forward, trying to get a better grounding and a better understanding of where they were at, and a greater degree of professionalism. The problem existed, though, that it needed to be broadened. Every way in which we can provide more incentives for people to add to their professional capacity and their qualifications should be sought out. Given the late hour, in spite of what I said about Mrs May, I understand that this debate needs to be sped up a little bit, so I will finish my contribution at this point.