Senator VANSTONE (Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs)(12.53 p.m.) —Let me take the opportunity to clarify `recreational learner'. It does not imply that it is any easier. A recreational learner may be someone who would like to buy a place at a university—perhaps some retired person who would like to take on a new degree and is happy to pay to do it. To me, being a recreational learner in that sense does not mean that the degree is easy. It means that the person is not doing it with a view to gaining a qualification to get a job; they are doing it out of interest. I certainly do not imagine that open learning is a pushover at all. What you heard from the colleagues you worked with in East Anglia is no doubt as true here as it would be in the United Kingdom or elsewhere.

My comments do not go to the difficulty of a particular course, but go to the purpose of undertaking it. One of the Labor members of the House of Representatives raised with me recently a research project that had not, in his view, received appropriate recognition and funding. It had in the past, but now it was not going to have continued funding. One of the Australians working on this project is an Australian who was a surgeon and who decided that at 55 he would retire. I assumed from that that he had earned a suitable income from being a surgeon. It did cross my mind that it would not have hurt that person to pay $5,500 as a contribution to a lifelong income that allowed one to retire at 55, to take on another degree to become an archaeologist and to work with a former Democrat senator, Senator Sowada, in Egypt.

That second degree, undertaken by someone who was a surgeon and who amassed sufficient income to be able to retire at 55, was undertaken at the expense of someone else who might otherwise have got in. Under our system, anyone would be able to be a recreational learner, take a second degree when they retired—if they are lucky enough to earn enough money to retire at 55—and pay for it. I want to emphasise that my description of a recreational learner is someone who is not doing it with a view to getting their initial qualifications to get a job.

Secondly, let me repeat: you are quite right when you say that there are some people who, for a whole variety of reasons, will not want to do full-time study. I thought you asked, `Why will we only fund them if they are full time?' That is not right. They must do one study period—just one—where they take two units. For the remainder of the year, they can take none in the other three periods, or one, or two, or any combination thereof. But in any one year there must be one study period where two units are taken. That is not taking a full-time load over a year, by any stretch of the imagination. A full-time load in any year would be eight units.

We are prepared to fund people who would be doing only two units. That is a 25 per cent load. We are prepared to shift to that sort of flexibility as an acknowledgment of the very point that you raise. We think it is reasonable to say, `If you're doing just over 10 per cent and you're not going to finish for 10 years, then you're not serious about doing this for a qualification. You're not serious enough.' In that sense it would amount to 25 per cent in any one year, and you have to do that by doing two units in one study period. But after that, the flexibility is up to you. You are quite right; there might be periods where it would not be appropriate or easily manageable for someone to do two units in each study period over the year. That might not be possible, and I quite understand that.