Senator CARR (3:44 PM) —The Higher Education Funding Amendment Bill 1998 sets the maximum operating grants for universities in 1999 and 2000, thereby confirming in legislation for the first time the government's massive cuts to university operating grants which were announced in 1996. It establishes and provides limited funding for the new Australian Education International to promote Australia's education exports. It updates funding estimates for special capital projects, various grant programs, superannuation and teaching hospitals in line with government estimates of relevant inflation rates, and adds Notre Dame University to the list of institutions eligible for funding for operating purposes, including teaching, research and capital.

It is noted that this bill has been redrafted to combine two pieces of legislation into a new consolidated bill. Part of the legislation was deal with in the previous parliament, but not passed by the Senate, and the other part was only introduced into the House of Representatives.

The opposition is especially critical of the haste in which this new bill has been introduced and the lack of time that has been given for scrutiny of the bill. We believe this to be characteristic of the way in which this government has handled its legislative program, and specifically its approach to higher education.

The Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Dr Kemp, who clawed his way into cabinet over the body of Senator Vanstone, is only too happy to use education as a scapegoat for every national problem that he can think of. But he is now most anxious to avoid public debate on his administration. We saw a clear indication of the lack of will of this government to discuss education during the election campaign when, in a most shabby way, they released the Liberal's education policy at 5 o'clock one evening in such a manner as to ensure that there was no examination of the details of that platform. One can understand why Dr Kemp is anxious to avoid public scrutiny of his policies, because under this government the very nature of tertiary education, the very nature of the creative features of our education system, has been fundamentally changed.

Australia has seen a contraction in the efforts of its education sector and a greater emphasis within the universities on commercialisation at the expense of the traditional role of providing high quality, broad based education of Australian people. We have seen an underlying position of greater emphasis on vocational education within the university sector which this government believes will create more jobs—an assumption which has yet to be demonstrated in fact. Sadly, the narrowing of the focus of our university sector has impacted on every aspect of university life and has resulted in less choice and an inferior quality of education in our universities across this country.

The very nature and role of academics has been supplanted by the more market driven approach adopted by the government itself. In the past, academics were proud of the role they played in essential and healthy debate within this country. In the past, academics were proud to be associated with public controversy to stimulate debate and questioning of society and the directions that society was taking. However, our academics are no longer encouraged to espouse views and positions which in the past were essentially the mainstream discourse of public life.

Under this government there has been a shift whereby there is an overriding atmosphere of fear and intimidation where academics are stifled, morale has plummeted and controversy is feared. Likewise, universities have been bludgeoned into accepting a narrower, market driven criteria for their very operations. What we have seen was recently demonstrated by Barry Jones—I think quite adequately—at the inaugural RMIT student union lecture series in Melbourne in August this year. He pointed out that the failure of Australia's universities to fight for the traditional values of scholarship or to contribute to debates on controversial issues has meant that governments can attack them with impunity. He pointed out that, in his experience as Minister for Science, he saw the precedent for this set, whereby the Liberal Party, which is essentially made up of philistines and various forms of ignoramuses—

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT —Senator Carr, would you please not reflect like that.

Senator CARR —What? That the Liberal Party is full of philistines?

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT —No, Senator Carr. Will you just withdraw, thank you?

Senator CARR —Sorry, Madam President?

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT —You know full well what you said is unparliamentary.

Senator CARR —Whatever is unparliamentary, Madam Deputy President, I withdraw.

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT —Come on.

Senator CARR —What we have seen—

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT —Would you please be more specific? Withdraw unreservedly.

Senator CARR —I unreservedly withdraw whatever was unparliamentary. Philistine elements within the media have taken up the questions that once were raised by Liberal Party spokespeople in their various waste watch committees and the like, suggesting that government grants singling out humanities and other groups were somehow or another wasteful. According to Barry Jones, the various vice-chancellors, rather than defend the actions of the researchers in their universities at the time, were only too happy, with a few notable exceptions, to maintain an eerie silence in regard to the onslaught by these philistine elements within the conservative political parties and the media of this country.

What followed was that various elements of the bureaucracy itself understood that university administrations were not capable of showing the strength and resolution to defend academic freedom that they so often asserted was their due. In practice, they maintained an eerie silence and were thought to be acquiescing to government attacks, thinking that those attacks would lessen in their brutality. A campus review article of 12-18 August 1998 reveals this and demonstrates that this is the same view being expressed by this government. The article says:

The Federal Education Minister, Dr David Kemp, appears to share this view. His media adviser told journalists last week that everything in higher education was fine because `universities are no longer on the front page of newspapers.'

We see another example with Melbourne University Press, which in September of this year was involved in the quite, I think, notorious scandal of the suppression of a book by Professor Tony Coady, professor of philoso phy at Melbourne University. The book was about the idea of university, about the central values that a university should embody and about the various notions which the author thought were integral to the concept of the principles of university life. The book was suppressed by Melbourne University Press on the advice of senior members of the university administration, including the Vice-Chancellor, Mr Alan Gilbert, the Director of Melbourne University Press, who was associated with the deputy vice-chancellor, and the Chairman of Melbourne University Press—who had direct links to the privatised university unit, known as Melbourne University Private—being pursued by the university. It was demonstrated by the statements made by the senior management of Melbourne University that this book was being suppressed because, in their eyes, it represented a traditional view of the university which did not give sufficient weight to opposing views.

According to an article by Peter Craven in the Melbourne Age on 24 August, the book, which had been edited by an eminent member of the university community, was not being published because in powerful opinions there was not sufficient weight given to the managerial and corporate approach of the university's management itself. So where there are complaints about the directions the universities are taking at the behest of this government, we find that academics are being forced to accept the directions and accept a more narrowly based approach.

For Australia's 600,000 students, the decline in quality has been most evident in the declining courses and subject options, and we have seen the rapid escalation of fees under this government. Who would have thought a few years ago that there would be some 21,000 fewer fully funded Commonwealth places? This government has sought to force upon universities a proposition which involved charging of fees of up to $100,000 for some courses.

We have seen a decline in the quality in the choices evident in the arts and the humanities with students being forced to absorb some $840 million worth of budget cuts. Staff-student ratios have risen in the 1990s from 16.5 to 18.5 students in the humanities, and from 18 to 20 in the social sciences. Faculties have closed and various language programs are disappearing. Seven arts faculties across the country have ceased to exist.

For students in my state of Victoria, this has meant the closure of the classics department at Monash, the Greek department at Deakin, the music department at La Trobe and the corresponding sackings of large numbers of arts and humanities staff—120 in the arts faculty at Monash University alone. Under this new regime, unless a university faculty and course can make direct commercial return, it is perceived to be of lesser value and as a consequence must suffer staff cuts and reduced resource allocations within the university itself.

The grand traditions of Australian universities are now directly under attack by this government. The decline in the emphasis and the quality of provision impacts most strongly throughout university administrations, which have suffered the constant burden of finding new ways to get funds and developing new strategies to get around guidelines, shifting their focus from education to the more narrow commercial focuses that the government is seeking to pursue.

In the election period, the government claimed that it was about breadth of provision, but in reality we have seen a whole series of bills—now seven bills—dealing with higher education. We are now dealing with the funding base for the next three years, with bills being introduced with very little public debate and in such a manner and with such time pressures as to prevent proper scrutiny of what is being proposed.

We have also seen various surveys and various empirical research emerging from the universities, indicating that there is a growing problem in the way universities are seeking to get around government regulations and government guidelines in the provisions of the HEFA Act.

A survey undertaken by the National Union of Students and released last week showed that there were 36 universities sent surveys of which 25 responded. There was a rapid escalation in the use of ancillary fees to counter Commonwealth funding cuts. The survey identified 300 fees charged at a departmental or faculty level for items relating to individual course units or subjects. Many of these fees are in clear breach of the ministerial guidelines and, in my judgment, in clear breach of the HEFA Act. Students were charged for such things as email access from home, access to assignment questions exclusively available from the email, requirement for internal students to purchase course materials designed for external students to substitute for cuts in staffing resources that were no longer available, the charging of students for reading lists, and the requirement for students to attend field trips and then forcing them to pay an associated entry fee. These are quite clearly in breach of the provisions of the act, which said that there should be no charging of fees for the essential components of the courses.

I put a simple proposition to the minister, and I trust he will be able to respond. Minister, what actions has the government taken to investigate the allegations that are being launched by the universities, which are clearly in breach of the HEFA Act? Is the government prepared to review the guidelines covering ancillary fees? Has the government evaluated the adequacies of the levels of funding which universities are currently expected to cope with?

These measures that we see operating now demonstrate that for the universities the law means very little, because they are able, as we have seen in the case of Melbourne University, to get around those without any great difficulty. The accountability provisions of the profile processes, in my judgment, are now being abused to the point where the New South Wales Auditor-General, Mr Tony Harris, was able to demonstrate that the published accounts of universities do not record all the financial transactions reported in their financial statements, yet this government relies upon the advice from its department as to the appropriateness of the performance indicators based on advice tendered to the department from the universities themselves.

What we are seeing are opaque accountability practices being used to drive the new performance indicators that DETYA is currently developing. They are meant to examine university finances, deployment of staff, diversity of courses and the various student outcomes, but they all seem to be totally inadequate because, on the government's own admission, interpretation of these indicators is difficult as accounting conventions vary from university to university. Specifically, universities are making internal decisions regarding the centralisation or devolution of administrative functions to hide the true nature of their cost structures.

This is an attempt by the universities to cope with the growing crisis that is emerging in our higher education sector, a crisis of confidence that goes to the very issues of the provision of quality education in this country. You cannot possibly have the cuts introduced in this bill imposed on universities and not expect them to have an effect on the quality of services provided. These cuts are being demonstrated in staff morale and in students having to cope with larger class sizes and overcrowding in lectures. Also, capital works programs have fallen way behind what one could reasonably expect from a high quality education system. Fewer and fewer staff are being asked to cope with these changes without the necessary support to provide high quality education.

Last night at the national teaching university awards in the Great Hall we saw the government placing great emphasis on what it is doing to promote quality education and teaching in this country; that is, the provision of $750,000 for various awards for high quality teachers at university. This is meant to somehow or other compensate for the fact that this government has taken the better part of $2 billion away from this sector and has asked the universities to provide services to the Australian people with considerably less resources. This government thinks that, if there is little debate and public scrutiny about it, then they will be able to get away with their actions in such a way as to fundamentally change the culture of Australian education.

I do not believe that this measure will ultimately be successful. I concede that the vice-chancellors have not fulfilled their obligations in defending the university sector in the way in which I am sure many Australians would have hoped. They have felt over time that, if they go quietly, things would be easier for them. Quite clearly, that strategy will not work because, as the crisis emerges within universities where they are required to do more and more with less and less, more and more people are going to come forward and say, `Frankly, it's just not good enough to expect us to run our universities as if they are mere businesses.' They are much more than mere businesses; they have a social and cultural function to perform which clearly this government has failed to acknowledge.

I wish to move a second reading amendment which expresses the concerns of the opposition about the way in which this government is administering the higher education budget of this country. We will, of course, be supporting the bill because the money has to flow through to the universities within 30-odd days. I move:

At the end of the motion, add:

"But the Senate condemns the government for damaging Australia's vitally important higher education system by:

(1) slashing funding to universities, resulting in 21,000 fewer, fully-funded Commonwealth places; and

(2) increasing HECS charges and lowering the repayment threshold, thereby driving down university application rates by 3.3 per cent in 1997 and 3.1 per cent in 1998".