One of the country’s most progressive unions has come out in support of universal access to higher education.
Australia's higher education system is by most metrics among the most affordable, accessible and academically excellent in the world.
With universities free from enrolment limits and publicly funded (to a point), students are not saddled with personal debt levels like those in the US, nor are they compelled to move to a different state to get a degree in search of a high-paying job.
Here, a ‘college town’ is a rare thing, as most of the country’s densely populated capital cities are well serviced by more than one university.
That’s allowed for specialisation across subjects within relatively close confines, evidenced in Western Australia where four public universities and The University of Notre Dame, religiously affiliated with the Catholic Church, are all based in metropolitan Perth.
A lot of these upsides have been obscured in the past two years.
Fewer international students because of the state’s tightly shut border have led to a nearly $100 million loss in operating revenue for WA’s public universities on 2019 figures, which, when coupled with an overall reduction in research and grant funding in real terms, has left the sector materially worse off than it was in the 2010s.
Some, such as chief scientist Peter Klinken, have suggested a whole-of-sector merger to salve the wounds, while the previous federal government opted to pursue further corporatisation of the sector through tighter controls of grant funding and greater incentives for degrees thought to result in good employment opportunities.
Given a Liberal government controlled the purse strings for nine years, the latter approach has prevailed.
All could change later this month, with Labor headed into the May 21 poll with a head of steam and a pledge to create 20,000 additional university places over the next two years at a cost of nearly $500 million.
It’s a bit player in the union movement that’s proposing something more radical, though, with the National Tertiary Education Union coming down on the side of universal provision late last month.
“Thousands of jobs have been lost at public universities and the staff who are left are being kept on casual or short-term contracts,” NTEU national president Alison Barnes said.
“Those staff can’t plan for their future and often have their pay stolen by money-hungry universities who have built their business models on wage theft and insecure work.
“The next Australian government could remove the financial barrier to higher education, employ more than 26,000 staff in secure full-time jobs, restore research funding, reduce the over-reliance on casual staff and establish a new higher education agency to improve governance.
“Free undergraduate education would be transformative for current and future students who are now facing more expensive degrees, mounting student debt and even the threat of being kicked off HECS if they don’t pass their courses.”
That recommendation, detailed in a report produced for the NTEU by The Australia Institute, boils down its stance to seven major policy proposals, including raising public funding for universities to $20 million per annum, or 1 per cent of GDP.
All told, these policies, which include an annual $3 billion proposal to subsidise undergraduate courses entirely, would drag on already deficit-ridden budget forecasts, with a $500,000 salary cap for vice-chancellors unlikely to cover the outlay.
Precedent would appear to be on the union’s side, given Gough Whitlam’s government abolished fees in the early 1970s.
In practice, that policy didn’t include removing enrolment caps and most onlookers, including Group of Eight and The Grattan Institute, have argued the reintroduction of fees in the mid-1980s through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme was a more cost-effective way of bringing more Australians into the tertiary system.
Unsurprisingly, the only major party to endorse free university in the most recent cycle was the Greens, which under parliamentary leader and Melbourne MP Adam Bandt had pledged to abolish student debt and fund free education for all if elected.
That’s far more radical than Labor’s proposal, which is to set up an Australians Universities Accord in what’s being labelled an attempt to remove politicking from the business of funding universities.
