HANSARD EXTRACT
|
Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Workplace
Relations Requirements) Bill 2005: Second Reading |
| 14 September 2005 |
Mr HAYES
(Werriwa)
(5.28
p.m.)—The
dead hand of the government’s industrial relations agenda has
emerged once again in the
Higher Education Legislation Amendment
(Workplace Relations Requirements) Bill 2005. It is not
unusual for us to be presented with bills that seek to establish
systems through which taxpayers’ money is distributed to various
groups throughout the country and on which the government seeks to
piggyback its uniquely Liberal industrial relations requirements.
Now it is the turn of the higher education sector. But it is not
enough for the Minister for Education, Science and Training just to
attach certain industrial relations requirements for the
universities sector, and it is not enough that, in order to receive
Commonwealth funding, considerable changes to the higher education
sector be made; the minister wants to go further and appoint himself
as the judge, jury and executioner when it comes to administering
university industrial relations.
Of course, it is not the first time that this has been tried in the
higher education sector. In 2003 the government made an attempt to
pass legislation that would impose unreasonable industrial relations
conditions on those working in Australian universities. After
considerable debate—and negotiation, I might add, with the Senate at
the time—the government was forced to remove the industrial
relations proposals in order to get the rest of the package through.
Unfortunately, we now have a different environment and certainly a
different make-up in the Senate. We have a government drunk on its
own power, with this minister willing to reintroduce the
requirements that were not supported in 2003.
The reintroduction of previously rejected provisions is really
becoming a disturbing trend with this government. It seems that the
government never misses the chance to spread the tentacles of its
industrial relations agenda into yet another group. When we have a
bill appropriating funds or setting up schemes in which taxpayers’
money will be spent, we always seem to have the obligatory
industrial relations clause attached to it.
I can only imagine what the cabinet meetings would be like when they
discuss bills such as this. It seems to me that you would have the
Prime Minister sitting there with his colleagues all contemplating
the bills and what could be grafted onto them. What is conjured up
in my mind is almost akin to that rather prominent fast food
restaurant. The bills are coming in and you have the Prime Minister
asking, ‘Do you want my IR with that?’ These ministers have caught
on pretty fast. They know that, unless they say yes, they will not
be getting their bill approved and they will not be getting their
money. In fairness to that very famous restaurant with golden
arches, at least you can decline the fries; it does not seem that
you can decline the IR when it is attached to appropriation bills.
The attitude seems to be that, if you want to spend money, you had
better work pretty hard to find ways to advance the Prime Minister’s
industrial relations agenda. Of course, in this bill the Minister
for Education, Science and Training has trumped his ministerial
colleagues. Introducing an industrial relations requirement under
which organisations receiving funding would require offers of
individual contracts to be made—that is not enough. Always striving
to go that little bit further, maybe because of some real and
genuine leadership qualities, the minister for education has ensured
that the industrial relations requirement under this bill not just
is consistent with but goes beyond the government approaches—at
least in terms of the government’s stated intentions for the
Australian work force.
The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Workplace Relations
Requirements) Bill 2005 specifies that every university employee
must be offered an Australian workplace agreement by 31 August next
year. That is every single employee. The minister in his second
reading speech on this bill claimed that it was necessary to
introduce these measures ‘if
Australia was to remain internationally competitive in the provision
of higher education’. He went on to say:
The higher education sector is not immune from the pressure to
adapt, reform and become even more productive. Universities need to
be able to respond flexibly to the needs of their constituencies
including potential and existing students, staff, employers,
industry and local, regional and national communities.
I find the suggestion that university staff are not flexible to be
staggering, quite frankly. I am not quite sure of the minister’s
personal experience with university staff when he attended
university, but from my experience I have always known them to go
out of their way and certainly be flexible and do everything they
can to assist students. I am very fortunate that very close to my
electorate we have the
Macarthur campus of the University of Western Sydney. I have known
it to be a university of very dedicated people and staff that
certainly has served the interests of students in the south-west of
Sydney. Through their efforts, we have a first-class institution
with faculties in the arts, business, law, teaching and nursing—and
soon there will be a medical faculty. Being a local, we are very
proud of our university. We are certainly very proud of their
achievements and certainly of the commitment displayed by all the
staff of the university.
In defending the provisions of this bill, once again we have a
government relying on the argument that it is providing choice. The
minister would have us believe that the implementation of this
Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Workplace Relations
Requirements)
Bill is all about choice. He claims that university employees will
have the choice of workplace agreements, will have the choice of
being covered by a certified agreement and will have the choice of
appointing the union to represent them in individual contract
negotiations and that there will be no requirement on individual
staff members to accept offers of individual contracts. It is the
last choice that is often referred to by people I speak to as simply
being no choice at all, because it is a choice of having a job or
not having a job. You do not have to go much beyond the Boeing
workers to find that out—or indeed the staff of the Department of
Employment and Workplace Relations—who similarly have that so-called
choice. In reality it is simply not there. It seems that ‘choice’ is
often used by this government, but I have to say that it is a
concept that is not readily adhered to.
The most disturbing choice of all contained in the bill is the level
of choice that this bill will afford the minister. Under this
legislation, the minister will have the choice to determine whether
or not a university has complied. This choice will determine
funding, so it is a pretty important one. Control is the essence of
the bill, and the minister has not missed his mark on that. The
essence of the bill is to make sure that the minister can
micromanage universities and their staff relationships.
The minister has made no secret of his bid for power in this regard.
It was reported in the Australian Financial Review on 12
September that the minister had written to the vice-chancellors with
a warning about the future—yet another example of the sheer
arrogance of the government in this regard. The minister has already
written to the management of the universities, telling them how
things are going to operate, when this bill is currently before the
House and being debated. The bill has not yet even passed the House,
and the minister is already busy lecturing those who will be
implementing the changes on the finer points of how he is going to
mark their report cards. The Financial Review reports that
the minister has:
... told the university leaders that he will take a strict
interpretation of the conditions imposed on more than $280 million
in funding and that, ultimately, the decision rests with him as to
whether a university has complied with the new rules.
The choice implemented for the minister in the bill is akin to the
thumbs up and thumbs down approach we might expect from
Roman emperors dealing with decisions of life and death about
gladiators. The article went on to say:
Dr Nelson wrote that, for universities to qualify for the funding,
he would need to be satisfied they had embarked on “fundamental
changes to the workplace policies and practices”.
But the minister does not stop there. Just so the vice-chancellors
are absolutely sure what they are required to do to get the thumbs
up from this minister, he makes it clear. He says:
Approaches which are focused on minimising, diluting or
circumventing genuine reform are unlikely to result in ... compliant
workplace arrangements ...
So everybody involved has a choice, so long as the choice they make
pleases the government. Interestingly enough, according to the
report in the Financial Review, the union is willing to work
towards compliant agreements. But the same report indicates that
universities are already using the tone of the minister’s direction
as the means for cutting staff entitlements. I wonder if this sort
of behaviour is yet another sign of the future for all Australian
workers. Not only is this the sort of behaviour that the staff of
our most prestigious academic institutions are fearful of but it is
the sort of behaviour that the vast majority of Australian workers
are certainly scared of. The ACTU, for instance, recently reported
that 62 per cent of workers believe that they will be worse off
under individual contracts and 62 per cent of all respondents
believe that individual contracts would do nothing more than give
power to their employers. It is not about a balance; it is a
transfer of power. It seems that, on this demonstration, people’s
concerns would be justified.
Despite the minister making strong arguments that the changes
implemented upon the passage of the bill will promote flexibility
and improvements in productivity and performance, it is more likely
to tear them apart. It will certainly tear apart cooperative
approaches to teaching and research that have developed over many
years. Staff members who have shared information for the benefit of
their students, who have collaborated on research in the past, will
be thinking twice about it in the future. They will think twice
about it now because colleagues with whom they have shared the
information and collaborated on research are now—or will be—their
competitors.
The institution that they are employed by will be competing on the
world stage when it comes to attracting research funding and
international students, but within their own institutions there will
be an absolute, but real, competition taking place between staff.
Staff members within faculties will conceivably be competing for
better rankings from their students, larger amounts of research
funding, better attendance levels, higher average marks from their
classes and any other matter to maximise their personal bonuses.
I am sure that in response to this the minister would argue that
this is a better outcome as it will be more productive on campus. In
my opinion, staff are unlikely to become more productive. They are
more likely to become more closeted in their work and divided within
their faculties. It is not too far a stretch to imagine that, if
incentives were written into staff agreements that are poorly
structured, we could have a situation where it is very much a race
to the bottom in terms of academic standards and the quality of
university education within Australian institutions.
While the individual contracts may meet the requirements of the
minister to gain the next round of funding, this will not advance
the tertiary education sector one bit, and it will not make our
institutions more attractive to international students. Students,
including international students, make their choice of institution
based on the education that they will receive, not on how successful
the institution is in implementing industrial relations reforms. Of
course, lately, for many students their choice of institution has
been considered through the prism of affordability rather than
quality, because of this government’s dereliction of duty when it
comes to higher education.
Labor opposes this bill, and it is opposed to this government’s
habit of attaching its industrial relations agenda to bills through
which taxpayers’ money is spent. The approach of attaching
requirements that ordinarily would not bear any relationship to the
government’s industrial relations agenda is, quite frankly, a
disgrace. The government is clearly worried that the community
backlash against its industrial relations agenda is growing. The
only way it can progress its agenda is by stealth. The government
intends to weave its agenda into various bills so that, at the very
least, those sectors of our economy that the government believes
will object to the reforms will be the first to be hit with these
adjustments.
This bill sets a new benchmark on just how underhanded the
government is willing to be in order to institute its industrial
relations agenda. The bill is nothing short of micromanagement. I
would have thought that members opposite who believe in
individualism, the core principle of the Liberal Party, would have
objected to a minister seeking to manage the employment relations of
nearly 40 campuses throughout the country.
This bill does nothing more than compromise the independence of
Australian university campuses. It makes it even tougher for them to
attract and retain the highest quality staff they require, should
they wish to please their now all-powerful minister and implement
inferior working conditions. Higher education in
Australia, and university education in particular, continues to
suffer at the hands of the Howard government. This bill is yet
another example. Funding cuts since the election of this government
in 1996 are estimated at $5 billion. The Higher Education
Contributions Scheme has increased and, sadly, $100,000 degrees are
increasingly becoming the reality.
The minister believes that a university education is a privilege,
and he must now be thinking the same thing about university
employment. This attack on our university sector flies in the face
of our universities’ bids to expand their services into the growing
education markets of
South-East Asia.
Our primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors need proper
levels of support not only to bring opportunities to Australian
students but also to remain internationally competitive.
Geographically, Australia is ideally located to take advantage of
our South-East Asian neighbours’ desire to advance the productivity
of their countries by improving the education of their populations.
In order to maximise this advantage we need high-quality teaching
staff in our universities. While the minister may have
conscientiously set about meeting the demands of his senior
colleagues by introducing a bill which will more than match the
government’s industrial relations agenda, this bill, quite frankly,
is just poor policy. This will not produce a climate of cooperation
in our universities, it will not result in more productive academic
staff and it certainly will not introduce a system of choice. This
bill will grant the minister unchecked powers to change the working
conditions of university staff at the stroke of a pen not just for
the first or the second round of funding but at any time in the
future. (Time expired)
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