ABC Western Plains NSW Mornings with Dugald Sanders

E&OE TRANSCRIPT ABC Western Plains NSW Mornings with Dugald Sanders 3 July 2014 SUBJECTS: Higher education reforms, school funding, Direct Instruction, Maths and Science, Agriculture education DUGALD SAUNDERS: Well, the Federal Government’s first budget has certainly stirred up a fair bit of reaction over the past month or so, with some of the loudest criticism coming from the collective student voice, concerned about higher education reforms. Now, the Abbott Government is cutting contributions to students’ degrees by 20 per cent and universities will set their own fees from 2016. According to modelling by Universities Australia, that’s likely to double the existing fees for students. The Federal Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, has been in Dubbo touring. He has had a look at the CSU School of Dentistry; also Sydney Uni’s School of Rural Medicine, as well as the Royal Flying Doctor Service Base, and the Minister has popped in to see us this morning. Hi there. Good morning. Welcome. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning, Dugald. DUGALD SAUNDERS: What have you made of Dubbo so far? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, it’s a very lovely town. It’s quite an affluent town, from what I can gather driving around. I even got a drive-through coffee — short black this morning, here in Dubbo, from Mr [indistinct] so I’m doing very well here. DUGALD SAUNDERS: What did you make of the facilities you visited yesterday? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: We went to the Charles Sturt University Dental School, and they graduated their first dentists last year, 33 dentists and most of them are working locally in New South Wales. So the idea of getting dental schools and medical schools out of the cities and into the rural and regional areas so that not just country kids, but also city kids – you want them to work in rural areas – is working because they will live in the community, spend their money in the community, buy their real estate in the community and it’s – I think it will help to regenerate a lot of rural areas. Obviously, the medical school from Sydney Uni, the Rural Medical School there is a great success and has been there for – since 2004 when John Howard opened it. And that’s doing good work. My dad was a Royal Flying doctor in Alice Springs in the 1950s, so Amanda Vanstone is a great friend of mine and she’s the National Chairman of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. She says everywhere I go in rural Australia, I have to visit the RFDS base and tell them how fabulous they are, so that’s what I did. Because I always do what Amanda tells me. DUGALD SAUNDERS: I was going to say, we saw that episode of - with Annabel Crabb in the kitchen and you certainly do what Amanda tells you to do. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It started badly, that episode when she asked me to get the oil and I turned around and there was, like, all these different bottles on the shelf, and I said which one is the oil? DUGALD SAUNDERS: [Laughs] Bad move. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Bad start. DUGALD SAUNDERS: Bad move. Look, obviously, education reform is something that plenty of people have had some thoughts on and had a say on. Look, over the past month, almost everywhere you’ve gone, you’ve had protestors having their say. You have to be, at the moment, possibly the most unpopular politician in Australia. How do you wear that coat? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, I just assume the students want to meet me and get to know me, so they’re coming in large numbers to meet me. Well, student protest is a part of higher education. You know, they didn’t protest against Labor for five years, in spite of Labor cutting higher ed by $2.7 billion, but I think we’ve given them a boost by getting into government so they can come out and protest again against a conservative government. Look, the students – the protestors are mostly the Socialist Alternative. Most students, if you ask them what their HECS debt was, they would struggle to tell you how much it was. But I will tell your listeners that the average HECS debt today is $16,800. It is not these tens of thousands of dollars that are wildly speculated about. If you went to the bank and said to the bank manager I’m going to borrow $16,800 from you on a credit card. I’m only going to pay you CPI and I’m not going to start paying you back till I earn over $50,000 a year, and then I’m going to pay you two per cent of my income, maximum, I don’t think you would get that loan. But that’s the loan that taxpayers give students right now, so they can get a higher education qualification and go on to earn 75 per cent more than people without a higher education qualification. So it’s a very good deal. And all my reforms will ask them to do is share the burden of their education fifty-fifty with taxpayers. At the moment, taxpayers are paying 60/40. DUGALD SAUNDERS: Do you think though that the people see it that way? Do you think people are understanding that message that you’re trying to deliver, or do you think that people just feel like they’re getting ripped off? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think they’re understanding it more and more, because I keep repeating it everywhere I go. And on this trip, I’m going from towns Mackay to Townsville to Lismore to Dubbo to Wagga to Mildura. I’ve told all the students where I’m going now, of course, and they will all be lining up to meet me again. DUGALD SAUNDERS: It’s alright, you’ve got security. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: [Laughs] Yes. And I’m telling people in rural and regional Australia that these reforms will be really good for rural universities. Rural universities will be the big winners. They will be big winners because we’re expanding the demand-driven system to diplomas and associate degrees, and rural universities offer a lot of those. They will get a big revenue boost. We are expanding the Commonwealth Grant Scheme to non-university higher education providers, so TAFEs will get revenue from the Commonwealth Government for their higher ed students and they have collaborations in rural areas with universities. Because of the size of the communities, it makes sense to work together. But if you are a vice-chancellor in rural Australia, you will be able to offer a package to students, wherever they are, which includes a great lifestyle, a cheaper cost of living, a high quality university degree, and if they plan their scholarships carefully, they might be able to offer them living costs, tuition fee reductions, et cetera, which I think is going to make them extremely competitive against the sandstone universities. DUGALD SAUNDERS: Well, let’s talk about rural universities then. You met some vice-chancellors. The Vice-Chancellor for CSU, Andrew Vann, had a bit to say sort of the day after the budget was released. Here’s a bit of what he said on that. ANDREW VANN: [Excerpt] Students will go from paying 41 per cent to at least 52 per cent of their education, and the government is reducing their contribution by 20 per cent and there’s going to be a higher interest rate on HECS, so quite a slog on students. So I think our biggest concern is that rural regional and distance education students tend to be more price sensitive than metropolitan school leavers, so they may well be a deterrent for them. We will absolutely be forced to increase our fees as will every university in the country, and there’s no doubt about that. The government is going to take money out, so we will have to put the costs onto students. Presumably, the metropolitan universities and the Group of Eight will charge the highest fees and, therefore, will have the most money, so it may well be able to attract rural and regional students, but we know that if people go to study in the cities, it’s very difficult to get them back to the region. [End of excerpt] DUGALD SAUNDERS: That’s CSU Vice-Chancellor Andrew Vann. So, obviously, people who run universities – vice-chancellors in regional areas – are concerned about these reforms, on a number of levels. What’s the response to what Mr Vann has had to say? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, Dugald, I’m a glass half full man, not a glass half empty man, and I’ve been to a lot of universities. I’m doing seven universities in three days and six electorates and 22 events, selling higher education reform, because I passionately believe in it. And Andy Vann has picked out some of the areas that he is concerned about, but he also needs to look at the positive side of the ledger. The opportunity that he will have as the vice-chancellor to plot the course of Charles Sturt University, to compete internationally, to attract more international students to the areas that Charles Sturt University does really, really well. In some areas, he will increase fees. Of course he will. In other areas, he will reduce fees. But he will be able to compete with the sandstone universities on price in a way that he can’t now. A law student at Charles Sturt University pays exactly the same for their degree as a law student at Sydney University. Now, that effectively is a rural student cross-subsidising a city student, potentially from the north shore of Sydney, to go to Sydney University. Now, that's not fair. So what I want to do is give universities the chance to compete on price and on the offerings that they make to students. Rural universities already get a rural loading for educating rural students. We've put tremendous infrastructure into rural universities under the Howard government and now under the Abbott government. I've just come from Southern Cross University, where we're building infrastructure there, and from James Cook University, where we're building infrastructure there. We recognise the importance of rural universities to the economy in rural areas, but also to be giving the same opportunities to rural students to go to uni as city students, and nobody is trying to do any anything other than build rural universities. And I work with Andy Vann, as I work with all vice-chancellors, to point out the opportunities that they will get under higher education reform, to make a real difference to their universities, and I think they will do very well. DUGALD SAUNDERS: We're talking to Christopher Pyne this morning, the Minister for Education federally. Looking at combinations and how things can change going forward, there was the announcement just recently with - in Queensland - with TAFEs and universities working together. Do you see that as being a model that New South Wales should take up? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, New South Wales doesn't have any dual sector universities. Yesterday – not yesterday, Tuesday, I launched the Central Queensland University and the Central Queensland Institute of TAFE merger. It's a very dynamic model, which offers everything from certificate I to doctorates. They have several mini campuses across Queensland and, in fact, across Australia, and it means that a student can start there in a diploma or a certificate and end up doing an undergraduate degree, a postgraduate degree. Victoria has a couple of dual sector universities. It does make sense, particularly in areas where there are smaller communities and there are institutions in the same community, whether it's a TAFE, whether it's a specialist non-university higher education provider like a college, whether there's a university. Rather than competing with each other, it makes sense to establish collaborations and have complementarity of offerings. And I won't tell the universities that they should do that, but I certainly wouldn't discourage them from doing it. DUGALD SAUNDERS: Is that something that it's a matter of them picking up the ball and running with it? How does that work? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Yes, Dugald, it is, and that's the whole point of these reforms. The Federal Government doesn't want to tell universities how to run their institutions. We want to give them the freedom to make their own decisions, to pursue their own course. Five years ago there were no Chinese universities in the top 200 in the world. There are now five. There was a time when the US, the UK and Australia took for granted that they would be the three countries with the most universities in the top 200 in the world. We're competing now with the Chinese and other Asian country university system that is extremely high quality. It's a $15 billion higher education export industry. It's the fourth biggest expert industry after iron ore, coal and gold. If we don't make these reforms now, the higher education industry will be part of a slow decline and international students will stay home. So I have a responsibility as the Minister for Education to recognise that, and rather than keep the seat warm for the next Minister for Education, do something about it. DUGALD SAUNDERS: Let's look maybe at primary/secondary education and the Gonski reforms, something that there has been a lot of talk about again in recent times. Federal commitments honour through till 2018, so you've kept the first four years, but the last two years scrapped. I know you've had lots of feedback on this. What are you hearing now as you travel around and meet schools? What feedback do you get? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, Dugald, the years five and six that Labor used to talk about were fantasy money, fantasy years, dodgy money. It was all something of a raising of expectations that they would never deliver. In fact, it was such a fantasy that Bill Shorten cut $1.2 billion out of education in the pre-election fiscal outlook before they lost government. That's how dodgy those claims that Labor made were. We always said that the school funding agreement is a four year agreement. That the forward estimates is four years, and that we would deliver on a unity ticket with Labor, the money that schools expected over those four years, and we haven't just done that, we've exceeded it. If people actually looked at the facts, they would see that we've put the $1.2 billion back in. I've delivered Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland into the national model, and put more money in. If Labor had stayed in office, there would have been less money over the next four years than we are putting in the budget a couple of months ago. So where I go in Australia, schools tell me that they are very comfortable and very happy with what we've done, because we're spending more money but we're actually focusing on the things that matter: a robust curriculum, parental engagement, more autonomy for schools and teacher quality. The OECD, in their PISA report last year said that of all countries in the OECD, Australia was the one where teacher quality had the most impact on the outcomes for students. So I'm focusing on that because that's what parents want. DUGALD SAUNDERS: And dealing with your State counterparts, for example Adrian Piccoli in New South Wales, is it working? I mean, are you happy with the results you get in New South Wales? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Sure. I mean, Adrian and I talk regularly and we're working closely together on collaborating on all of these areas of public policy, and I think you will find over the next month there will be several announcements which will prove that. DUGALD SAUNDERS: You've got some announcements to make, I believe, today, as you head to Wagga Wagga. Any little snippets you can tell me? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No, that would ruin the surprise. Everyone loves a surprise, Dugald. DUGALD SAUNDERS: Will we be excited? Will we be pleased? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It's an ag in schools, an ag in education, agriculture education announcement, and I think rural Australians will be pleased about it. A couple of days ago I announced $22 million for Direct Instruction in remote schools. It's a crime that if you are in a remote school there's a one in five chance that in year 3 you will be below the national average for reading. In a metropolitan area there's a one in 25 chance. Direct Instruction has been working in Cape York to repair that gap, and we are going to broaden that beyond Cape York to north Queensland, Northern Territory and northern Western Australia in remote schools. It's phonics based, and yesterday I announced $16.4 million for maths and science in universities' programs, to encourage students and teachers to want to be involved in maths and science. One of those was in Southern Cross Uni. So, yes, I'm getting around Australia, selling my higher education reforms, catching up with my friends like Mr Coulton, and hopefully helping ag in schools and science and maths in school. DUGALD SAUNDERS: That's great. We're going to catch up with our Federal member probably next week, but that Direct Instruction model is probably one that I guess people in western New South Wales would be thinking, this could be for us as well. Is that a possibility too? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Absolutely. And if we had come to government with a surplus budget, as we had left it in 2007, we would be able to have a broader program. I think $22 million is a modest amount of money, but it is a doffing our cap, if you like, tipping our hat, at the fact that we think phonics based literacy learning and reading is the way to go, and we will do that in remote communities. Phonics, of course, is used across most primary schools in Australia in early childhood, but I don't think you can do too much phonics to learn how to read, and that's why we've supported this program and rolling it out. It's called Good to Great Schools. Noel Pearson is responsible for it in Cape York, and then he will be taking it further, and I would like to see it go even further over the years to come. DUGALD SAUNDERS: I appreciate your time. Thanks very much for joining us this morning. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It's a pleasure, Dugald. Thank you for having me. DUGALD SAUNDERS: Christopher Pyne, Minister for Education. [ends]