The education minister, Christopher Pyne, has denied it was a mistake to tie a crucial $150m research funding extension to the fate of the government’s controversial higher education package.



Pyne said the Senate would debate the proposed deregulation of university fees from Monday to Wednesday next week and then vote on the package.

“We will get a decision one way or the other next week about whether the Senate is prepared to allow universities to be deregulated, provide more opportunity for tens of thousands of more students, make our universities the best higher education system in the world with some of the best universities in the world or not,” he said.

But the government is facing mounting criticism over its decision to insist that senators must pass the bill to enable to government to provide a one year-funding extension to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

The chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, Catherine Livingstone, is the latest public figure to speak out about the government’s negotiating tactics.

She told a Universities Australia conference: “How have we come to a point where a government feels it can use assets, publicly funded to the tune of over $2bn, as a hostage in a political process; where it is prepared to jeopardise over 1,500 highly skilled research jobs and the continuing operation of 27 national facilities?”

Pyne defended the government’s approach, saying Labor had not funded NCRIS to continue beyond 30 June this year.

“The Labor party defunded that scheme and I want to refund it,” he said on Friday.

“I’ve found the savings to do so through the reform of the higher education sector and I’m very passionately committed to continuing [NCRIS], but the savings to fund it are in the reform bill and if the crossbenchers and the Labor party vote against the reform bill they will effectively be voting against the [NCRIS] continuing.”

Asked whether the linkage was a mistake in light of concerns from research leaders, Pyne said ministers were required to find savings if they had spending proposals.

“No, it certainly is not a mistake,” he said. “Most people who are stakeholders in a particular sector would like to have funding for their areas of expertise. They aren’t responsible for finding savings in the rest of the budget. Ministers, treasurers, prime ministers, governments are.”

He insisted there was no internal party resistance to follow through on the threat to revoke the funding if the bill was not passed, after a report in the Australian Financial Review that senior figures had expressed concerns.

Australia’s chief scientist, Ian Chubb, said this week that it was “a pity” the government had linked the two issues, while the Group of Eight universities warned that the imminent expiry of NCRIS programs “would cripple breakthrough research”.

The treasurer, Joe Hockey, appeared to hint on Wednesday that the government could consider shifting its stance, when he was asked directly about comments by Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt that NCRIS facilities would have to start letting staff go within weeks.

“Well, it has been raised with myself, with my colleagues, by the minister for education,” Hockey told the ABC on Wednesday.

“It is something that we are looking at. I can’t give you any more commitment than that because it does involve a substantial amount of money and we are trying to work that through, we really are. I can only say, we want to do more in terms of research and we obviously want to support our scientists.”

NCRIS is not specifically mentioned in the contentious higher education bill that the Senate will debate next week. The passage of the bill remains uncertain, but calculations have been complicated by the fracturing of the Palmer United party (PUP).

The PUP’s Senate leader, Glenn Lazarus, who had been a vocal critic of the deregulation bill and associated cuts to course subsidies, announced on Friday he was quitting the party to serve out the rest of his term as an independent.

The only remaining PUP senator, Dio Wang, has previously expressed his openness to deregulation but it is unclear to what extent he will be swayed by party leader Clive Palmer.

The government requires support from six of the eight crossbench senators to pass the bill.

Pyne said he would “redouble” his efforts to win over senators. The minister said he had not yet had the opportunity to put the government’s case to Lazarus, but he hoped “that Dio Wang might be free to support this bill next week”.

“I don’t know, to be honest, what the effect of him leaving Palmer United party will be on the outcome of the reform bill, but all I can do is to continue to forge ahead with our plans and hope that they will be passed next week,” he said.

When asked about the research funding threat, Tony Abbott said: “Well, you know, the best thing we can do for research in Australia is liberate the university sector.

“Christopher Pyne, good on him, is working very well and closely with the crossbench senators because again we’ve got the Labor party trying to sabotage a reform which more and more senior Labor figures support.”

Labor’s higher education spokesman, Kim Carr, called on the government “to quit bullying the research sector and the Senate crossbench”.

“The science community and the business community are telling the government loud and clear that their reckless blackmail is putting at risk the very basis of Australia’s future as an innovation economy,” Carr said.