‘We will not give up,’ vows Christopher Pyne after most crossbench senators vote against the government’s legislation to remove limits on student contributions

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Australian university fees will continue to be regulated by the government, with the Senate blocking the Coalition’s deregulation agenda for the second time in four months.



Most crossbench senators held firm on Tuesday evening to vote against the government’s legislation to remove limits on student contributions and extend funding to sub-bachelor programs and private colleges.

The bill was not identical to the legislation the Senate blocked in early December so the outcome does not comprise a “trigger” option for Tony Abbott to call a double-dissolution election.

Within minutes of the latest defeat, the education minister, Christopher Pyne, issued a statement vowing to try a third time to legislate the changes.

“We will therefore bring back the higher education reform package for the parliament to consider,” he said. “We will not give up. This reform is too important … Great reform takes time.”

The independent senator Nick Xenophon said: “Albert Einstein once said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Pyne made last-ditch concessions, including offering to remove $1.9bn in cuts to course subsidies from the main bill to deregulate fees.



But many crossbench senators were angered by the government’s earlier threat to revoke $150m in funding for a landmark research program if the upper house blocked the legislation.

The Senate voted 34 votes to 30 against allowing a “second reading” of the bill, preventing detailed debate that would have allowed amendments to be considered.

The Coalition secured support from only three of the eight crossbench senators, John Madigan, David Leyonhjelm and Bob Day. Labor and the Greens joined Xenophon, Glenn Lazarus, Ricky Muir, Jacqui Lambie and Dio Wang to defeat the bill.

Universities Australia, which supported fee deregulation, said the Senate’s decision did not deliver “a long-term, sustainable and predictable funding model”.

The organisation’s chief executive, Belinda Robinson, called for a new national discussion on the issue, saying universities could “no longer afford to be treated as a convenient political football”.

The Group of Eight – which represents the nation’s most prestigious universities – said the Senate had “let Australia down” by failing to fix the “broken” funding system.

“Our quality is what makes our graduates sought after here and overseas,” said the chief executive of the Group of Eight, Vicki Thomson.

“That quality cannot be maintained with current funding. The problem won’t go away. It will only get worse.”

But the National Tertiary Education Union welcomed the decision to reject the government’s “unfair, unprincipled and unsustainable higher education policies”.

The union’s national president, Jeannie Rea, said senators who blocked the bill had “earned the gratitude of university students, staff and communities and future students”.

“The lesson to be learned from this debacle is that when contemplating policy changes of this magnitude, the concerns of Australian families, who aspire to go to university and gain a high-quality reputable degree, must be heard,” she said.

The assistant education minister, Simon Birmingham, closed the Senate debate by reaffirming “the case for greater autonomy and greater freedom for Australian universities”.

Birmingham noted that almost all university vice-chancellors were supporting deregulation.

And he said the government’s bill would expand opportunity by extending demand-driven funding to diplomas and associate degrees – the pathway programs that helped prepared students with lower entrance ranks for further study.

But Labor’s higher education spokesman, Kim Carr, said the government had revealed its plans for universities in an “ambush on budget night” and had “broken faith with the Australian people”.

“For 10 months the Abbott government has pursued an unfair, unnecessary and ideologically driven agenda to restructure higher education in this country,” Carr told the Senate.

“The agenda is unfair because allowing universities to charge any fees they want will drive up the costs of degrees. It will impose crippling debts on students and deny to many of them the opportunity in life that university education can offer.”

Carr said Labor would “fight this issue right through to the next election and beyond”.

Madigan urged his fellow crossbenchers to allow the debate to proceed to the detailed stage so that senators could seek to improve the bill with amendments.

“Senators have been charged with a great privilege but with it comes great responsibility,” he said. “I have serious concerns with the bill in its current form but I also fear the consequences of doing nothing.”

Lambie accused the Liberal party of trying to set up “a blue-tie aristocracy” and expand funding to private providers to “allow their big-business mates to make a lot of money”.

She said Australia should look to Finland and Denmark, not the US, and move towards providing everyone’s first university degree for free. “I oppose this legislation with every fibre of my being and I will always do so,” she said.

Xenophon said the current funding system was unsustainable but he did not believe deregulation was the solution, noting that higher education was “not an ordinary market”.

“Once you have the deregulation genie out of the bottle you cannot put it back in,” he said.

Xenophon said Pyne’s threat – repeated on Sunday but revoked on Monday – to cut the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy if the Senate did not pass the deregulation package had been “extraordinarily foolish”.

The leader of the Greens, Christine Milne, described the government’s threat to withhold funding for the strategy after 30 June as a “standover tactic”.

She said the solution was to increase to public funding for education. “We are prepared to raise the money to pay for it by securing that money from those who can afford to pay,” she said. “We could remove, for example, the fossil fuel subsidy to the big miners.”