5AA Breakfast

E&OE TRANSCRIPT 5AA Breakfast with Jane Reilly, David Penberthy and Mark Aiston Wednesday 3 December 2014  SUBJECT: Higher Education Reforms DAVID PENBERTHY:        Well, yesterday the Education Minister Chris Pyne suffered a pretty significant setback with the Senate ganging up to block the Abbott Government higher education changes, which would have uncapped university fees, cut funding to universities by 20 per cent, and indexed student loans to the rate of inflation. The Minister joins us now. Good morning, Mr Pyne. CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     Good morning, David. You don't have to call me Mr Pyne [laughs] I don't think, having known you for about 30 years. DAVID PENBERTHY:        I know, it does sound a little bit formal, doesn't it? CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     It doesn't sound right to me at all. DAVID PENBERTHY:        Well, Chris, look last night you copped quite a bit of flack. I saw you on the 7.30 Report, and the question was - all the questions you normally get as a politician, going to are you embarrassed, were you humiliated. We are more interested here in what the second wave of your reforms will mean for the parents and the younger people who listen to our show. You said yesterday round one is over; round two begins tonight. What does round two look like? What are you going to do to change higher education? CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     Well, that's a good question and I thought that was what the questions would be on the 7.30 Report last night since they had an exclusive, but they didn't do that. But you've asked a good question and the truth is that the new reform bill will be even more generous for students than the first bill. We will ditch the 10-year government bond rate for interest on the HECS debt and go back to CPI. We'll also introduce a HECS pause for mums and dads that go out of the workforce to have a baby for five years who have a HECS debt. So they won't even accrue CPI on their debt. We're going to establish a transitional fund for universities. They're going to make the Commonwealth Scholarships only for low SES and rural and regional students. We're going to give the ACCC the power to survey prices or fees in the same way as they have over other parts of the economy in order to make sure that students don't suffer any price gouging. So the key elements of the original bill remain, which is the deregulation of the university sector, but there are more safeguards and support for universities and also support for students. DAVID PENBERTHY:        So will we - will we still be seeing those big increases in the cost of a degree that made your round one proposal so unpopular? CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     Well, Labor did run a pretty big scare campaign against the first reform bill and they put some wild figures out there about what fees might rise to. They also added the compound interest rate of the 10-year government bond rate. But as we're now going to have CPI rather than a real interest rate, those kinds of figures are now meaningless and fees won't rise to anything like the extent the way Labor and the Greens had portrayed them. JANE REILLY:         But Minister, if even the fees go up even a small amount for many families who struggle to put their young people through university or they have a HECS fee at the end, they may have to make the decision not to pursue a university degree. CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     Well Jane, in Australia, we have the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, and it means that every single dollar can be borrowed up front and now repaid on the CPI rather than a real interest rate. So the truth is that no student will make a decision not to go to university on the basis of fees. In fact, that hasn't been the case since 1988 when Hawke and Keating introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, the number of students have doubled. There's now over 750,000 undergraduate students in Australia. HECS hasn't made the slightest difference to them going to university and in Britain, where they introduced deregulated fees, the demographic change to universities saw more low SES students going to uni, not less. Across the border in Scotland where they have so-called free education, the demographic of low SES students going to uni is lower. DAVID PENBERTHY:        So Chris, if this is so good why can't you get it through? CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     Well, because the Labor and Greens are voting against it because they were wreckers in government and they're vandals in opposition and the four out of the eight crossbenchers didn't vote for it. That's the simple mathematics. But I got Senators Muir and Madigan, Leyonhjelm, and Day to support it and I'll introduce my new reform bill this morning and we'll debate that in February and I'll have another go. And I don't think in Australia you get marked down for having a go. This idea that you should just slink away from the camp in the middle of the night and never actually joining the battle is not something that I'll ever do. DAVID PENBERTHY:        No, absolutely. And look, I don't think anyone in Australia having seen some of the Jacqui Lambie press conferences over the past month or so thinks that negotiating with her would be particularly easy. I just wanted to ask you finally, do you have to bring in the second wave of reforms via legislation or is there a way whereby the Government can use regulations to get some of it in? CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     Well, it's a good question. I don't want to go around the Senate because I think the Australian public gave us the Senate that we have. That's part of our democracy and I don't whinge about that. If the Australian public didn't want to give it to us, they wouldn't have. So the reality is 37 of the last 40 years, the government - a government has not controlled the Senate and they've always had to deal with the crossbenchers. In terms of the deregulation of the fees, my view is that that needs to be done by legislation and I'm reintroducing the reform bill today; we'll debate it in February - February, March potentially - and we'll see what happens next year. But big reform and important reform takes time and I'm quite indefatigable about dealing with that. MARK AISTON:       Indefatigable. DAVID PENBERTHY:        Just one more before we go, Chris. Tony Abbott said the other day that last week was a ragged week. It has been a difficult end to the year for the Government. How do you regroup over summer and what do you change, coming into 2015? CHRISTOPHER PYNE:     Well, David, I think we've had a great year. We've abolished the carbon tax, the mining tax, we've stopped the boats, we've settled three free trade agreements with China and South Korea and Japan. Business confidence is on the rise, consumer confidence is on the rise. The economy is being repaired, we've passed 75 per cent of 400 measures in the Budget, and I don't really buy the end-of-the-year blues that the media here in Canberra talk about. I think that's kind of our who's got the ball and who's kicking it to whom kind of reportage. The reality is the fundamentals of the Government are good and I think the Australian public have turned off politics because of the nature of its reporting sometimes from the press gallery here. DAVID PENBERTHY:        Mr Christopher Pyne, thank you for joining us this morning. [ends]