Page 2273 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 16 August 2006
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Today we heard that students could face fees of $230,000 to acquire a degree. Again, that is what people have been predicting and that is what we are starting to see.
Mrs Dunne: Mr Speaker, I take a point of order. I seek your guidance on relevance. This is a debate about the importance of international students. It has been wide-ranging but Ms Gallagher seems to have taken it to quite a wide extent. She has extolled the virtues of the medical school and physiotherapy and now we are moving on the cost of full fee degrees, which affects everybody. Ms Gallagher has not spoken at all about international students.
MR SPEAKER: I think the cost of full fees is relevant to international students, Mrs Dunne. I do not think you can mount an argument that it is not relevant.
Mrs Dunne: International students have not been mentioned in the last five minutes.
MR SPEAKER: I am sure that full fee paying students are part of the subject matter.
MS GALLAGHER: Thank you, Mr Speaker. If Mrs Dunne wishes to refer to Hansard she will see that I have referred to international students at every point of the speech that I have been giving today. In fact, the comments I am making are around the desirability of Canberra to be a place for international students to come and study. If you downgrade services at universities, Canberra will be less attractive to international students and they will go elsewhere to study. We are in an international market. We know that students make decisions based on the services that are provided at a university and the cost of attending that university. What I have been arguing, or was about to argue before Mrs Dunne raised one of her serial points of order, was that if you increase fees, if you withdraw services, then students who may be sitting in China making a decision about where they would like to go and study might think they will study elsewhere where those services are provided and where their degree may not be so expensive. So what I am saying is entirely relevant to the motion that Ms Porter has brought to the Assembly today.
The decisions that the federal government has taken in relation to higher education will damage our standing internationally as a desirable place for study. As I said, I think those opposite will regret that, as we do already, and the impacts of those decisions will be felt for many years to come. What we are trying to do here with our investment in health education is ensure that we remain an attractive place for international students to attend, particularly in areas where we have significant skill shortages, and that is in the area of allied health and in the training of medical students. So we have invested millions of dollars in the ANU medical school and we have provided a $10 million grant to the University of Canberra to enhance their capacity to take on allied health students.
We are already seeing that international students are wanting to come and study here. So we will do what we can locally, despite the efforts of the Liberals federally, to make our universities a place where international students want to come and study, as opposed to the view the federal government has taken, which is to reduce services, increase fees and, my guess is, make Australian universities a less attractive place for international students to choose to study in.
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