University of Australia Online

The terms and conditions of success for any nation in the 21st Century begin with its investment in its people and creating an innovative society. As Einstein said, no problem can be solved by the same thinking which created it.

Einstein is right when it comes to the Government's record of cutting $1 billion from universities since coming to office, and watching cheerfully as business expenditure on R&D fell from 0.86 percent of GDP in 1995-96 to 0.67 percent in 1998-99.

In fact, current investment in R&D is 33% lower than it would have been had it continued to grow the way it did in the three years before Mr Howard cut the 150% tax concession.

Making Australia a Knowledge Nation must start with our education system. I want to make 2001 the year in which education is recognized as the number one political issue for Australia.

Last year’s Workforce 2010 report showed that by 2010, 40% of all new jobs will require a Bachelor's degree or higher. And yet currently only 15% of Australia's workforce has this level of qualification.

This means we must increase by tens of thousands the number of university graduates every year.

We now know that the Howard Government's increases in HECS have flattened demand for university places. Enrolment demand for university undergraduate places has fallen by 3.6 per cent since 1996, most dramatically among mature-aged people who have to repay HECS as they study, on top of their other financial commitments.

The plan to create full fee-paying undergraduate courses for the so-called 'rich and thick' has been a complete flop, with enrolments virtually at zero.

In Labor's last seven years, we increased the number of Australian undergraduate students by more than 100,000. Since the election of the Howard Government this rate of growth has slowed dramatically. And now I discover from the DETYA website that the Howard Government achieved a new benchmark in the year 2000 by actually reducing the number of Australian university students by more than 4,000.

We can only guess at the impact on enrolments of Mr Howard and Dr Kemp's preferred plan – still in the bottom drawer – to deregulate university fees and replace HECS with real interest rate loans. The $100,000 dollar degrees!

The additional graduates we need by 2010 present a challenge every bit as great as that which confronted the Whitlam and Hawke Governments, and which led to the massive expansion in the number of Australians getting a tertiary education during the 1970s and 1980s.

A Beazley Labor Government will establish a new public university – the University of Australia Online, or UAO.

It will have the following features:

• The Commonwealth will fund an additional 100,000 university places by 2010 for Australian students who agree to do their degrees online;
• All units undertaken online will attract only half the current rate of HECS;
• Australia's existing universities will receive Commonwealth assistance in converting units and courses into an online format, through the establishment of a Content Development Program;
• Existing students may also choose to do all or part of their degree online;
• The Commonwealth will establish an Institute for Online Teaching to make Australia the world leader in research in this field; and
• Labor's IT and communications policies will ensure that universities and students have access to sufficient capacity to realise the potential of online learning.

The UAO will do two vital things for Australia: it will significantly expand the opportunity to study at university for thousands of Australians who would otherwise miss out; and it will make Australia a world leader in providing online education.

By creating 100,000 additional online university places by 2010, and halving HECS for all units undertaken online, Labor will unlock the door to opportunity for many thousands of Australians talented enough to succeed at University, but locked out by high fees, and the difficulty of fitting study into a busy life.

• foundation courses will be made available free of charge.
• Australians living outside the major cities will have a better opportunity than ever before to study and interact with fellow students and lecturers without having to leave home;
• It will be a boon for the parents wanting to upgrade their skills while raising the kids at home; and
• It will offer new hope for workers at risk in their current jobs to train for a new and more secure job, without having to leave work.
• free pathway courses will be developed to assess potential UAO applicants.
• online degrees will be funded at a level that will provide a strong incentive to the universities participating.
• students studying degrees on campus will be able to undertake part of their degree online, paying only half the rate of HECS for those units.

All of this requires government to help people get access to computers and an Internet connection to make the promise a reality. We will be releasing our detailed IT and communications policies to achieve this later this year.

Australia already has a head start towards becoming the world leader in online education:

• We are the world leader in distance education;
• We have formidable skills in multimedia;
• Between them, Australians speak all the languages of the world; and
• We share the incomparable gift in this globalised age of the English language.

I am committing a Beazley Labor Government to assisting Australian universities to meet the significant up-front costs of moving into online education.

While this policy is aimed at realising the promise of online education, Labor recognises that on-campus education has been badly affected by Howard Government cuts. We will be addressing how we can raise the quality of on-campus education in subsequent policy announcements.

This policy is absolutely essential for our nation's future.

The first reason is that the information revolution is changing the way education is delivered around the world in ways which represent both a threat and an opportunity for Australia.

A number of institutions around the world have proved the promise of online learning. They are delivering courses of higher quality than ever before, with features simply impossible in an off-line world.

Top international universities in Britain and the United States are gearing up to market their famous lecturers, and university brand names, to students in the Asia-Pacific region, including our own students.

While this represents a real challenge to Australia, I believe it is one we are equal to.

A number of Australian universities, such as Deakin and Newcastle universities, already offer a selection of full-fee postgraduate coursework degrees.

Southern Cross University in northern NSW, and the University of Southern Queensland, already reach thousands of students online.

Just last year, the University of Southern Queensland won the prestigious International Council for Open and Distance Education award for the world's best dual-mode university.

Those who worry that online education is second best, should ask the on-campus USQ students who have demanded – and been granted – equal access to what they see as the privileges of online students.

Done properly, online education helps us replicate the best features of traditional university teaching – one-on-one tuition, contact with other students, and access to expensive libraries and lab facilities – which Dr Kemp himself admitted in his leaked cabinet submission were affected by the increasing financial pressures on universities.

This policy will also be a great opportunity for Australian academics.

We all know how bad the brain drain has been in recent years, because brilliant Australians simply can't get the rewards their talents deserve while remaining in the country they love.

Labor's policy will deliver the talents of Australian teachers directly to the home computers of the world's students. It will create thousands of new academic jobs for Australians.

Labor will ensure that Australian academics devising and delivering online courses are recognised, and benefit financially from the use of their intellectual property.

The second reason we need this policy is that Australia needs many more tertiary graduates if we are to become a Knowledge Nation. This is an issue of both national prosperity and social justice.

What I am talking about with this proposal is nothing less than a revolution in social democratic education policy. We on the progressive side of Australian politics all look with pride to Gough Whitlam's abolition of university fees as a landmark in education policy in this country.

For all the benefits of that reform, there remained cultural and other factors that were never resolved, and prevented too many talented Australians from getting a tertiary education.

Labor's reforms during the 1980s and 90s saw the numbers of students at Australian universities expand from 348,000 in 1983 to 634,000 in 1996.

But still, too many Australians have felt estranged from a tertiary education. Often, no-one in their family had ever been to university. Perhaps the family support was not there. More likely, they could not afford several years without work.

Today, Labor has come up with a solution that builds on the reforms of the past, by harnessing the power of modern technology:

• For people who might have been intimidated by the classroom, the classroom will now come to them;
• For people who cannot afford the luxury of years without work, online learning lets them work and study at their own pace; and
• For people shut out by the Howard Government's punitive fees, relief will be at hand.

This plan is one of the keys to boosting lifelong learning in Australia. Indeed, I encourage you not to look at this solely as an education policy, but as Australia's first comprehensive lifelong learning policy.

And I encourage you all to think about the opportunities this policy will provide, not only for universities, but also for vocational education.

Too often, those reporting on politics in this country see education policy through the prism of a university education. Yet many TAFE colleges are proving already that online opportunities are equally exciting in the vocational as the university sector.

A Beazley Labor Government will work with ANTA to ensure that vocational education also benefits from this online education revolution.

Let me conclude by showing where this policy fits into the broader Knowledge Nation agenda. In practical terms, becoming a Knowledge Nation will include:

• Strengthening our manufacturing and service industries through the application of new technologies and the re-skilling of the workforce;
• Encouraging innovation in emerging fields such as biotechnology, information technology, and green technologies;
• Encouraging every school – public as well as private – to become a centre of excellence;
• Having a world-class university system that attracts the world's leading researchers and teachers;
• Establishing leading-edge telecommunications, transport and research infrastructure;
• And last, but by no means least, a Knowledge Nation will mean helping all of our citizens to improve their skills and gain a secure and well-paid job through properly-funded vocational education and lifelong-learning programs.

This last point is crucial.

The Knowledge Nation is not just about universities and lab coats, it is just as much about schools, apprenticeships and the factory floor. It is about the way we do business; address our environmental needs; respond to our social problems.

This is what Mr Howard just can't seem to grasp. He only sees the Knowledge Nation agenda as a political threat to be neutralised, not as I do as a fundamental re-orientation of national priorities.

In the Knowledge Nation, education will have to start earlier in life, continue throughout life, and be of a higher quality than ever before.

Of course Barry Jones recognised this 20 years ago in his prophetic bestseller, Sleepers Wake, when he wrote that Australia needed to "create an open university … in which people of all ages can study for degrees at home, in their own time, using television and other modern techniques". Today we can use the Internet and digital communications to make Barry's dream a reality.