The Abbott government has given a two-year lifeline to a landmark research program but will fund it through cuts to another research scheme.
New education measures in the 2015 budget are less ambitious than last year’s, when the government surprised voters with plans to deregulate university fees, cut course subsidies and extend support to private colleges.
Savings from the higher education package remain factored in to the budget bottom line because the government says it will try a third time to legislate these changes, despite the Senate holding firm in opposition.
The budget reveals how the government will fund an extension of the national collaborative research infrastructure strategy (NCRIS), which emerged as a controversial bargaining chip in unsuccessful Senate negotiations.
About 1,700 highly skilled jobs were in placed in jeopardy this year when the education minister, Christopher Pyne, warned crossbenchers the government would withhold a $150m NCRIS funding extension if the Senate did not pass the broader higher education package.
Pyne ultimately relented, agreeing to provide the previously budgeted $150m to continue NCRIS for another year after 30 June 2015. The budget papers show the government will also provide $150m to achieve a further one-year extension, providing certainty until mid-2017.
The lifeline will be offset by $263m in savings from the sustainable research excellence program between 2016 and 2019.
The budget papers said funding for the program would continue to increase each year, but would grow at a slower pace – thus producing savings compared with previous budget allocations.
Pyne, in a now-infamous Sky News interview about the standoff over the NCRIS, said he had “fixed it” but would not reveal how the extension would be funded before the budget was delivered because he wanted to “surprise” people.
On Tuesday Pyne said the NCRIS extension would allow the completion of a research infrastructure review due to report to the government in mid-2015, paving the way for further decisions on long-term funding.
Major new spending in the education budget includes $843m for preschool funding. The previously announced measure will extend payments to states and territories under the national partnership agreement on universal access to early childhood education to 2016 and 2017.
Scott Ryan, the parliamentary secretary to the minister for education, said this would ensure families continued to have access to a preschool program for 600 hours of preschool education in the year before full-time school.
In a substantial savings measure, the government will garner $131m over five years by terminating or redesigning a number of programs administered by the Department of Education and Training.
This includes an overhaul of several programs focused on workforce training and development and teaching excellence, including the Endeavour Language Teacher Fellowships.
The budget shows the government’s policy to recover higher education loan program debts from Australians living overseas is predicted to recover just $26m over four years.
The new obligations will apply from July 2016 and ensure people who are overseas for more than six months will face the same repayment obligations as people who remain in Australia.
Graduates will not repay loans if their salary is below the minimum repayment threshold, which is about $53,000.
The government will provide an extra $16.9m to the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership to implement improvements to teacher training and course accreditation. But the spending follows a government decision in the 2014 budget to cut allocated funding for the same agency.
The budget still contains $4m in federal funding to establish the “Australian Consensus” centre headed by Bjørn Lomborg.
The centre was to be hosted by the University of Western Australia, but the university announced on Friday it would not proceed with the initiative after a backlash from academics. Pyne said the government was committed to the centre and would look for another site to host it.
The government will cut $5m from previously allocated funding for the higher education participation program, which provides grants to help disadvantaged students access further study.
Budget papers said the $5m would be redirected into preserving a range of documentary and audio-visual materials held in non-digital form by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
The government has also shuffled $5m previously allocated to the advertising campaign for its higher education overhaul into a different campaign “to raise awareness of the positive effect parental engagement has on their children’s achievement in education”.
Pyne said federal funding to schools would be informed by nationally consistent data on students with disabilities “from 2016 for the first time ever”.
This would ensure “that all students with disability are funded on the same basis, regardless of the state or territory in which they live”, he said.
The government will also provide $5.4m for a further two years of funding to help non-government boarding schools with large numbers of Indigenous students from remote areas.
Long-term funding for schools remains uncertain given the Coalition’s decision to proceed with only the first four years of increases planned by the former Labor government under the needs-based Gonski reforms.
Last year’s budget revealed the government would switch to tie funding movements to the consumer price index after four years, fuelling a dispute with states and territories about pressures on their education budgets in the long term.
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has agreed to discuss health and education funding with state premiers and territory chief ministers at a Council of Australian Governments “retreat” in July.
Other education-related budget measures in Tuesday’s budget include $18.2m to toughen compliance checks in the vocational education and training sector, after concerns about unscrupulous operators exploiting vulnerable students.
The government will also spend $14.5m to expand the adult migrant English program, which provides up to 510 hours of language tuition.
But the government will cut $4.6m from the Australian early development census, a population-based measure of how children have developed by the time they start their first year of full-time schooling. Budget papers said data collection under the census would continue despite the cut.
