Listening – presumably a core skill for anyone wishing to stand for high office – sounds like the new buzzword in Australian politics.
“We are here to listen,” the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, told participants in his “mini-summit” on economic reform on Thursday. The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, followed that up with a declaration that the government was well and truly “in listening mode”. Scott Morrison flatly denied the meeting was a talkfest; the new treasurer preferred to call it “an important opportunity for the government to have a careful listen”.
The implication was that, at some point, the government had stopped listening. No one quite pinpointed that moment or named the culprit. But they should know that all the listening in the world won’t save a government if it makes decisions that breach faith with the electorate or insult the community’s sense of fairness – two powerful explanations for the political failure of the 2014 budget.
It wasn’t just business, union and social service leaders voicing opinions about the nation’s direction this week. The elephant not in the room, Tony Abbott, also wanted to be heard. The renowned talker was on commercial radio declaring that the main failure of the Coalition government’s “brave, bold” first budget was not that it had broken election promises or been seen as unfair in its impact, but that it had “turned out to be too gutsy for the parliament that we had”.
So it was with disappointment that the former prime minister greeted the shelving of the limping higher education package that was one of the big surprises for voters in the government’s first budget. So committed to listening was the Turnbull-led government that it delayed by a year the implementation pending further consultations. This would give it time to talk the sector and others who would have a view, notably Senate crossbenchers who stood in the way twice in this term of parliament.
In truth, the package was doomed from the beginning. The government would have found it much less difficult to win over those wary senators if Abbott had not promised “no cuts to education” before the 2013 election, nor suggested in the Coalition’s Real Solutions™ booklet that there would be “the continuation of the current arrangements of university funding”. And the prospect of higher fees for students is a potent political weapon; parents, grandparents and the broader community naturally worry about children having bright choices to get ahead.
The deferral – an acceptance of political reality rather than an abandonment of the fee deregulation holy grail – was announced by the new education minister, Simon Birmingham, the same senator who six months ago urged the upper house to pass the package because almost all vice chancellors supported removing government-imposed limits of student contributions.
“To have all elements, essentially, of the education sector backing this reform is a demonstration that the government has listened and acted and developed a policy that should be supported by those opposite,” Birmingham said then.
After 16 months of difficult public debate on the package, the government has not repudiated any of the core elements of its proposal; Birmingham still says there are “meritorious arguments” for concepts like giving universities more autonomy. The government merely conceded what the sector already was assuming – that the planned start date of January 2016 was unachievable because it was fast approaching and there was no prospect of an imminent Senate breakthrough.
By not scrapping the policy in its entirety, the government can continue to include the bulk of the cuts in its budget bottom line. Figures published by the independent parliamentary budget office in September (PDF) show the Coalition’s unlegislated higher education measures produce a net fiscal balance saving of $9.3bn between now and 2026. The figure is even higher if you include the former Gillard government’s higher education cuts, which the Coalition has been unable to legislate because Labor now opposes them.
The mid-year fiscal and economic outlook to be released by the government in December will probably have to account for the one-year delay, but the deferral includes both savings (like the 20% cut to bachelor course subsidies) and spending measures (like the extension of funding to pathway programs and private colleges) so the immediate impact is likely to be modest.
At some point, listening will have to give way to deciding. It’s not clear yet what the revamped package will contain, but Birmingham is hinting that it will have to feature spending and saving measures; he says the broader budget situation requires any policy to be “well rounded”. That would seem to be an argument against simply gifting a good-news funding boost without tying it to at least some potentially unpopular cuts in particular areas. Cue possible problems in the Senate.
The Coalition will face a decision about what higher education policy it presents to voters at the 2016 election. Not having a policy would be untenable, given what led to this juncture. Labor has already etched out the parameters of its alternative policy, including increasing public investment (by $14bn over a decade, which is not as big as it sounds because it is measured against the baseline of the Coalition’s yet-to-be-legislated cuts) and incentives to increase course completions. Labor will be eager to campaign on the issue.
Voters may well get what they were denied at the previous election: a substantive policy debate on how to strengthen the nation’s universities and improve opportunities for the next generation. Then the politicians will have to listen.
