This issue was one of the first issues that was brought to me when I entered politics. I totally agree that there should not be politics involved in student bodies. I was never a member of any political party at university. What is a university about? A university is more than just the lecture theatre and the library; a university is more than just a nine-to-five job. A university is about the development of the person as a whole. I will be honest: when I went to university, I was a private school boy from Sydney and I expected everybody there to be private school boys from Sydney. That was my view of the world. Over a period of time, I had the capacity to mix with a wider group of people, and I realised that I was just part of a very small segment of my nation.
What was the mechanism that brought about that mixing? The mechanism that brought about that mixing was the sport that I played. There was the incredible ability to talk to people—or to be forced to mix with people—who you otherwise probably would not have talked to or mixed with. That is what is a university is supposed to do: bring you out of your shell. It is not just about developing you academically, but about developing you socially as well.
The biggest overhead for universities at this point in time is sport and the coverage of sport. I see sport as being a fundamental section of any educational institution. When I went to Woolbrook Public School, the sporting facilities were there. The government paid for them and we all utilised them. When I went to Riverview, the sporting facilities were there. You did not have the option of not paying for them. Or you had an option: if you did not want to pay for the sporting facilities, you went to another high school—that was your option.
I am always a bit perturbed when we come up with pieces of legislation that say, ‘You can and you cannot charge for this within a business.’ A university is a business. You cannot prescribe to a business that they are allowed to charge for this but not allowed to charge for that. You must believe in the marketplace, and the marketplace means that they can charge for whatever they like. And if people do not like it, they have the option to go to another university. That is the option that is before us. In regional areas, it is very prevalent.
At the University of New England, for instance, which is where I went, we were not very political; in fact, we were completely apolitical. What we recognised, though, was that we had a small student body and about $14.5 million—at that point in time—of sporting facilities. If there was not the capacity to pay for those sporting facilities, those sporting facilities would fall into disrepair and, as they fell into disrepair, the university would lose its attraction, the university would lose its status and the regional people would lose a tertiary institution. Once more, you would have got that disenfranchising of regional people from the expectations that people in metropolitan areas have.
Sport costs money. It costs a lot of money to build a gym; it costs a lot of money to have a netball court; it costs a lot of money to run the cricket pitch; it costs a lot of money to have the rugby grounds. But the chess club does not cost a lot of money. All you need are two chairs, a table and chess pieces. If you want a debating club, you get yourself seven chairs, two tables and a bell. Sport is the big drain on funds.
If you go to other universities around the world—if you go to Cambridge, Oxford, Yale or Harvard—you will have a compulsory amenities fee to cover those things. It is the expectation. When this legislation came forward, there was only one other nation on earth that had legislation like this, and that was the communist People’s Republic of China, which I thought was peculiar.
I have never sat on the edge of a netball court—netball being what my wife played—and could determine the political allegiances of the players. They were just playing netball. When I played water polo, the people were just other water polo players; when I played, rugby, they were just other rugby players; when I ran the four by 400, they were just other runners. It was just a mechanism that got us to communicate. I spoke to people from other nationalities, from other religions and from other socioeconomic groups, and I hope that in some small way I developed as a person.
People say, ‘What about the cost?’ When I was at university, I also had to go to work. I worked as a farm labourer. I did a bit of fencing and I did a little bit of crutching—not as well as Senator Williams, but a bit of it. Later on, I worked in a pub. That was the ticket that I bought. I decided to go to university and there were things that I was expected to pay for.
I always noted that Cambridge had the greatest number of Nobel laureates of any tertiary institution in the world. They have done studies as to why Cambridge has the greatest number of Nobel laureates. It has the greatest number of Nobel laureates—so the Nobel laureates say—not so much because of the facilities that are there, though of course they are prominent, but rather because of the collegiate atmosphere among the student body and the ability to bounce ideas back and forth to develop them.
What we have developed in Australia is an idea that as long as I get a piece of paper with the word ‘university’ on it, then it came from a university. No. In some instances, it might have just been an academic institution. I have no problems at all with someone offering a course online. When you finish it, you can get a piece of paper. But do not call it a university degree. It might get you into what you want to get into. It might make you an accountant like me, a journalist, a doctor or a solicitor. But acknowledge that you have not been to university; you have just acquired academic knowledge in a certain specific field. You have not developed much beyond that.
Maybe we have too many universities; maybe that is the issue. Once upon a time, only about five per cent of Australians went to university. Maybe we now have too many people going to university. What I have a problem with is this juxtaposition where we want everybody to go to university but we do not acknowledge what a university is about and the historical premise that a university is built on.