Hon Anne Tolley
Minister for Tertiary Education

28 May 2009

Quality investment in tertiary education

Budget 2009 delivers a quality investment in tertiary education and will assist polytechnics and universities to meet cost pressures.

The total amount of funding for tertiary education in Vote Education will increase from a 2008/09 baseline of $2.66 billion to $2.78 billion in 2009/10.

“In this Budget, the Government’s focus for tertiary education has been to maintain funding for expected growth in student places in 2009 and 2010,” Tertiary Education Minister Anne Tolley says.

“Additional funding will be provided to Tertiary Education Organisations as agreed in their investment plans.

“Pressure on course subsidies will also be addressed by an inflation-adjustment in 2010. This will provide $127 million of extra funding to the tertiary institutions over four years. This commitment was not funded by the previous Government.

“The previous Government made a number of other significant promises in tertiary education that they did not fund in last year’s Budget. This Government has not been able to fund all of these initiatives and Budget 2009 reflects that.

“These include ‘capability funding’, scholarships for domestic and foreign students, increases to industry-training funds and the development of some new training programmes.

“The previous Government was not able to fund these initiatives even in the best of economic times,” Mrs Tolley says.

ENDS

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