Senator Kim Carr

In Broadmeadows, on Melbourne’s outer industrial edge, last Friday a new $257 million biotech research and development facility specialising in a range of life-saving drug therapies for rare and serious diseases, including cancer, was unveiled. 

As the former Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, and a backer of the project when it was first announced in 2010, I was delighted to be there and to see the results of Labor’s $50 million co-investment in CSL Behring’s new, world-class facility.

The Abbott Government is set to shift a larger burden of the cost of higher education on to the shoulders of students and their families.

If, as seems likely, the Government accepts the recommendations of the Kemp-Norton review, the inevitable outcome is clear privatisation of higher education by stealth.