Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities, and Other Measures) Bill 2009. I want to commend the Minister for Youth and Sport for her championing of this bill in terms of our processes and within this parliament. It is the right thing to do. It is repairing a lot of damage that was done by the previous government, damage that I will come to shortly. I am disappointed that the opposition are not supporting this bill, but I am not surprised.

I think it is important that I tell a story to the House. It is a very interesting story and it relates to the time that I first met the current Leader of the Opposition, the member for Wentworth, Mr Turnbull. I studied at Sydney university from 1974 to 1976 in economics—that is the main campus—and from 1977 to 1978 I was at the law school. I was not a student politician, though there were plenty of them there—and I will go through some of them; a number of them are in this House. The current Leader of the Opposition was on the union board. There was a student representative council, which the member for Warringah pursued in terms of his student political career. The Leader of the Opposition was a member of the University of Sydney Union board, which was also elected by the students. One of the other members was a good friend of mine, the former state leader of the opposition, Kerry Chikarovski. She is someone who can verify the story that I am about to tell.

The University of Sydney Union wanted to increase the fees. We paid an entrance fee and we also paid an annual fee, and it was a fixed fee. The proposal that came forward from the University of Sydney Union board, of which the current Leader of the Opposition was a leading member and leading advocate of the proposal, was that the entrance fee should be indexed to 25 per cent of average weekly earnings and the annual fee should also be indexed to 25 per cent of average weekly earnings. The annual fee dealt with food and other facilities in relation to the university. I was a member of the Sydney university Labor club. I did not hold a position other than returning officer, which I regarded as the most important position of the organisation! It was our view that the entrance fee was over the top. We took the view that, in terms of services, it was appropriate to increase the annual fee to 25 per cent of average weekly earnings because it went directly to students’ ongoing facilities within the university. We opposed the increase of the entrance fee to 25 per cent of average weekly earnings because the then union board wanted to use that to build an edifice in the Wentworth Building on City Road, similar to the University of New South Wales. It has subsequently been fixed. It was an interesting process. The rules of the union said that you needed a two-thirds majority at the first meeting and a simple majority at a subsequent meeting. A two-thirds majority was obtained for both propositions at the first meeting, but when it came to the second meeting only the annual fee was allowed to be increased to 25 per cent of average weekly earnings. The current Leader of the Opposition tried to argue that, even though the proposition for the entrance fee was defeated at the second meeting, they could continue to call subsequent meetings until a simple majority carried the proposition. He abandoned that pretty quickly. At times he can be a bit of a kite-flyer.

The reason for the story is that he recognised then, as he should recognise now, that there should be these sorts of fees for student facilities, that indexing them is not a bad thing because it maintains the real earnings for the organisation and their ability to spend, and that there is nothing wrong with the proposition that that fee should apply across the university population. It is only through that that you will get the revenue to be able to deliver the adequate services. So the current Leader of the Opposition took a position as a student occupying a position at university which directly contradicts the position that the opposition is now taking in relation to this instance. That is the reason I relay the story. It helps to have a little history here to see whether people are being consistent over time. The reason we opposed the entrance fee indexation was that we thought we did not need edifices, that it was sufficient at the time.

In relation to the alternative Leader of the Opposition, the member for Higgins, I notice that he is listed to speak in the debate on this bill at a later hour. I do not know what he will say. I wait with anticipation. I appreciate the fact that it is the first time he has spoken on a substantive bill since the election of the new parliament, apart from the valedictory, which was a wonderful valedictory—

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