Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Energy and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I will start again because I am sure the member for Braddon did not hear.

… organisations which depend on the funds of people who are there, by virtue of compulsion, tend to become lethargic … It is almost invariably tied up with security in the source of funding—the knowledge that, no matter how badly they do, there will still be a pay cheque there for people who run the organisation ...

This was in a report to the Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, as a footnote.

Labor’s broken promise on this issue is almost unbelievable. It is yet another broken promise by the Labor government. The previous shadow minister for education, Stephen Smith, the member for Perth, said this in May 2007 when questioned:

... I am not contemplating a compulsory amenities fee.

So there he went, on the record. The Labor Party said this before the election but did something else afterwards.

Other members opposite, such as the member for Wills and the member for Melbourne concurred, stating that they would not be increasing the financial burden of our students. This bill does the complete opposite. It seeks to introduce a compulsory payment for non-academic services through the imposition of a deferred fee. Imposing an extra burden on the students at a time of economic uncertainty is surely not in the best interests of Australian students.

In conclusion, I say that the purpose of this bill is simply to introduce compulsory student unionism by stealth, by denying students their fundamental right to freedom of choice on campus. As I have said before, it is the students—not the government, universities nor student unions—who are in the best position to determine their financial priorities. This bill will deny students a real choice on campus and will force them to fund activities which they may not need or want. I will return to Hal Colebatch’s article. In his last paragraph he says:

The ALP and the Left would not have fought so hard against voluntary student membership and pushed so hard for compulsory fees to be restored if they did not believe that their ideological allies on campus would benefit very substantially and student guilds would revert to their former roles as cadre-generating institutions for the Left.

It is a very succinct point which I am sure those opposite will not agree with.

I am pleased to join with my colleagues in speaking against this bill. I want to dedicate my contribution on this bill to Jess Finlay and her colleagues, who have gone through the universities of Western Australia and fought hard for many years to see freedom of choice in universities and freedom of association. This bill is a reversion to the dark old days of compulsion, coercion and the ability to garnish favour with students on universities. I recall that there is a song—I wish I could remember its name—that starts, ‘throwing stones at the embassy’. I wish I could remember the rest of the title because it really explains what these activities are trying to generate in the universities of Australia.

See this speech in context