Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Capricornia for her question and know that, as a member of this parliament representing a regional electorate, she cares about support for country children going to university. Unfortunately the Liberal and National parties do not. They continue their war against students; the war against students they started in government when they sat there as a government and watched the participation rates of kids from country backgrounds go down—something that they should be ashamed of, watching the participation rates of country students go down.

This is a government that is committed to supporting access to education and particularly access for disadvantaged groups including country students. That is why we have before the Senate a new and improved student financing arrangement which better targets money to those households and those students that need it the most. Who supports this new set of arrangements? Well, people who care about education do. Australia’s universities do. Last week I was joined by representatives of every university system in the country, standing shoulder to shoulder with me, calling on the Liberal and National parties to get out the way and pass this bill. Since that time the Group of Eight vice chancellors—the vice chancellors of our oldest and most prestigious universities—have issued a press release directed at the Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal and National parties. It is entitled Student income support is not a political plaything, and that is absolutely true. The Group of Eight has said in this press release:

The Group of Eight supports these changes because they target finite resources to the students most in need, including those in rural and regional areas.

All universities support this bill. Student organisations support this bill. So there are the Liberal and National parties, in their arrogance and in their war against students, having presided as a government over declining participation rates by country children, now setting their face against expert advice from universities around this country. There was a time when the Liberal Party had the decency to acknowledge that its student financing system was inequitable. Those days of decency were when the member for Casey was shadow minister for education and he slammed the old Liberal system—as he rightly should—

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