Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to address a couple of comments that the member for Isaacs made about student unionism and the so-called attack by this side of the House on unions. It is actually not an attack on unions; it is an attack on compulsion, Member for Isaacs. We have no problem with unions at all. In fact, we have always supported their role in both the workplace and at university. Our problem is when you force people to be members of the union so that they can fund Labor Inc., so that they can fund the training ground. We accept that very senior members of our side—the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney; the member for Wentworth, as we were reminded; the member for Sturt; and, I think, the member for Warringah—were all involved in student politics. Of course they would be; they were interested in politics. The member for Isaacs was involved in student politics when he was a young buck. But the issue was that you chose to be involved.

Our problem with this Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities) Bill 2009 is that you are charging a compulsory fee to bump up the bottom line of the student union so that it can go out and campaign on issues which largely are not representative of what most university students think. That has always been our problem and that has always been how we have outlined it. The member for Isaacs said that this is meeting an election commitment. I will read to you what the then shadow minister for education said:

… I am not considering a HECS style arrangement, I’m not considering a compulsory HECS style arrangement and the whole basis of the approach is one of a voluntary approach. So I am not contemplating a compulsory amenities fee.

I am not sure how that set of words is consistent with the election commitment they claim to be meeting. I would have thought that was the complete opposite of the election commitment the Labor Party gave.

Like so many things that we heard from the Labor Party before the last election, it turns out that it is just not true—the approach on this issue, their economic conservatism or the buck stopping with the Prime Minister on health and hospital reforms. As we heard today, not one single hospital has been assisted. These promises made before the election have failed to be delivered. We were going to have a superfast internet network, NBN mark 1. We now have NBN mark 2 on the drawing board. All of these promises were made purely to get through an election campaign. The creme de la creme, we should not forget, was, ‘I’ll turn the boats back.’ That was the best promise that we had from the Prime Minister. It was just days—two days, I think—before the last election that he made that promise, and we have seen that that promise is as fraudulent now as it was when he made it. So this is clearly a commitment the Labor Party have gone back on. This reintroduction of compulsory student unionism is a broken election commitment.

The second issue I wanted to address with the member for Isaacs is that he talked about the Liberal Party being the party that likes to censor debate. But we are not the party that have introduced censorship of what we can send out, including whether copies of Hansard can be sent out. I do not think that was our side of politics, Member for Isaacs; I think that was the side of politics that you are on. Under the biggest control freak of a Prime Minister in the history of our country, we now have to check what we can say about the policies of the Labor government of the day with bureaucrats in its censorship bureau. But the member for Isaacs has the gall to allege that we are the party of censorship. Give me strength. This is Orwellian in its nature. It is 1984. These guys will say and do anything to mislead this place. It is an extraordinary suggestion to say that the Liberal Party is the party that wants to censor or stop debate.

We saw it at the Labor Party’s national conference. The minister for finance and his thought police at the front of the room had to see any motion before it could be put to the floor of the conference. That side of parliament have become a North Korean style communist organisation run by a factional warlord, and they want to control every single word, every single sentence and every single thing that happens—so much so that they are now trying to control this side of the House as well. All we have heard in the last few weeks is how much of a debate we do have on the Liberal Party side of politics. So the member for Isaacs’s arguments are somewhat befuddling, I must say.

The real intent of this bill is to get back to what Labor believe in, which is a compulsion for unionism, a compulsion to ensure they get the money and the numbers. The student unionism plays an integral part in the flow-through of young people who make up the Labor Party brand across the country. There is no better example than the several members of parliament from South Australia. My friend the member for Kingston who is, I grant you, a hard worker, came through the training school. The minister responsible for this bill, Ms Kate Ellis, spent five years at Flinders University, three of them, from memory, as president of the student union, so she has a very long history with this area. She went from there into Labor Party staffer land in South Australia, with now Deputy Premier Mr Kevin Foley. So there is a long history here.

The usual tactic with the Right in South Australia is that Don Farrell, dubbed the ‘godfather of the Right’ by the Adelaide Advertiserand tonight he and the member for Port Adelaide hold the future of the Premier of South Australia in their hands, whether or not they believe the story, but we will not get into that during this debate—gets the numbers through compulsory student unionism, in the first instance, which allows them to build up their numbers base. They move into the right side of the SDA and they are able to control Labor Party branches and conferences in that way. I am sure my friend the member for Wakefield will very soon correct any mistakes I make on this matter.

So this is very much Labor Inc. This is what they do. Student unionism is an important part of the Labor organisation and its structure in terms of how the Labor Party is able to operate, particularly in my state of South Australia, and we have seen that for a very long time.

The $250 student services fee was first part of the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities, and Other Measures) Bill 2009 introduced in February 2009, which included a section on VET FEE-HELP. It passed this House in March, and we voted it down in the Senate in August. It has been reintroduced in this place without the VET FEE-HELP section, which has been hived off into a separate bill. So this is very much the ‘student unionism bill 2009’. Let me make this very clear. Unlike what the member for Isaacs said, this was not promised before the last election. Indeed, it was the very opposite that was promised before the last election. There was a very specific promise by the member for Perth as the shadow minister at the time—now our foreign minister—not to do this. But instead we are seeing the second attempt to get this student services fee through.

I was interested that the member for Isaacs mentioned a couple of senators who had made contributions on this bill—I think they were Senator Birmingham and Senator Cash. In fact, I thought what the member for Isaacs did was make a very good argument, which was that this is about freedom of association; this is about choice. If students want to be part of the clubs and use the services that are offered at universities, they will join. There is no need for the compulsion. The only reason for the compulsion is to get the funds in the door so the student union, run by the Labor Party organisation, can run their campaigns, as they have for very many years. What Labor do not like about voluntary student unionism is that it has been chipping away at the underbelly of Labor Inc. That is what this bill is about: re-establishing those arrangements, which were taken away in 2005 by the former government.

This bill is, very simply, about the reintroduction of student unionism in Australia. It is not about services. It is not about students’ wellbeing on campus. It is about the beginnings of Labor Inc. and important aspects of how the Labor organisation works. That is very much what this bill is about. The minister responsible for this bill is a beneficiary of the Labor Inc. organisation. She has very much benefited from how this set-up works, from student union days all the way through. She is now the minister who has been able to reintroduce this bill in an attempt to re-establish Labor domination at universities. What we are saying is that this bill should be treated as we treated its predecessor earlier in the year—with the contempt it deserves. This is a bad piece of legislation. It is a backwards step. It is purely about the reintroduction of compulsory student unionism in Australia.

As I said earlier in my contribution, the issue is about compulsion. It is not that we do not like student unions. If people want to be involved in politics at university, if they want to get involved in student unionism or if they want to get involved in sports clubs at university, of course that is encouraged and of course that is what people should do if they wish to, but it should not be compulsory that they do so. They should not be forced to do so.

This is a very Labor Party bill. The Labor Party is now trying to censor this side of the House as well as its own MPs and its own members. The Labor Party conference had the thought police at the front there run by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. Any idea to be presented had to go through the minister for finance. This is the most controlling government in the history of Australia. The most controlling Prime Minister in the history of Australia is now trying to control this side of parliament as well as his own. This bill should be treated with the contempt it deserves. It will obviously get through this place when it is put to a vote, but I am sure in the Senate it will be treated as it should be.

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