Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I start by commending the member for Forrest's contribution there in outlining, particularly, the impact of the Higher Education Support Amendment (Student Contribution Amounts and Other Measures) Bill 2012 on regional and rural students. She is a very strong advocate in this parliament for those students particularly. This bill—as you would be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker—reinstates the student contribution amount for mathematics, statistics and science units of study to its pre-2009 levels for domestic students commencing a course of study on or after 1 January 2013. It also removes the eligibility for Commonwealth supported places in the Higher Education Loan Program schemes for Australian citizens who commence a course of study after 1 January 2013 and do not intend to reside in Australia during the course of study. The second purpose of this bill—to capture those students who do not intend to reside in Australia—I think is a step in the right direction. Our focus should rightly be on trying to support students who want to study here, pursue their careers here and make a contribution back to our nation. So we support the intent of that measure.

But I would like to focus on the first purpose of the bill, which is the removal of the HECS discount for maths, science and statistics courses. As you would be aware, the HECS discount for maths, science and statistics courses was introduced by the Rudd government in December 2008, and it took effect on 1 January 2009. It was while the now Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was the education minister. The aim of providing the discount was to encourage more students to undertake these courses, because indeed we do have a shortage of students undertaking these courses. The government is now reversing that decision three years later, and this reversal is effective from 1 January next year. The stated reason for reversing this decision, as the new education minister has explained to us, is that the measure was not working. That is the stated reason that they have given to us. They have said that there has been no change in terms of the numbers of students studying those subject areas at universities and hence they are going to abolish the HECS discounts.

Some of the evidence put forward by some people suggests that the measure was in fact working. Indeed, the Parliamentary Library looked into his question and produced a report, Are maths and science enrolments increasing? It is dated 2 December 2011. It concluded that the measures which Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard introduced had an immediate effect. It said that in 2009 undergraduate applications for natural and physical sciences increased by 17 per cent on 2008, and increased again in 2010 by 13 per cent. It said that this reversed the declines from the previous years just in those couple of years. It also said that the increases in applications carried over to increasing enrolments. For example, the commencing bachelor places in all science subjects showed an increase of 8.7 per cent in 2009 and 19.4 per cent in 2010 when the overall increase in undergraduate student numbers was only 15 per cent. So at least the Parliamentary Library believes that this measure did make a difference in terms of increasing the number of applicants and the number of people who are studying maths, science and statistics at university.

I suggest that the reason the government is abolishing the discounts is not that the program did not work. I think it is using that as an excuse, frankly. I think that the real reason for the measure that we are debating today and that is contained within this bill is that the government has wasted so much money over the last five years that it is now scrambling to try to find savings in every single portfolio to bring some semblance of integrity back to the budget for next year. That is the real reason that we are debating this bill right now.

The government over the last five years—as you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, and as every Australian knows—has wasted billions of upon billions of dollars on all sorts of wasteful programs. We know about the pink batts scheme: billions wasted to put pink batts into people's rooves and then billions spent to take the pink batts out of people's rooves. We know about the Green Loans Program. We know about the school halls which were built at double the price they should have been. We know about set-top boxes being installed into people's houses costing $700 per set-top box when you can get one from Harvey Norman for $450. We know about the shambolic border protection regime, which is wasting billions of dollars, when previously our border protection system only cost us in the vicinity of $80 million or so. And, of course, we know about the $1,000 cheques that were sent to dead people and were sent to family pets.

See this speech in context