Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Member for Adelaide, I listened to you in silence and I promise I will not reflect on your university experience if you listen to me in silence. Labor delivered five record budget deficits. They left a further $123 billion in deficits for the next four years and their debt is costing Australians $1 billion a month in dead money.

Let us look at what we need to do and what we have said we will do, and how proud we are of the university reforms that we have mentioned, the higher education reforms that are part of our budget. This is not a defensive position, this is a positive forward-looking position, and this is in the interests of the Australian higher-education sector, students and the economy as a whole. For the first time ever the Australian government is supporting all Australian higher-education students, with all registered higher-education institutions, enrolled in diplomas and bachelor degrees, including advanced diplomas and associate degrees.

We know that diplomas and other pathway programs are a great way into university for many students, including those from low-income backgrounds. People who have not done that well at high school, and mature-age people wanting to move into a new job, will now have an opportunity to participate in this slightly different form of higher education, which will lead them into a positive pathway for the future, alongside our HECS style loans for apprentices, the Trade Support Loans—$20,000 loans to apprentices, with a significant reduction if they complete their course. That is what we want to see: abolishing the loan fees for HELP loans for vocational-education students and for undergraduate students with non-uni higher-education institutions.

Commonwealth scholarships will help students from low-SES backgrounds, Indigenous students and students from regional Australia. I highlight that point because the member for Adelaide talked about these measures as affecting and disadvantaging rural and regional students. I want to assure those listening—Labor does not bother to read the detail—that universities will need to invest one dollar of every five dollars that they receive in new scholarships, scholarships that they will offer rural and regional students, Indigenous students and disadvantaged students—Commonwealth scholarships that will support those students through their higher-education experience.

No-one needs to pay a dollar up-front. We have to keep repeating this. No-one needs to pay a dollar up-front. Frightening and scaremongering families who, I admit, are writing to me as the local member saying, 'I don't know if I can afford to send my child to university,' is ridiculous, because parents should not be paying the fees of their children at university. Even wealthy parents should not. Students should be paying their own way and they can and always will be able to, under our system, because no-one needs to pay a dollar up-front. You only make repayments when your income is over $50,000. Then you will have to pay a modest rate of interest on your repayments. So to say that you cannot afford to go to university is disingenuous at best and misleading and untruthful at worst. We know that university education is the best investment. I would agree with the opposition on that. I read a report in TheNew York Times this morning that priced the difference in lifetime earnings of someone with a university degree—or, as they say in the States, a college degree—at $500,000 and that is with much higher payments that American students pay for their university degrees.

I stand here and represent the students who will never go near the door of a university. Deputy Speaker Scott, they are the students from your electorate, from Western Queensland, from western New South Wales, from the rural electorates represented by the members on this side of the house who will never go near the door of the university, who will work in manufacturing, in factories, in retail, in modest jobs that will never earn the incomes of the graduates this Labor Party expects our taxes to support. If it is a matter of fairness, this is fundamentally fair.

If the member for Adelaide wants to talk about unfair attacks, she should look no further than the state that the Labor Party left vocational education and training in—a subject dear to my heart—dismantling our successful Australian technical colleges, putting in trade-training centres. I have now visited many of these. Many of them carry on something that does not prepare students for industry, does not make them ready for the workplace and does not actually meet their needs. In fact, in one high school students were studying tools by looking at photographs. In another, they had all their machinery set at the wrong level. We've gotta love our manual-arts teachers—we remember them from the old days—but they do not necessarily provide high-quality vocational training.

So we are fixing that up. We are fixing up Labor's mess. We have the states and territories around the table working on a plan that delivers students, in high school, Australian school based apprenticeships that lead to the world of work. We are linking students to real jobs in the real economy. We do believe in a strong VET-in-schools system. We do believe that it has to be industry focused. The subject of this MPI by the member for Adelaide was training, but she only talked about higher education. It is important that we do talk about training and I am looking forward to the contribution of her colleague. It is vital that vocational courses provide that clear pathway to employment.

I visited Newman College—and I think the member for Lyne might be speaking in this debate—and was incredibly impressed by the way that the college prepared students for the world of work. They understood that Labor's trade-training-centre approach did not work, did not work in the real world, did not work for the students of that college and certainly was not in their interests. Reflecting on the approach we took, the key difference is that it is industry led, because we as the Liberal and National parties understand that if students leave school and are not ready for the world of work then an employer is not going to pick them up. An employer is not going to give them a job. And if they do not get a job 18 months later, they are unlikely to get a job in a hurry. We know that unless we put that a clear pathway in place we will let the students down.

Back to the context in which we are all operating today: Labor's debt and deficit. There is $1 billion of interest every month. Imagine what we could do with that money. Dead money. We saw the Commission of Audit report. If we implemented every single one of their recommendations—and the Treasurer said we will not and we have not—it would still take until 2023 to pay back Labor's debt. I know that is only on the government spending side and there is a taxation side—and, of course, we have got to keep that down—but I use that example to highlight the scale of the problem that we are here to fix. The Australian people can trust this government to do what we said we would do.

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