Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

It is not the book I was about to quote from. I was going to quote from Imagining Australiabut he would have to share the royalties with the other authors of Imagining Australia, which is why he is holding up his own book, Battlers and Billionaires. He said:

A deregulated or market-based HECS will make the student contribution system fairer, because the fees students pay will more closely approximate the value they receive through future earnings.

He is absolutely right. But why is it that the member for Fraser knows this but the rest of the Labor Party does not? I lit upon it the other day.

The Hawke-Keating government of the eighties understood that economic credibility is central to being in government—we understand it—Hawke and Keating understood that if Labor was to govern for any length of time they had to have economic credibility. And the member for Fraser is the only one who shares that legacy. Everyone else in the Labor Party, all the trade union hacks on the other side, think that economic credibility does not matter; they have shredded it in their response to this budget and the public will never vote for them until they get it back.

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