Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

While the list of those in the Australian community betrayed by the recent Abbott government's budget is a long one, there is no betrayal that is more bitter than the betrayal of the people in our community who are dreaming of building a better life for themselves through hard work and education.

Before the last election, the coalition's Real Solutions policy pamphlet promised Australians who hoped to one day earn a university degree that the Liberal Party would:

… ensure the continuation of the current arrangements of university funding.

We now know that that was just another lie, a fib, a fabrication, a falsehood. Existing funding arrangements for our universities will not continue under the policies released in the federal budget. In fact, the budget indicates that Commonwealth government higher education expenditure for this year will actually decline in real terms.

At the same time, students will be slugged with massive increases in both their upfront uni fees and the costs of their university debts. In fact, Universities Australia today said:

With the reduction in the Government contribution, the student contribution to course fees will rise by an average of 23 per cent. For some courses the increase will be closer to 60 per cent. This could be much higher at institutions with strong market power and in the absence of an upfront cost to mute the price signal.

Professor Bruce Chapman, the man who designed the original HECS policy, has stated that as a result of these changes:

Fees will go up and they will go up quite significantly …

And further:

I expect most universities will increase tuition fees to international student fee levels, which are currently about three times higher. The Group of Eight universities will do that pretty quickly.

Professor Chapman also slapped down the desperate claims of those opposite that competition might prevent this from occurring, stating blankly:

The idea fees will go down anywhere is frankly fantasy land.

In the face of this betrayal, the Minister for Education had the hide to tell the ABC's Insiders program: 'Students will always be the winners,' as a result of the Abbott government's massive university fees hike.

If students will always be the winners, my question for the Minister for Education is: how will students be winners of what the vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide has suggested could be a 'student debt burden that is worse than that in the United States.' Student debt burden in that country has tripled in the last eight years and is now larger than total US credit card debt. How will students be winners from decades of debt and a new interest obligation that will increase an unpaid student debt of $40,000 to almost $60,000 over a ten-year period? How will existing students be winners from having the debt burden of their already incurred university debts retrospectively jacked up to a rolling average of the government bond rate? It's an utter nonsense and those opposite know it. To bastardise Hot Chocolate: 'Everyone's a winner, baby—that's a lie!'

The biggest losers from the government's plans to massively hike university fees will be families from disadvantaged backgrounds like some families in my electorate. There are few things that give people more pride than seeing the first member of their family attend university. I have seen families in my electorate speak about this. It is a great achievement and one that requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice, not only from the students themselves but from the family members around them. The government's plan to massively hike university fees will destroy this dream for many of these families. The Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University in my own electorate, Professor Peter Dawkins, has already said that the equity impacts of the government's proposals are 'the biggest question mark against these reforms'. In the inaugural Mitchell Institute policy lecture, Professor Dawkins noted:

It is clear that the burden on students will rise significantly and with interest being charged from the time the student commences, significantly higher levels of debt will accumulate.

His conclusion was that this risked discouraging students from low socio-economic backgrounds from starting university. This view is shared by the man who designed the original HECS scheme, Bruce Chapman, who recently noted:

Past changes to HECS didn't deter students from entering university, but now that there will be a real rate of interest on the debt we are in uncharted waters.

He noted that the 'real interest subsidy' in the original HECS scheme was an important and deliberate feature of the scheme designed to ensure the policy's equity. He further noted:

The interest rate subsidy is there for protection. A lot of people, particularly women, will spend time out of the labour force, child-rearing, or people will have accidents and have bad luck and end up in poor jobs. When you think HECS you've got to think about insurance all the time. That's what it is—it insures you against bad luck … Once you put a real interest rate on that, that's gone.

Bruce Chapman is right. This government's plans to massively increase university fees take the equity out of our higher education system. If this legislation gets through the equity is gone. It will be a broken promise that betrays Australia's future. Labor has always fought for an accessible, high-quality education system. We would never introduce a system as unfair and inequitable as the one that those opposite are proposing and we will fight to make sure that the proposals never eventuate.

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