Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

$6.6 billion—nearly $3 billion of that in the last 12 months alone—not to mention the cutting of research funds across the country.

We have two important outcomes in this bill for students. Firstly, the bill ensures that they are able to study at little or no up-front cost to themselves, even if it is not through a university or TAFE. This alarmist language that says that these reforms will price people out of commencing a higher education journey is absolutely false. There are no up-front costs. Nothing has changed. So, a person from the lowest-income, most-disadvantaged family in my electorate can step to the plate tomorrow and enter into a university degree that will change their life forever. They can enter into a diploma or associate degree that will change their life forever—at no up-front cost. And people opposite, including the Greens, should stop the scaremongering. If they want to have a debate, that is fine. Talk about the facts that are on the table, the measures in the bill that are fact, not alarmist language that scares the daylights out of people with untruths.

Secondly, and just as importantly, the bill provides the student with the due recognition that undertaking a sub-bachelor degree is of equal value to our community as undertaking a university degree. In the north-west of Tasmania that may mean that a student undertaking a course through a private education provider will not face the difficulty of needing to save for up-front course fees but, rather, can defer those fees through the FEE-HELP scheme. That will be a massive help to prospective students in regional Tasmania.

Despite the feigned outrage of members opposite, particularly the Leader of the Opposition, who claim that students will be worse off under these reforms and that the sky will fall in, the truth is that under their government many students not only paid interest tied to the CPI for their loans but were slugged with a 20-plus per cent loan fee. That means that if a university charged $30,000 for a degree then students who were unable to pay up-front were actually charged $36,000 for the degree, plus interest. This bill proposes to remove that fee and instead use the 10-year bond rate to determine the interest rate and then cap it at six per cent. By removing all FEE-HELP and VET FEE-HELP loan fees that are currently imposed on some students who are undertaking higher education and vocational education and training, the government is making a real contribution to improving educational and employment outcomes for regional Tasmanian students.

I welcome these reforms, because the delivery of the government's commitment to introduce these reforms will change the face of higher education in this country forever. It will give us a fighting chance to place our universities back in the top of the rankings, not see them falling down the league ladder as we are seeing at the moment.

See this speech in context