Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I am also rising to speak on the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014. My contribution is motivated by a visit I made to Griffith University Logan campus in the week after the budget. I am very fortunate to have been a graduate of Griffith University and particularly fortunate to be able to represent the Logan campus in this place. A lot of what I want to say today is motivated by the year 12 kids that I spoke to on that day as part of Griffith's Uni-Reach program, which gets a whole bunch of year 12 students into a room and talks to them about what it is like at university: what sorts of challenges there are and all of that sort of thing. I went along on 19 May. There were a whole range of schools there, but from my electorate there were kids from Marsden High, Mabel Park and also Springwood High. We spoke about how they arrange their studies and how they arrange their lives to be successful students at university. It was a great opportunity. I congratulate Griffith University for providing that kind of opportunity to kids. When I was thinking about speaking on this bill today, I was thinking: what kind of country and what kind of government would make those kids—some of them from quite disadvantaged areas—choose between going to university and other important life choices like a mortgage, starting a family or even starting a small business?

I will be forever in debt to the teachers and administrators at Griffith University for the education I got. Unfortunately, this bill and its mean-spirited changes will put kids forever in debt in a whole different way, to the Abbott government.

Not every young person wants to go to university, and we need to afford them a whole range of training opportunities, but we also need to make sure that we do not limit their choices. We do not want kids who get the right marks and qualify for university to decide not to go to university on the basis that they cannot afford it or that they do not want to spend 20, 30 or 40 years repaying debts for their degrees of $100,000 or more. We want to make sure that kids have that option. Unfortunately, this bill limits people's options and choices.

There is a very famous economist called Amartya Sen. Sen says that if you want to tackle inequality in a society you need to provide the ability to choose lives of value. You need to give people the capacity to succeed. I like to think of it as: you need to give people the tools of success so that they can work hard and get ahead in a modern market economy. I was thinking about Amartya Sen because what this bill does is to let some people but not others choose lives of values. I think that is unforgiveable in a modern, wealthy, first-world country like ours.

Just as individuals have choices, countries have choices too. Like I said, a wealthy country like ours does have to choose its priorities. I can think of no more important priority than making sure that university education is affordable and that kids from low-SES areas like mine are not priced out of the market—like this bill does. We need to make those kinds of choices. As the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday in a very good speech in this debate, he said, 'Our country has a choice between becoming smarter and becoming poorer.' That really does get to the nub of this issue.

We hear people on both sides of this House talk about how important it is for us to build productivity, and that is a crucial objective for our country and our economy. If we are serious about building productivity, we need to establish broad and deep pools of human capital. That means not excluding people on the basis of their socioeconomic status, it means not excluding kids from regional areas, it means not making it harder for women who want to go to university—not pricing them out of the market by making them contemplate paying back a university degree for all of their working life and jacking up the cost of degrees to $100,000 or more. We have to choose whether we are going to become smarter or poorer, whether we want bigger or smaller pools of human capital and whether we want a more inclusive economy or a less inclusive economy. These are the choices that nations have to make. The appalling thing about this bill is that it makes all the wrong choices when it comes to those crucial questions. And probably the most crucial question when it comes to higher education is: do you want the opportunities to flow to the many or do you want the opportunities to flow just to the few? Unfortunately, this government—true to form, I have to say—have chosen the latter, and they are doing it in a range of ways, including with superannuation. They have chosen the latter, disastrous path.

When Labor were in government and we thought about reforming the university sector—under great education ministers like Julia Gillard, Kim Carr and others who worked in this crucial area—we wanted to broaden and deepen the pool of human capital in our country. That is why we increased real revenue per student to universities by 10 per cent. There was an extra $1,700 for universities to spend on quality teaching for every single student. And that is why we lifted investment in universities, from $8 billion when we came to office to $14 billion by the time we left. If we had kept the model that existed under the Howard government, universities today would be worse off to the tune of $3 billion. So we do have a very proud record, and probably the proudest part of that record—certainly the part that I am proudest of, having played a peripheral role in some of the discussions—is what we did to make university more accessible to more people. Whether it was the student start-up scholarships, the relocation scholarships or the increased funding for regional universities, we did a great deal to make university more accessible. That is why one in every four of the 750,000 students at university today are the result of some of our measures. We have 190,000 more students on campus, we boosted Indigenous student numbers by 26 per cent, we boosted regional student numbers by 30 per cent, and there are more than 36,000 extra students from low-income families in universities now compared to 2007. On top of that, we have almost $4.5 billion in world-class research and teaching funding. These are things that we are very, very proud of. They are the choices we made.

Unfortunately, this bill chooses another path. It denies our economy and our community the creativity, the dynamism and the verve that flow from including more people in the remarkable opportunities that a first-world wealthy country like ours should be providing to not just to some of our young people but all of our young people if they have the talent, if they put in the work and if they qualify for university.

The rest of the region is investing heavily in education. They get it, they understand it, they know what is going on. They know that the future will be won by the countries who win when it comes to human capital. Other countries in our region know this; it beggars belief that our country is heading in a different direction. I could spend a long time, but I won't, going through all of the atrocities in this bill. I have already mentioned the degrees costing $100,000 or more and what those higher fees and higher interest rates mean for women, low-SES youngsters and regional kids who want to access university.

Let us boil down what this bill does. It allows unis to set much higher fees, which lead to substantial increases. It introduces a real interest rate of up to 6 per cent on HECS-HELP debt which, when it comes to CPI, is much more than what it currently is. These are the sorts of changes they are making to the fee structure.

What is making some universities support some of these changes is the really dramatic cuts that the government is making to the sector more broadly. Some $5.8 billion will be cut from higher education—$3.2 billion from HECS-HELP; $1.1 billion from Commonwealth supported places; $87 million from the HECS-HELP benefit; $120 million from Higher Education Reward funding; the scrapping of the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships program; $200 million from grants; and $504 million from the Student Start-up Scholarship program. The list goes on and on and on. These are serious cuts that are being made to the university system. Any one of those decisions would be a backwards step. But in combination they are devastating for a country like ours that rightly aspires to have the best educated people, the best educated workforce in the region and in the world.

I want to touch very briefly on an issue that is very close to my heart within this series of issues because of the very good New Zealand born population that I have in my electorate. I want to refer to schedule 10. I have had a lot of people contact me about the measures that the government is introducing in this space. We support theses measures. We actually announced them. My predecessor in Rankin, the great Craig Emerson, actually came up with this policy, and part of it is in this bill. I want to tell my great New Zealand born constituents that we want the government to introduce separate legislation for that part of the bill. Senator Kim Carr, who understands these issues, has put out a press release saying that we want to see HECS-HELP eligibility extended to New Zealand born citizens. We announced that before the last Labor budget. We consider this to be a very important measure. I know from so many conversations with people in my area how important this measure is. We will do our best to pass it. If the government will not split the bill, we will move a private member's bill. I look forward to being part of that process if the government does not see the sense in affording to New Zealand born kids the same opportunities that are afforded to Australian kids in my community and in south-east Queensland in particular. We will be keeping an eye on that issue. I assure my constituents of that.

One thing that really rubs salt into the wound when it comes to the changes that have been announced by the government is the breaking of various promises that are central to this. There are so many of them, I would need a couple of hours to run through them all. The Real Solutions policy document says, 'We'll ensure the continuation of the current arrangements.' On 1 September last year the Prime Minister, then Leader of the Opposition, gave people an absolute assurance that there would be no cuts to education. On 17 November Chris Pyne said, 'We're not going to raise fees.' But they have. Chris Pyne said in a media release in August 2012, 'We have no plans to increase fees, cap places, of course.' But that is exactly what they had plans to do.

Another thing that really offends people when they contemplate what the government is trying to do to them in the higher education system is that so many of the coalition frontbench—and our frontbench too—have benefited from either free education or affordable HECS. I mentioned earlier that I had the good fortune to go to Griffith University under an affordable HECS scheme. It was a great investment and it was a great time to learn from some quality educators. A punter in my area put a comment on my Facebook page the other day that 'the government have climbed the ladder and then pulled it up behind them'. I could not say it better myself. It is as though they have gone through the doorway and closed the door behind them.

When we see the education minister jump up and say he is making these changes, it is offensive to think that so many members of the government benefited from far more accommodating arrangements when it came to their own degrees—in the education minister's case, a law degree from the University of Adelaide. What he wants to do to kids studying law at the University of Adelaide—in my colleague's electorate—is appalling. When you contemplate the advantages the minister got from his own affordable degree, what he now wants to do to those law students in Adelaide and to all university students around the country, including in my electorate, is even more appalling. They have a real failure on that side of the House to understand the lives of others. It is not just the Treasury talking about poor people not driving cars. It is really a more fundamental problem with understanding that there are some kids, such as the ones I mentioned before at that Uni-Reach day the week after the budget, who are trying to work out whether they can go to university. They will have to make that choice and they will be priced out of the market by this.

The difference between the two sides of the chamber is that our side fans the flames of ambition and opportunity in every young person but their side wants to extinguish them—not for everyone, but for some. That is unacceptable in a wealthy First World country like ours. We have got a big chance in this country to set ourselves up for the future. If we can get the human capital right, if we can get inclusive economic growth, if we give every person the opportunity to succeed so that everyone gets a stake in our prosperity, we have got a big chance to go to the front of the line in our region and around the world. This bill does the opposite. That is unacceptable in our country and that is why we oppose it so vehemently.

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