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

Apart from the Leader of the Opposition's trying to verbal me from my comments yesterday, I would refer the Leader of the Opposition to these articles in the The Guardian newspaper, hardly known to be a great supporter of the coalition, in May this year. What I was pointing out to the House yesterday and I am happy to repeat it today was that in fact, in Great Britain, where fees were introduced for undergraduate degrees in England but in Scotland there is ostensibly free education—in other words, the taxpayers pay for the students' tuition fees—in England the percentage of low SES, low socioeconomic status, students going to university has increased and in Scotland it has either stagnated or declined. In fact, the introduction of fees in England actually improved the uptake of higher education amongst low-socioeconomic-status students. Labor would rather just rely on myth than the facts. Myth, sadly, is running the Labor Party's policy agenda. They would rather try to create a scare campaign, they would rather make things up, they would rather pretend that the so-called Whitlamite free education—

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