Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

For an education minister Mr Pyne is a pretty slow learner. Last year the Senate sent this government a very clear message. The Senate, representing the Australian people from various points on the political spectrum, sent a very clear message. The Senate said: 'Australia is a country where, no matter how much you earn, you should be able to go to university and should not be deterred from going or forced to make certain choices on the basis of the size of the debt that you might incur.' The Senate sent the very clear message that in Australia you should not graduate from university with a debt the size of a small mortgage. If people have to graduate with a debt the size of a small mortgage, it is clear that people may not go in the first place or, if they do go, they will be forced to make certain choices for the rest of their life that they otherwise might not. People have looked to the United States, where students carry around with them five- or six-figure debts for their whole lives and are forced to make decisions about where they live and what kinds of jobs they will take because they have this debt hanging around their neck and said: 'We don't want that. We do not want Australia to become like the United States where the gap between the haves and have-nots just grows.'

The Senate saw through the blackmail of this government that is encapsulated in this Higher Education and Research Reform Bill 2014 and the last bill. The blackmail was, 'We are going to cut funding to universities by about 20 per cent,' and when the universities said, 'Hang on, that is not sustainable,' they took that as some kind of imprimatur for their policies. People can see through that. They are putting a gun to the head of universities and saying, 'We are going to cut your funding by 20 per cent unless you get together and say you are going to support our bill.' People can see through that because people are not dumb.

Independent review after independent review has told us that universities in this country need a boost in funding and yet this government comes along, after having made the promise that there would be no cuts to education, and says it is going to take 20 per cent out of base funding for universities. The Senate stood up to this government and said: 'No, hang on. Not only are you breaking a promise and not only did you not tell people at the election that you were going to do this but this is fundamentally unfair and will grow the gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country.' Instead of saying, 'I hear what you are saying, let us find a different way,' the minister said: 'I will turn around tomorrow and introduce exactly the same bill. I will take some of the worst bits off it because you have called me on it—you have called me on the fact that my original intention was to make women pay more and to give people crippling debts that would keep on growing so when women took time out of the workforce to have kids their debt would keep increasing even though they were not earning anything. You have found me out on that so I will take that bit out, but I will leave the rest in and pretend it is now fair.'

This message was not just coming from the Senate. This message is coming loud and clear from the Australian people. People in Australia know that once you deregulate university fees and say, 'You can just go for it now, guys; you institutions can charge whatever you like,' some courses will have their prices skyrocket out of the reach of ordinary citizens. That stands to reason. We have heard lecture after lecture from members of the government about how price signals are wonderful because they allow people to make choices. Anyone can look at any other commodity in the market to know that if you can charge whatever you want for it then people will charge a very high price knowing that there is a small proportion of the population that is able to pay that price and everyone else can go hang. That is exactly what universities will do.

The universities that are well established and well off and that are currently attractive because of their good institutional reputation or location will be able to charge whatever the hell they like in certain subjects. Each year there are only a few hundred places for subjects like law, medicine and vet science and when the places are limited the prices will go up and up. People saw last year the University of Western Australia and Melbourne University say that $100,000 for a degree is not unrealistic, especially when you look at what international students are paying at the moment. The minister comes in here and tells us that we should be satisfied with this bill because there will be a new cap in it and you will not have to pay more than an international student is paying. Some comfort that is, knowing that some degrees at the moment are in the vicinity of $100,000. He just made the point that we made all of last year and are going to continue to make all of this year.

The University of Western Australia says expect that some degrees could cost in the order of $100,000 and a lot of institutions now require you to do an undergraduate generalist degree before you can go into a specialised degree like law or medicine—these things are becoming postgraduate degrees now, so some students are going to have to do two degrees. If they want to get into medicine or law, they will have to do the generalist undergraduate and then go into the specialist one, so costs are going to go up and up. I would have thought that members of the government would read their journal of record The Australian, which made the point recently that students studying veterinary science are going to be up for around $200,000 at some universities. That will go down well in rural and regional Australia! That will get people staying on the farm. This government is proposing $200,000 to do vet science.

People know that once you say, 'Let it rip,' and people can charge whatever they like for education the cost of some degrees is going to be out of the reach of the everyday Australian. They are not going to want to graduate and then have to find a job, start a family and get a mortgage with a small mortgage already hanging around their neck, but that is what this government is condemning people to. Not only that, but if you happen to graduate and it takes a little while to find a job, heaven help you after six months because they are going to kick you off the dole and you will have nothing except a $200,000 degree. While you look for a job you will be forced to live on zero dollars a week.

If this government gets its way with this legislation and its other legislation, we will see the tipping point in this country, where, as a result of this government's action, future generations and people under 30 are going to be worse off than their parents, and the people who came before them. That is going to be the legacy of this government if this legislation and other legislation is passed. They stand up part of this bill and say, 'It is all going to be all right because there are scholarships,' but what they do not tell you is that they are not putting a dollar towards those scholarships. The funding for those scholarships is going to have to be met from the universities themselves. So they cut university funding by 20 per cent and say to universities, 'You are going to have to fund a bunch of scholarships as well as a 20 per cent funding cut.' Where is it going to come from? The money is going to come from the students in the form of higher fees, so this wonderful scholarship program that you are talking about is actually going to put fees up even further for everyone else.

They came back again at the start of this week and said: 'We're all ears. We hear what the Australian people are telling us and we understand that we might have got a few things wrong.' Obviously this is not one of them. Obviously this government have no compunction at all about making people graduate with a debt the size of a small mortgage before they have even started their working life. That is not off the table. They are pressing ahead with that. I must say that after hearing the government saying, 'We are all ears,' and, 'We hear the message,' I am yet to find one policy that they are firmly committed to scrapping, or one policy that was in last year's budget that they are firmly committed to taking off the table. It seems to be the case that they want to get it all through, and they are coming back and pushing again and again. They are going to be met with the same response and rightly so.

One of the other things that people have picked up on over the last few months is that not only is this bill taking 20 per cent of funding away from universities and then saying to them, 'From your cut funding you have to find money to fund some scholarships'; it is also going to take a pot of money that would have gone to universities and give it over to the private sector. It is going to give to the private sector $500 million that would otherwise have gone to universities. They are, in effect, not only going to deregulate but going to privatise universities as well. I struggled to find that in the government's election platform, but that is what they are going to do.

You do not have to look further than my home state of Victoria to see what the effect of doing that will be. It will rip money out of the public system and public education suffers, and that money then goes straight across to a private provider, who takes a whack of it in profit. That stands to reason; they are in business and they are private operators. That is fine. Good on them, but why should we, the public, be subsidising them at the cost of universities? That is what this government is asking us to do. In the TAFE sector and the vocational education sector last year, according to some research that has just been done, the private providers in the sector made $230 million profit, and that is off the back of public subsidies. So $230 million in Victoria that could have gone into TAFE to skill people up for the future is now going straight into the hands of private operators in the form of profit. And this government, with this legislation, wants to do that with $500 million of taxpayers' money—shovel it off to their mates in the private sector. It will be interesting to have a look at the list of Liberal Party donors. Why should the federal government and the Australian taxpayer subsidise a private for-profit education operator? Let them run their business, and good luck to them, but it is not our job to subsidise them.

I thought this government was all about saying that industry had to stand on its own two feet and that it is going to withdraw industry assistance. It seems that does not apply here; they are all too happy to gut universities and just shovel the money into the pockets of the private sector. What we know, and we have seen it in Victoria, is that when you introduce that kind of model the quality goes down because money that would have otherwise gone to teaching and research is now going towards someone's bottom line and is not finding its way back into the system at all, all courtesy of the taxpayer.

I take my hat off to the hundreds of thousands of students, family members, community members around the country and the National Tertiary Education Union and others, who have campaigned so strongly to say, 'This will fundamentally change the direction of education in Australia forever,' and, 'This will make Australia a more unequal country.' I say to them: thank you for your campaign because you have helped call this government out. If the government wants to find a reason as to why it is languishing in the polls—it is not the salesman; it is what you are trying to sell. People just do not want it.

If you think the answer is to come back here and say that you will just push this bill through as quickly as possible, do not be surprised if what happened in Queensland and what happened in Victoria happens to you again very soon. So it should because you have overstepped the mark. You have broken a fundamental compact with the people of this country, who want Australia to be a place where we look after each other, where no matter where you come from and how much money you earn you will get a good quality health care and a good quality education, and where when you get sick they check your Medicare card not your credit card. They want a place where when you go to university you do not leave with a debt the size of a small mortgage. You have pushed people too far and that is why you are in trouble. People want to make sure that in Australia education is available to everyone and remains so. That is why I am very proud to be opposing this bill. I will continue to fight for more money for our universities and better support for students. It will not be a moment too soon that this bill is defeated yet again in the Senate.

Debate adjourned.

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