Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The major difference, Mr Huff-and-puff up there, is that Whitlam made historical changes that shifted Australia towards a significantly more equal society and made us more economically flexible. The current government aims to divide our nation with this legislation and make us a more elitist society where students will be given a debt sentence as a barrier to opportunity. This will also, importantly, undermine productivity opportunities. With a growing number of students finishing year 12 and looking for further education, the system was due for an overhaul, I understand. Funding the entire cost of their education would place a significant burden on the budget, the LNP made that clear; but let us contrast it and see it through the prism of the Whitlam government's changes, especially after his death.

In 1974 the Whitlam government abolished university fees, opening campuses to groups that had previously largely been excluded from this elite education. In 1989 it was the Hawke government which massively expanded university education through the Dawkins revolution, in the form of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. Since these innovative changes, HECS-style income-contingent loan systems have been adopted around the world. Dawkins chose—quite controversially at the time—to fund this massive expansion in the number of university places available to Australian students through the introduction of this groundbreaking deferred-repayment, income-contingent student loan scheme. This values-driven choice of the Labor government meant that funding for the sector could be dramatically increased without students from disadvantaged backgrounds being locked out of the system.

A modern Australia requires our brightest to strive. The policy being promulgated by those opposite is the 'dumb-but-rich' model. This simply will not create the jobs and opportunities of the 21st and 22nd centuries and it demonstrates a stark difference between Liberal-National party policies and all those higher education reforms introduced under Labor. This government, the Abbott government, wants to allow universities to charge students as much as they want for a degree. This is an assault on the middle class and an assault on Australia's social mobility, to quote the member for Wakefield. A degree should not be a debt sentence.

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