Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

people who I come into this chamber every day to represent, who are on incomes that are less than half of what the degree will cost, supporting relatively large families. These families are not going to consider $100,000 to be a simply absorbable cost, as we might see from people in other electorates in other parts of Australia.

I know that, in the world that some other members may live in, everyone's parents are at home encouraging them about the importance of education and talking to them about their need to stay at school for as long as they want, but there are lots of kids who live in my electorate who actually do not have their families saying that to them. They have families at home saying, 'Please, you need to be earning so you're helping our family now.' These are not families that are going to think that $100,000 is an amount of money that they can afford for their kids to go to university. That is just ridiculous.

Something else that I have talked about to local principals is that, for sure, there will be this shorter term impact on kids who are going into the end of their secondary years now, and of course they are not going to be as excited about going to university when they are going to be saddled with this enormous debt, but the principals are actually most concerned about a change to the culture over time. What these rules say to them is that education is for families who can deal with these amounts of money. Those families are not the ones that go to some of the schools in my electorate.

This policy says to us that this kind of scholarship scheme—which is the throwaway to the people who cannot afford through their families to pay fees—is going to resolve the equity question, but not all the kids in these schools are going to get these scholarships. It is saying to them that it is fine for families that can afford it. There is much broader access to education for those families. But, in these really struggling households, it is only a few of the best and brightest that will get to go to our best universities.

In Australia, this is just not how we do things, and I do not think that most Australians want to see that changed. We want our country to be a meritocracy. That is what Labor stands for. We want to live in a community and a society where young people all around the country believe that their skills and their capacities will be equally valued and that the government will be just as enthusiastic about getting the best out of those young people as they are about getting the best out of young people who are trying to get degrees but have families who are able to pay those exorbitant fees that we are going to see as a result of these policies.

This is absolutely anathema to the Australia that, as Labor people, we want to live in. I just say to those on the other side of the House that I can understand that, in different types of communities, you might not experience this. You might not have schools like those in the really disadvantaged parts of my electorate. But it is just the honest truth that, when I talk to those principals, they are extremely worried. They are extremely concerned. When I talk to young people who live in regional Australia, I hear the same types of messages. We know that there are lots of young people in regional communities who study at regional universities and who would not study were the university not there. We cannot just assume that all young people are equally mobile and able to move into the city when they want to take up that opportunity to go off to university.

I am really proud to stand today and say that, on behalf of the people of Hotham, I absolutely oppose the measures in this bill. It is bad policy. It was bad policy to begin with, made perhaps only worse by the fact that the savings measures in this bill, by and large, are now gone. So now we have a dramatic change to the way education is funded in Australia that puts costs onto families and costs onto students, and we do not get much back by way of savings. It was bad policy to begin with; it is bad policy now, and I am proud to say that I do not support it.

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