Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before the election, Minister Pyne said:

The Coalition has no plans to increase university fees …

Now he wants to allow universities to charge as much as students or their parents are prepared to pay. This is an outrageous breach of intergenerational equity, made even worse by his botched plan to hold scientists and scientific research hostage to it. If his legislation is again defeated in the Senate he will have shredded all credibility and the Prime Minister should sack him. He has cost the government much more support than poor old Peta Credlin. The minister is undermining academic standards and quality. When I went to university there were no fees and places were allocated on the basis of academic merit. If the Liberal government succeeds in its plan to deregulate university fees, we will have achieved the complete opposite of the system of the 1970s. Academic merit and performance will count for nothing. Your capacity, or more accurately your parent's capacity, to pay large fees will count for everything. Under this, what point would there be in working hard during year 12. What value would be the marks of students past who have worked hard and done well in year 12. Good luck to the year 12 teachers, and secondary teachers generally, trying to encourage their students to do the hard yards at secondary school. This is a free market dream that will give us declining academic quality and increasing social inequality.

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