Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I have seldom heard a contribution in this place that bears less relation to reality than the one we just heard from the Minister for Education. 'The fixer' certainly displayed his tenuous grip on reality in that contribution! He talked about the University of Sydney and the University of Technology in my electorate. I have been with students and academics at both of those institutions in recent weeks, particularly during O week. The students are desperately worried about the financial penalties that they will incur in undertaking a degree, while the academics are desperately worried that young people will not be able to afford to do the courses that they are offering.

The Minister for Education talked about how great it would be when Sydney university could offer more scholarships. I have two things to say about that. First, these scholarships are funded by the fees of other students. They are not through the generosity of the universities or the generosity of the education minister. Second, the reason that you need 9,000 scholarships is that ordinary kids will not be able to afford to go to university under this minister's education plans.

We say that bright kids should be able to go to university based on their ability, based on their desire to work hard, based on the passions that they have and the interests that they want to pursue professionally. We know that, after those bright kids go to university, they will repay the investment we as a community make in their education by working hard for our nation and by paying their taxes—by earning well and paying more taxes over the years. Eighty-eight per cent of people want their kids to be able to go to university. The minister says, 'Why should a factory worker, why should a taxi driver, why should a shopkeeper pay for someone else's kids to go to university?' I will tell you why my dad, who was a plumber, and my mum, who was a housewife, were happy to pay their taxes: because they were delighted that they had three children who, if they worked hard, if they tried hard and if they were bright, could one day go to university.

I am reminded of that brilliant speech that Neil Kinnock made in 1987. He asked why he was 'the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university' and why his wife, Glenys, was 'the first woman in her family for a thousand generations' to go to university? Was it because their predecessors were dumb? Was it because they were weak? It was not. It was because the previous generations did not have the structures, like those we have now, to collectively contribute to the education of all children so that those children are raised up as individuals. They benefit and their families benefit, but we as a nation benefit too.

We know that our prosperity in the future will not depend just on what we dig out of the ground and it will not depend just on what we grow. Those things will always be important, but it is how we transfer those raw materials—through our hard work, through our brains, through our inventiveness and through our intellect—that will really count in the world of the future. By 2020, two-thirds of jobs will require a university education. That is the answer to why the taxi driver, the shopkeeper and the factory worker do not mind paying their taxes. They know that their kids will have an opportunity to benefit individually, and they know also that this is an investment in the prosperity of our nation.

John Adams, 200 years ago, in the beautiful series of letters that he wrote to his wife, Abigail, said:

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

What he was saying is that every generation wants life to be a bit better for the next generation. That is true of us as individuals in what we want for our own children; it is true of us as leaders in the federal parliament in what we want for our nation. We want the best, brightest, hardest-working kids—irrespective of their family background, irrespective of the parent's ability to pay and irrespective of their own ability to pay—to be able to choose a university education or a vocational education, whatever it is that suits them, their interests and their abilities. A system that only relies on scholarships for those kids is not a system that I can support.

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