Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think that this is a great discussion to have—not so much the topic of the MPI, but I think that the discussion around higher education is a great one to have. I go back to a previous MPI that we had on this. The member for Pearce gave a great speech where he outlined why he thought this was a great discussion to have. Under the Menzies system, there were Commonwealth scholarships. So it was not as if everyone had to pay to go to university. John Howard went to Canterbury Boys’ High School, a state high school. He was the first Prime Minister ever to go to a state high school. He won a Commonwealth scholarship because he was one of the best and brightest. Lots of people went through that system.

The question asked by Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s was: could you get more people from lower SES backgrounds to go to university if you removed all the costs? I think that was a great question to ask. They took away all the costs. I notice the member for Chisholm is in the chamber. She did not pay for her first degree, and I remember that story. By the time that 1988 came around and Labor brought in HECS, the answer was: no, it would not. Free education would not necessarily raise the number of low-SES students, because the fact was that the numbers had not changed substantially. So Labor brought in HECS.

On this issue, you always hear the Labor Party say that we did not take this to an election and that it is a budget bill not an education bill. I point out that every bill is a budget bill, because everything passes—including HECS. I quote from a speech that I gave earlier in relation to higher education:

Liberal Senator Bill Teague led our response to the package of bills, which included HECS, in a major change to higher education, which, incidentally, in 1989 was not taken to an election. This is what then Senator Teague said:

We in the Opposition are opposed to the graduate tax, but we will be supporting the higher education contribution scheme in this legislation, for several reasons. First, it is a Budget Bill and we respect the ability of an elected government in the House of Representatives to determine a Budget and its financial provision for higher education.

That is what a responsible opposition does. It respects the government's right to set a budget.

This debate gets down to the argument that a degree should cost the same in every context. My university in Townsville is James Cook University, and it is a Menzies university. We have a science degree which includes access to Orpheus Island, to a working cattle station and to the Great Barrier Reef; it offers all of these things. Why should that degree cost the same as a degree in the concrete jungle in Melbourne? Surely, there should be some differentiation.

HECS was brought in, and the number of students from lower SES backgrounds did not drop; in fact, it rose. Towards the end of the Keating government and into the first Howard government, we actually had increases of up to 800 per cent in HECS.

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