Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I agree with the last statement from the member for Herbert: education is one of our largest export earners. That is no more evident than in my electorate, which is home to Monash University's Clayton campus, one of the largest university campuses in Australia, and the city campus of Deakin University, in Burwood. Between them they educate in excess of 50,000 students on campus and it is probably 100,000 when you take in the offline students and students around the world. Monash has a campus in South Africa, of all places.

So this is a huge issue. It is not something to be bandied around and made fun of with Monty Python skits, even though I am a great Monty Python fan. A bit of Monty Python on the record is not something that goes astray, but nor should this be used as a political football, which the Prime Minister did at the election when he said there would be 'no cuts to education'. The Minister for Education, when he was the shadow minister, said there were not going to be any rises in fees. Both of these statements were absolutely false. I will not use the other word because I know the rules of the parliament, but these statements before the election were completely and utterly false. Not only was this not an election commitment anywhere; this is a completely nasty surprise—a complete falsehood from both the Prime Minister and the Minister for Education—and it is not something we can just joke about. This is one of the nastiest surprises from the unfair budget, in which, again, we were not going to have any surprises or shocks. It is Gomer Pyle on steroids—'Surprise, surprise, surprise!' The surprises are out there and happening, including $100,000 degrees. You might quibble about it, but it is now been proven that that is how much they are going to cost.

Why do we want to go back to the days of having scholarships? Why do we want to go back to the days when my father-in-law had to sit his matriculation twice to get a perfect score to get into medicine at Melbourne? Why would we want to deny this populous of one of the best doctors I know because his father was a tram driver? Surely, he should have been able to just enter that university on the score he got the first time around, which was in excess of what was needed in that day to get into medicine—but, no, he needed a full scholarship. There was no way his father, a tram driver, was going to get his son through university. Did my parents get to go to university? No, they did not.

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