Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I have a number of questions for the Minister for Education and Training. Firstly, referring to a previous answer he gave a little earlier to the member for Port Adelaide, he said that all states have signed up to the independent schools model and that indeed that included Labor states. I have the agreements with the states here and for both South Australia and New South Wales there is a clause which says that it will not establish a model with independent public schools. Does the minister still back up these claims? I am happy to table these documents if he needs to read them. Maybe he needs his memory refreshed.

I also have a number of questions in regard to his proposals to make massive cuts to our universities and indeed to impose significant fee increases on our university students. Despite his legislation having been defeated twice in the parliament, can the minister confirm that the Abbott government is still committed to deregulating universities, sentencing Australian students to $100,000 dollar degrees and also, for the first time, imposing fees on PhD students?

I would also like the minister to confirm and concede that he is making $5 billion worth of cuts with the cuts to the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, the Sustainable Research Excellence program and the Research Training Scheme. Will he confirm that it does equal close to $5 billion worth of cuts? Also, given the government's plan to deregulate universities and rip billions of dollars out of the higher education system has now been defeated, is it slightly duplicitous to put the $37 billion worth of savings in the budget? Will he review that if his legislation gets defeated again? When will we actually get an accurate budget picture, considering this bill has been defeated twice? Will the minister take advice from the vice-chancellors that his time line for implementing these changes is just not practicable? Does the minister still think that six months is sufficient time to introduce these changes? If he does not introduce these changes, how will that affect the forward estimates and when will we hear a report of that? Finally, we would like the minister to tell us if he does plan to bring the legislation to the parliament, where is this legislation, when will he reintroduce it and what is his time frame for that?

See this speech in context