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

I would be fascinated to know what the member said when he was the student president at university in the bygone days when HECS was introduced. I would like to dig that up—because I have got on record what Peter Costello said about HECS when he was the student president at Monash University. You may say that the Labor Party was once great. But I am not going to say that the Liberal Party was once great—it has never been great. And this week has been a complete demonstration that we cannot point to anything they have done that was reformist or good. This week we saw the astounding event of a six-hour party room meeting. In my 17 years in this place I have never seen the Labor Party sit through six hours of discussion.

Why do I raise that? Because the Prime Minister said, quite rightly, that a lot of people who voted for the Liberal Party are going to feel dudded. Well, they feel a lot more dudded about this appalling legislation. This was an extraordinary statement from a Prime Minister who has already dudded every voter across this country. He has dudded every pensioner, every retiree, every hardworking low-and middle income family and women in particular around parental leave. Most importantly, he has dudded young people who are struggling to get an education—young people with hope and aspirations not based on their parents' income but on their ability to go to university. The Prime Minister wants to dramatically increase the out-of-pocket costs for every university degree and push some up as high as $100,000—and the Group of Eight have mentioned that.

And why do we know this could happen? Because it has happened before. It happened under the Howard government when the maximum rate for HECS was introduced. Here is how one newspaper paraphrased the then education minister, Brendan Nelson, at the time:

Education Minister Brendan Nelson has said that introducing fee flexibility would mean some course costs would rise, some would drop and others would stay the same, according to demand.

Does that sound vaguely familiar? Yes—because it is exactly what the current education minister has said. But did that happen? No, it did not. Here's what Dr Nelson said in an opinion piece he wrote at the time:

Some institutions may increase the tuition fees in some disciplines. Some institutions have already indicated they would like to reduce their fees or make no change at all.

But what happened? Here is what Dr Nelson said during debate on his bill:

Some university vice-chancellors have already said that they will not be changing their HECS charges .... it is quite wrong for critics to say that every HECS charge is going up by 30 per cent …

Sound familiar? Yes. And what happened? Everyone rose to the maximum amount of 30 per cent when there was a cap.

Deregulate and you all have to go to the maximum amount, especially when you are also taking away 20 per cent of the funding to universities. That is something that they took off the table—standing next to the Group of Eight—before this budget. And then it was miraculously back in the budget papers. We were told that the 20 per cent was going. We were told by the Prime Minister before he won the election that there would be no cuts to education. What a joke! What an out and out disgrace! What a lie!

We were also promised by the Minister for Education that they were not going to raise fees. But the first thing he introduced into this parliament was legislation to deregulate, which was automatically going to increase fees and take away 20 per cent of funding. Why is this so important to me? Because my electorate is home to over 50,000 university students at Monash and Clayton and the Deakin city campus at Burwood. I was at Deakin just the other day having a sausage sizzle with the students. Every one of them is concerned. They are not concerned about what we are telling them; they are concerned about what the university is not telling them. What is actually going to be the cost of their degree into the future? And it is not just for future students; it is for students now. Before, you probably would not have used higher education as a thing you would lobby on. But now everyone should have the aspiration for their child and for themselves to go to university. Deakin university will lose $157 million in funding over four years, and Monash will lose more. This will also reduce the ability to do research in this field.

And what about STEM for the future? What about the kids at great institutions like Box Hill High in my electorate, which is an amazing STEM institution already? Already, 305 students who have graduated from Box Hill High have gone on to STEM courses. This is a local government high school that provides amazing science and maths courses. In particular, it runs a program for educating boys. It is an exciting place to be. But already the students there are concerned that they will never have the opportunity to go to university. They know that their parents have made sacrifices enough. How are the government going to get away with this? The Prime Minister should be sorry for dudding every student in this country— (Time expired)

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