Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

It was Oscar Wilde who had his character in Lady Windermere's Fan Lord Darlington say that a cynic was a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. You could say that those who put a blind faith in market forces, who think deregulation is an end in itself, suffer from the same hopeless mix of obsession and ignorance. And this government, in so many areas, has shown that same inclination to let the market loose, to let prices and profits reign in areas where prices and profits do not belong and to allow the often unfair, imbalanced and distorting effects of an improperly regulated market to cause harm to Australia's social fabric.

The most important aspects of our shared wellbeing, and indeed the defining features of the fair go in Australia, are the public goods we enjoy and maintain together—our public health and public education systems, our land and marine environments. Yet this government in all those areas wants to privatise and deregulate or else enable the private exploitation of those shared public goods. This is ideological madness.

The government's proposed deregulation of university fees will take higher education further down the path to becoming a product to be advertised and sold to those with the greatest purchasing power. It will take university education further down the path of commodification and image marketing, and it will make Australia's productivity and innovation future subject to both personal and institutional economic self-interest.

Universities are not supermarkets, and degrees are not products to be produced at the cheapest cost and sold to the highest bidder. We are fortunate in Australia to be able to consider the path other nations have followed in comparable areas of public policy, and of course the United States is particularly relevant as a country that has favoured deregulation and the private-sector provision of health and education. On that point, it is interesting that last July, when Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was asked to nominate the two biggest mistakes the government could make in taking Australia down the path of economic stagnation and widening inequality, he cited the deregulation of universities and the introduction of the Medicare co-payment. In stark contrast to the Minister for Education, who said Australia has much to learn from the United States, Mr Stiglitz said:

Countries that imitate the American model are kidding themselves.

He went on to say:

Trying to pretend that universities are like private markets is absurd. The worst-functioning part of the US educational market at the tertiary level is the private for-profit system. It is a disaster. It excels in one area, exploiting poor children.

If you're rich your parents can pay the fees, but if you are poor you are going to worry about how much debt you're undertaking.

It is a way of closing off opportunity and that's why the US doesn't have educational opportunity.

While we in the US are trying to re-regulate universities, you are talking about deregulating them. It really is a crime.

That is what is at issue here—a proposal to make university education less accessible and less fair. It is absolute rubbish for people to claim that the use of the HECS or HELP loan schemes makes the level of fee irrelevant. Anyone with any experience of the real world, especially the real world of people in lower income families, would know that the prospect of taking on a large debt acts as a powerful disincentive. It will mean that young people who already question whether university is a feasible option choose not to back themselves and their talent and their potential, or else choose a cheaper option than the course to which they are best suited.

In my state we do not need to speculate about how the government's proposed deregulation would change the landscape, because there has already been a clear indication from the University of Western Australia about how it would respond. UWA announced that it would replace the current three-tier system of regulated fees, where the highest fee is $10,500, with a flat fee across its five bachelor degree streams of $16,000 a year

That amounted to a price rise of 55 per cent for commerce students, 75 per cent for science students and 155 per cent for arts students.

This is the reality in prospect under the Abbott government's deregulation agenda for Australian universities and Australian students—a massive jump in the cost burden and a massive barrier and disincentive for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and from rural and regional areas, as I was, who already face additional challenges.

I have some sympathy for the universities themselves—to the extent that the government is offering fee deregulation as a sop to cover huge cuts in funding to the sector. But I am glad that the uncritical and even unbridled enthusiasm of some universities has given way to a more sober assessment of the real effects and impacts of deregulation on education, equality of opportunity and fairness in Australia.

The Abbott government's proposed funding cuts and fee deregulation for tertiary education in Australia have rightly been rejected by this parliament on two occasions; they represent another broken promise, another example of a government that wants to price everything but values nothing.

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