George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a very rare thing we are debating at the moment—a debt that the Labor Party actually does not like! In this case, it is student debt. This is a very rare thing we are debating. It is almost as rare as the $100,000 degrees that we are told about in the member for Kingston's MPI here. It says in the MPI that there are $100,000 degrees, and so it says on the posters that the Labor Party members put out the front of their offices here in Parliament House, along with all the propaganda that they are speaking to themselves about.

Where are these $100,000 degrees? We have looked high. We have looked low. The member for Aston has looked for them. The member who spoke earlier has looked for them. We have looked for them in the Group of Eight. We have looked for them in the sandstone universities. We looked for them in the University of Western Australia when it set its fees. We looked for them in QUT when it set its fees. I could look for them in the Regional Universities Network. One university that is a member of that is the Central Queensland University. They say:

Despite the scare campaign, we do not believe that $100,000 degrees will be a reality in the regions.

So they do not exist in the cities or the regions. Where, oh, where are these $100,000 degrees?

Mr Speaker, I am just going to check my drawer and see if there is a $100,000 degree in here. No, there are no 100,000 degrees in here. Perhaps you could check under your computers for me, Mr Deputy Speaker! Member for Aston, perhaps you could check in the dispatch box. Please, tell me if one of those $100,000 degrees is in there. We are having a hard time finding them.

But they exist, apparently. Where? In Labor Party modelling. The only place they exist is in modelling that those opposite have paid for. It might have been done by NATSEM, but everyone knows one thing about modelling: if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out. That is exactly what these $100,000 degrees are—absolute rubbish.

It is disgraceful that the Labor Party have come into this place and attacked the very fundamental thing we have in this country of university education that is accessible to all students. In doing so, they are undermining the system. They are undermining the system because they are going to make it financially unviable. When they come in here, their proposals all sound great. They came in here on the reply-to-the-budget night and the Leader of the Opposition said, 'We are going to make university degrees free for a bunch of people in the STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths—area.' It sounds great, but ultimately nothing is free. Someone has to pay. When we looked to see what the costs were, the first to come out was at 8.59 that Thursday night when the speech was delivered by the Leader of the Opposition. It came out in The Guardian. They said, 'It is going to be $353.2 million.' That figure was too big, so the Labor Party ran around and shortly afterwards said, 'No, no. It's only $45 million.' There was a lot of confusion because these were numbers that were coming out of the Labor Party.

Then we heard from the Leader of the Opposition the next day on ABC Radio National that it was only $350 million. Then, again, later on in its FutureSmart Universities policy released that day they said it was going to be only $45 million. They went back and forth. They do not know the numbers. Then the next day in The Australian it was reported that it would be a $1.4 billion hit to the taxpayer and to the university system, making this university system unsustainable. And now they have the gall to come in here and lecture us about fictional $100,000 degrees when what we want to do is make the university system sustainable well into the future. Right now it is not and it certainly will not be if Labor come in and give out free degrees to people.

The principles we have in the university system are right. You can basically put your degree on the credit card and pay it back when you have the capacity to do so. That is a great thing for students from all walks of life, from all socioeconomic groups, and it is something that should remain in place. The Labor Party should get on board with the deregulation we are proposing.

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