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

The member says that he needs police protection. I am not surprised, when he is taking Australian students and Australian universities down a very dark path. It is not surprising that he needs protection from the Australian people. I will stay on track, because I was pointing out that this is incredibly bad policy and it is time for the minister and the Prime Minister to give it up. The Prime Minister has had a bad week. There is no doubt about it; he has had a bad week. It has been a difficult time for him. My advice to him would be, if he wanted to turn his week around, to abandon this plan. He could come out tomorrow and say, 'This is a captain's pick.' One of the few popular captain's picks would be to abandon his plan for $100,000 degrees, because it absolutely bad policy.

The minister is losing friends very quickly. As I said, in the Group of Eight there are more and more vice-chancellors that are saying that this policy is not right. Of course, we have got the crossbench who is saying that nothing will move them, because it is fundamentally bad policy. We have each of those senators telling the minister that, so the question is: why do they pursue this? Why are they pursuing this unfair and unpopular package? It is time that they did listen to the Australian people and actually abandon this.

In the small time that I have left, I would like to say that the Labor Party stands in stark contrast. In Bluestocking Week, when we celebrate the contribution of women to higher education, we see that while the Liberal Party has $100,000 degrees, Labor has a clear program in which we will focus on STEM. We will focus on STEM because that is where the jobs of tomorrow will come from. Indeed, one of our policies—we have got a whole suite that I will not have time to go through—is that we will fund $100,000 STEM award degrees: $20,000 a year for five years, which will provide a financial incentive for students to enrol. We will focus on encouraging women to participate in that. It would be great to see those on the other side actually have a policy to address STEM and to attract women to STEM disciplines. Labor has a policy on this; the Liberal Party does not. (Time expired)

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