Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am not surprised to see the member for Kingston run this scare campaign, because she has form. She was flown into Launceston last year to debate me at Launceston College. They bypassed every Labor senator and every Labor member in Tasmania and brought in the higher education spokesperson to debate me. So she had exactly the same bag of scary spiders and bag of skeletons to scare the people in my home state. She failed miserably, because my interest then and my interest now is in actually making higher education something that more young Tasmanians desire—and we have to do that, because in my home state, I regret to say, less than seven per cent of young people attend university, compared to a mainland average of about 40 per cent.

So my interest is to have a lot more young Tasmanians in the future coming to university—choosing that tertiary pathway—because, even though we need strong vocational pathways, higher education reform is vital. As we look at the engine room of global prosperity shifting to the Asia-Pacific region, we need to make sure that we have that engine room of innovation and research in all of our universities, including in the University of Tasmania.

That is why I am disappointed to say that the long-term future of Tasmanians is being white-anted by this sort of myopic politicking, and Labor does it in far too many policy areas: trade, higher education and others. The inevitable offspring of success in both of these policy areas will be jobs and a more resilient economy, so I know how disappointed people in my state will be with this sort of scare campaign. What those opposite ignore is the necessity to fix the government-supported pathways and diploma courses which promise to make higher education available to thousands more young Tasmanians. Without that higher education reform, there is little scope to change the way that things are now.

Labor achieves nothing with these scare campaign apart from attracting comparisons with the Greens. I heard the member for Chisholm talk about the affordability of higher education. As we know, the truth of it is that higher education is accessible by people in Australia. There is a thing called HECS, whereby no Australian student has to pay a dollar up-front to attend university. They can borrow the full cost through a taxpayer funded scheme and do not need to repay anything until they earn in excess of $53,345 a year and then at only two per cent of their income in the initial stages. The member for Chisholm talked about cuts. Let me state for the record: that is not true either. I refer her to page 6-19 of Budget Paper No. 1, which confirms that funding for higher education grows every year across the forward estimates, from $8.97 billion to $9.47 billion in 2017-18.

If there is any remorse to be had about higher education, then it is clearly linked to the inaction that we saw under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments from 2008 to 2013, with billions of dollars cut from higher education. In fact, $6.6 billion was cut from the higher education sector. Even the often-quoted David Gonski has publicly criticised those Labor cuts. Labor continues to fail in this vital policy area through the sorts of false claims it makes about degree costs. In fact, the education minister announced on 1 October that university funding arrangements for 2016 would be the same as for 2015 while he consults on a sustainable funding basis for universities. Even when we were looking at trying to implement the higher education reforms, the highest fees announced by universities were less than half of what Labor is now proposing those fees would rise to. That demonstrates that, if you discount everything Labor says by at least a factor of 50 per cent, you start to get to somewhere close to the truth.

I ask those opposite to put aside their fake skeletons, bag of spiders and scare campaigns and think of the tens of thousands of Australians, and the many thousands of young Tasmanians, who would benefit from higher education reforms. Stop discriminating against those who would benefit most from a revitalised higher education system and join us in evidence based policy making.

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