Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, hasn't this MPI set the cat amongst the pigeons. Here I was preparing this afternoon and thinking: we might get there and someone on the other side might get up and announce a new policy. I was quite hopeful that perhaps we would come in here this afternoon, all prepared to talk about $100,000 degrees, to find that they had been dustbinned. But, no, what we have learnt this afternoon is what we knew before we got here. What we have learnt is that while the member for Sturt is busy 'unleashing his revolutionary', the new minister is hiding the mess left by the member for Sturt, the self-proclaimed fixer, who has gone off to fix something else.

What we have learnt is that they are not throwing out this terrible policy. They are not going to stop the cuts to universities. They are not going to stop the $100,000 degrees that they want to foist on the young people in my electorate of Lalor. No, what we have learnt today is that they are trudging on with this great policy of theirs. They are trudging on with their unfairness. They are trudging on with that 2014 budget. They are trudging on with the cruel, unfair measures from the 2014 budget. New minister? There is nothing new to see here, though—$100,000 degrees are alive and well, just as we thought. All we have heard from the new minister is a concession that he could not possibly bring in the price rises in 2016 because it had been beaten in the Senate twice and he could not put the legislation through a third time. The fixer has been foiled, one might say, and left this mess for the new minister to try to clean up. Rather than come in here today and make an announcement of a new policy—rather than follow Labor, lockstep, down the road in the year of ideas and give us an idea—they are staying with this policy, which has been rejected soundly by the Australian public. I am trying to remember what month it was last year when the petition ticked over to 100,000 signatures against the $100,000 degrees. I am trying to remember when we ticked over that milestone.

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