Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Education Legislation Amendment (Overseas Debt Recovery) Bill 2015 and the Student Loans (Overseas Debtors Repayment Levy) Bill 2015. The fundamental principle behind the Education Legislation Amendment (Overseas Debt Recovery) Bill is that nothing is for free, including university education. It often amazes me when I hear many students stand up and say, 'We should have free education.' Someone has to pay. Someone has to pay the wages and salaries of the lecturers and someone has to pay for the builders that create the lecture halls, for the furniture in those lecture halls and for the electricity to keep the lights on. At the end of the day, somebody has to pay.

We have perhaps one of the most generous education systems in the world. We now enable anyone that wants to back themselves to get to university without paying one single cent up-front. Any Australian citizen that wants to back themselves and that thinks they can benefit by going to university can do so without paying one cent up-front. All we ask them, at the moment, is to repay on average less than half of that amount, with the taxpayer paying the other half. This is a more than fair system.

This is why I must comment on a few of the statements made by members of the opposition during this debate, where they have rabbited on about a scare campaign on so-called $100,000 degrees. I would ask those members to have a close look at themselves and think about the damage that they are potentially doing. We are all entitled to come here and talk about things to give us some type of political advantage or to raise points that we think are relevant, but to come into this chamber and spread what you know are deliberate falsehoods about $100,000 degrees, when that has the potential to do damage and to scare young people and deter them from going to university, is an absolute disgrace. That is the standard of the debate that we are getting from the opposition—an absolute disgrace for their own political advantage trying to scare young people of Australia and deter them from going to university. I would ask them, before they come in and continue with this outrageous scare campaign, to have a good look at themselves and consider the damage that they are doing. What also amazes me is that those who create these scare campaigns about student debt seem to have no worries about running up deficit after deficit after deficit, spending money that this nation does not have and running the entire nation into hundreds of billions worth of debt, which everyone is going to be forced to pay off in the future. The hypocrisy on this issue is outrageous.

We do have, and have had, one loophole in our legislation asking some of our students to make a contribution and to repay the debt and costs that they incurred through obtaining their university degree—that is, if you went overseas and you earned income overseas, then you did not have to make any contribution. It has been estimated that since 1989 some $800 million worth of revenue has been lost by the Australian taxpayer. This $800 million loss should not have happened in the past, but we need to put steps in place now to make sure that it does not happen in the future. While the future is uncertain—no-one knows what industries will be successful and no-one knows what new technologies or new innovations we will come up with—one thing that we can be sure about is that in the future the Australian economy will be more integrated with the world economy than ever before.

We need to remember that 98 per cent of the world's economy lies beyond Australia shores. The opportunities for young Australians today to travel and work overseas are unheralded in our nation's history. We have free trade agreements with China, Japan, South Korea and the recent TPP involving 12 countries. The opportunities for young Australians who obtain their degree here in Australia and travel overseas to get a job have never ever been greater in our nation's history. Therefore, it is only fair that we ask them that if they earn above a certain threshold—currently, around $50,000 each year—then they help contribute to the expenses that were incurred in giving them the advantage of a degree. It is simply a fair system. I do not see how anyone could argue against it.

The other point that needs to be made is that when Australians work in many overseas countries they are paying a much lower rate of personal income tax than they would in Australia. So we need to be very careful here in Australia. It is all very well to say that we want to raise taxes to pay for some harebrained scheme that may come up in government, but we already have a top rate of personal income tax approaching 50 per cent. In other countries, that is as low as 15 per cent and in some countries there are no taxes at all. If we are going, as the Australian taxpayer, to subsidise 50 per cent of university fees for many students, then this is an only fair system. We need to be careful. If we continue to do this—if we continue to have such big differences between personal tax rates here in Australia and the personal tax rates overseas—we risk damaging our economy and collecting less tax revenue in total. I will leave my comments there. This is sensible bill, it is a fair bill, and I commend it to the house.

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