Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not just about how much money you can shovel out the door. It is not just about how many people graduate; it is patently about the quality of the graduates you create. The shadow minister was talking like Indigenous people being offered baubles by explorers, seeing plastic 3D modelling and saying how wonderful it is that they can turn around a part. I mean for goodness sake, it is way more than just 3D modelling and printing. This is about, in the peleton of developed economies, having a nation whose graduates can create new ideas and operationalise them. It is not about how many teachers you can graduate. With a BA from the University of Melbourne in teaching, 16,000 unemployed primary school teachers are added onto the waiting list of unemployed teachers, half of them with their expertise in health and physical education.

For goodness sake, it is about keeping women in STEM. It is about encouraging young women who are at school to take up a STEM career. Again, it is not just about waving their HECS debt; it is about the quality of the degree. I know you have got a BA. For anyone who has a BA on that side of the fence, you can speak with all the authority you want about your BA but this is about high-tech degrees in STEM, engineering and maths, and this is what we have to achieve. It is not about the simplistic model of just waiving a HECS fee; it is about encouraging young women at school to take on a career in STEM and do the highest quality degree they can.

A $100,000 degree—doesn't it sound horrible? Most universities charge $15,000 a year for a quantitative degree. A medical degree is six years—that is $90,000. Memo to the Labor Party: we are already paying $90,000 for a medical degree. These individuals will earn more than $2 million. That is more earnings in a lifetime than what people who do not get that medical degree earn. I do not think that a $10,000 premium for a quality medical degree is that much of a problem for a medical student. Those on the other side have never met a medical student complaining that their $90,000 degree might be a $100,000 degree. If it gets them the $2 million lifetime earnings premium, they have no problem paying it.

What we have a larger problem with is Labor's system that led to massive debts for those who took out VET FEE-HELP degrees. They now labour under a massive debt burden thanks to your system. The Labor Party did way more damage than they ever did to science graduates by queuing up people under that model and leaving them with a massive public debt. Let there never be a complaint from universities focused on quality that this is a debate about money. It is about the finest graduates that we can create, and Australia is doing very finely in that respect.

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