Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question. The government's higher education policy retains our support for higher education through both direct funding of the cost of higher education for students and the loan scheme as one of the most generous in the world. The majority of the cost of a student's higher education will continued to be funded by the government. It is reasonable to ask students to pay an increased amount for the extraordinary benefit of a higher education, which of course confers on those students great additional earning capacity in the years ahead.

The honourable member asked also about company tax. Part of our budget and part of our economic plan is to reduce business taxes in Australia. Why are we doing that? We are doing that so that those students and many other young Australians will get a job. That is what we are doing, because that is the whole purpose of higher education. That is the purpose of vocational education. That is the purpose of an apprenticeship. That is what young Australians want. They want to know that there will be a job. What that means is that they need Australian businesses to be competitive. You cannot be competitive with a tax rate at 30 per cent when the US is heading to 15 per cent. That is obvious. That was a rationale and an insight—a penetrating glimpse of the obvious, you might think—that was apparent to the Labor Party and indeed to the Leader of the Opposition. I remember that back in 2012 he spoke quite eloquently about it from this side of the chamber. What we are doing is securing those young Australians' future by investing in reform that will deliver more investment in business, more jobs, better jobs and better opportunities.

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