Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last night, my grandfather passed away. He was born in 1932 and he was incredibly intelligent—the smartest person I ever met. But there was never any risk that he'd be able to go to university; there was never any prospect of that. He left school as a child and became a fireman on a steam train. Later, when he started his own business, he was incredibly successful. The business he founded is still running today. I think it is fantastic that people of his generation were able to do well without the same opportunities that people of my generation have. But I also think it would have been incredible had he had those same opportunities.

I'm a first-in-family to have gone to university, like a lot of people on the Labor Party's side of this parliament and like a lot of people who are at universities today. I got opportunities two generations after my grandfather, but they're also opportunities that my mother never had and that my father never had. They left school at grade 10, as was normal at the time. Again, there was never any suggestion they would go to university. Again, they were very intelligent people who started small businesses, who have worked very hard their whole lives but who just have not had the same opportunities. Yet there I was finishing school in the nineties and going off to James Cook University to start a degree. Why? Why was I was able to do that? It was because of Labor reforms to higher education. It was because of Gough Whitlam's reforms, and it was because of Bob Hawke's reforms.

I just heard the coalition member who spoke before me in this debate try to appropriate Bob Hawke and John Dawkins and the reforms that they made in the 1980s and try to compare this bill, the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (A More Sustainable, Responsive and Transparent Higher Education System) Bill 2017, to those reforms as though that is a rational thing to do, but it is not. Those were reforms under which students were asked to pay a small contribution into the public purse to help defray the cost of university and to increase the availability of funding for universities. This bill seeks to implement Liberal Party ideology, where they think students should pay more. They just think students should pay more. You heard why, because of what the member before me said. He said it is because students are the principal beneficiaries of higher education.

This bill seeks to increase the overall proportion of the costs of university study paid by students to the highest proportion it has ever been since Gough Whitlam freed up higher education in this country. At the same time, this bill, unlike Bob Hawke's reforms, unlike John Dawkins's reforms, seeks to cut funding to universities. This is a bill that is aimed at putting up fees for no other reason than that the Liberal Party think people should pay more, because that's what they reckon, and at the same time they want to deliver funding cuts to universities. It's a disgrace to be doing it, and it's definitely a disgrace to be appropriating Labor heroes like Bob Hawke in doing so.

To argue that students are the principal beneficiaries of university education is, I think, really revealing on the part of the coalition member who spoke before me. Not even the minister's own documents argue that students are the principal beneficiaries. Even the leadership of the Liberal Party acknowledges that the public benefit of university education is greater than the private benefit that accrues to individuals. But the member argued that students are the principal beneficiaries, and let's talk about that. Is a student who becomes a community legal centre employee, working in an Aboriginal legal service for family and domestic violence victims and survivors, the primary beneficiary of their legal education? They're not earning much. They're taking longer to pay off their HECS debt. They're doing the right thing by their community. Are they the principal beneficiary? What about the engineer who ensures the safety of the bridges we drive over every day? Is she the principal beneficiary of university education? Emergency department doctors who save lives get paid well—absolutely, of course they do—but are they the principal, the primary, beneficiaries of university education?

University education is a good. It is not the only good, and it's not better than vocational education. It's not better than a life in business, but it is nonetheless important. People deserve to have the opportunity that comes with being able to go to TAFE or go to university, or do neither and go into business—whatever they see as their path. They deserve that opportunity.

It is an utter nonsense to suggest that increasing the amount of private debt that people have to take on in order to get a university education will not affect that choice. It is an utter nonsense to suggest that a 33-year-old woman with two kids who is thinking about how she can improve her qualifications so she can make more of a contribution will not be affected in deciding whether to go to university by the prospect of an even greater amount of private debt that she would be taking on than under current settings.

It is an absolute nonsense to suggest that the parents of working-class kids in Western Sydney would not think twice about encouraging their kids to go to university if the consequence was decades of debt for those kids. It's also a nonsense to think that the couple in their mid-30s with a massive higher education debt won't find it harder to save for a house deposit, particularly given the housing market in Australia at the moment. Do you really think—does anyone really think—that this greater burden of higher education debt that they carry through their lives won't make them think twice about going to their local small business and buying a coffee or buying locally to support small businesses? Of course, people aren't just one thing. They aren't just HECS debt owers. They're also small-business consumers; they're also customers; they're also parents; they're also, hopefully, homebuyers.

This is a bill that seeks to do several objectionable things. It seeks to increase the fees that students are asked to pay, on an entirely spurious, ideologically driven basis. It seeks to decrease, by corresponding amount, the public funding provided to universities and then seeks to further decrease the public funding provided to universities. I understand that the previous speaker claimed that there were no cuts to higher education, which is, frankly amazing.

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