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

Incomprehensible—thank you, Member for Scullin. It is an incomprehensible proposition given that the government's own budget papers acknowledge that this is a $2.8 billion cut, or $3.8 billion in fiscal terms. The government's budget papers acknowledge that this is a cut—and, in fact, it is a cut.

The other highly objectionable problem with this bill is the proposition that we should reduce the threshold at which HECS repayments kick in to a much lower threshold. So, when people are earning not much more than the minimum wage, and a long way from average weekly earnings, they will start to pay an additional tax to the government. They will start to pay to the Commonwealth a contribution for higher education. I've seen the press this morning reporting on government media that suggests that this is great. It's going to mean we recover more debt, as the Commonwealth. It seems to ignore one little aspect of income contingent loans, doesn't it? The income contingent aspect of them. Of course, the point of these income contingent loans is that if you never earn a high enough income—and by high income I'm talking about $54,000; I'm not talking about $180,000—then you never pay it. People might like to describe that as bad debt; I see that as the liability not arising in the first place because you don't get this lauded private benefit that the government carries on about. Are you really trying to tell me that someone earning $42,000 is somehow enjoying an amazing massive windfall because they've had a higher education? It's a ridiculous proposition. If people want to claim that it is somehow good that we're recovering higher taxes from people on low incomes, they can go ahead, but I will not support that. I will not support the argument that graduates who earn $42,000 should pay higher taxes than nongraduates on the basis of some perceived private benefit that they have obtained.

It's not just a question of the regressive nature of that arrangement, though that is obvious; it's also a workforce issue. Not-for-profit organisations may say to people, 'We'll pay you much less but you'll have the satisfaction of making a contribution,' whether it's social work, whether it's community legal or whether it's medical or pharmacy—whatever you might do for a community organisation. Those people might take a significant reduction in the amount of income they get and, yes, that might mean that it takes them longer to pay off their HECS ultimately as they move up. How are these organisations now going to say to people, 'You should still come and work in a lower-paid job even though it's going to be much more expensive and difficult for you to do so'?

I notice that there's not much focus and attention being given to the gender ramifications of this bill, but the fact is that this reduction of the threshold is more likely to affect women. Women are more likely to be in part-time work or in low-paid work. This is absolutely a gender-impact bill and we should be considering it in those terms. This will have an effect on women's ability to get a higher education. It will have an impact on their ability to manage the cost of living after they've got that higher education.

Labor opposes the fee increase. We say it is unreasonable, it forgets the impact on individual students and it is oblivious to the impact on the broader economy because of the impact it will have on household consumption by graduates who have high debts. We oppose the cuts to the Commonwealth Grant Scheme. We do not support cutting public funding to higher education. Last year, higher education was part of the international exports sector, which had a record trade of $23 billion. One of the reasons that we do so well in our international education exports is the high quality of Australia's universities. Countries in our region know this. China knows it. Japan knows it. Our competitor universities are getting the benefit of additional public funding and additional investment. And what's Australia doing to this really important export service? We're going to cut funding to it. We're going to make it harder for it to be a quality service. That's what Australia's going to do under this bill, and that's yet another reason why it's so ridiculous.

We're concerned about the performance-contingent funding for universities. We support performance based funding in principle, but reducing the funding by 7.5 per cent and then using that as a pool to pay for the performance pay for performance indicators which are as yet unknown is the wrong way to have gone about doing this. On top of the cuts to higher education public funding, there's a further reduction of 7.5 per cent of the funding which will be put into a pool which will be contingent on, as I said, as yet unknown performance indicators. That is very problematic.

The bill also goes to a reorganisation of scholarships for postgraduate coursework places. I think most people would agree that the current distribution of Commonwealth supported places for postgraduate study needs review and needs to be rearranged. But without consultation about how that should be done, and without apparently really formulating the actual policy mechanisms by which that will be done, there are significant difficulties in just announcing and legislating and hoping the rest will fall into place later. So we're concerned about that as well.

In relation to sub-bachelor courses, obviously this requires a lot of discussion and negotiation with the vocational education sector to ensure there's not inadvertent cannibalisation there. In respect of enabling courses, we are gravely concerned that taking away the loading and turning it into student fees will limit the opportunity for people to take enabling courses and will therefore limit the number of people from low-socioeconomic backgrounds who get to go to higher education. We oppose the bill.

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