Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Preventing Family Violence) Share this | Hansard source

To use 'university educated' as an epithet is disgusting. It is anti intelligentsia and you should know better. And it's on a day when universities are under attack. You saw The Australian today; you saw the headline 'How universities are betraying Australia' in the nation's broadsheet. To think it's okay to be attacking universities and university education in those circumstances is disgusting, I think. It's consistent with the behaviour of this government and this Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister had the gall to tell us that we don't get aspiration at the same time that he had the gall to say that we weren't blue-collar enough—that we were university educated. Not only is he a snob about university education but he thinks we should know our place. He thinks it's outrageous that we have a university education. But he can't have both: either we don't understand aspiration, or we're too educated. It is not the case that we don't understand aspiration. We embody aspiration. We exemplify aspiration. There are people on this side of the House, me included, who were the first in their family to go to grade 12 let alone university. For these people to think that we don't understand aspiration shows how out of touch they really are.

They think aspiration is aspiring to be an investment banker. They think aspiration is aspiring to make more money. We think aspiration is aspiring to do better for this country. It's aspiration to make this a better society. It's aspiration to value education. But, you know, it's not just universities they don't like. They don't like TAFE either. The Minister for Education and Training referred to TAFE as basket weaving. Not only do you think we should know our place but you don't even value skills. You don't even value vocational education. How do we know? It's not just the basket-weaving comment; it's the fact that they've cut $3 billion from skills, including $270 million in this budget alone.

No-one in this place understands aspiration like Labor. We build aspiration. We exemplify aspiration. We will always stand up for working Australians. We won't cut the pension like that mob over there. We will stand up for aspiration. (Time expired)

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