Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

We don't agree with these amendments and we don't support the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018, because it is one more example of this government's vandalism when it comes to education. This is a government that, just before Christmas, cut another $2.2 billion from our universities, not by taking it through the parliament and allowing us on this side to make clear our opposition to these university cuts but by pushing it through in the midyear economic update, just before Christmas—a $2.2 billion cut. All this government has done is make it harder for young Australians to get a university education.

And what do we want? We want every young Australian to have the opportunity, if they're prepared to work hard and study hard, to get a great education—at university, at TAFE; it doesn't matter. But we know that most jobs of the future will require one of these. They will require either a university education or a TAFE education, and this government is wrecking both. It is wrecking universities, making them harder to afford and harder to attend, and it is wrecking TAFE, by ripping billions out of vocational education, apprenticeships and traineeships, including hundreds of millions in the last budget alone. We know that many Australians are already turning their backs on a university education because they just can't afford it. This week, just days ago, we heard that one in seven university students are regularly going without food, because they can't afford to study and eat.

I was speaking today to one of our major universities that says that a large proportion of the homeless young people in their city are university students who haven't got a place to live. We saw an article this week in The Conversation about young women in particular trading sex for accommodation, including students who were doing this. What are we doing to our young Australians that we are making it so impossible to make ends meet to invest their time and their energy in a university education that gives them hope for the future?

It is incredible that we are asking young people on lower and lower incomes to pay a larger share of their income, repaying their debt sooner. We know who this hits hardest. It hits people in lower paid jobs harder, because they will be spending a disproportionate amount of their income, that should be covering necessities, on repaying their education sooner. We know that most of these people will be women. These measures disproportionately affect women, and Labor has said so all along. Sixty per cent of all Australians with a HELP debt are women and two-thirds of the Australians impacted by these changes will be women.

Of course our investment in education as a nation benefits the people who get the education. But those students, when they graduate, we hope go on throughout their professional lives to earn well and repay their debt—not just their HECS debt but their broader debt to society. Through their increased taxation as their wages increase they are supporting other young Australians to get a university education. Investment in education doesn't just benefit the individuals who receive the education; it benefits our nation. We know that Australia cannot be a wealthy and successful nation when we continue to cut university funding, as those opposite have done, and cut access to university education, as those opposite have done, by freezing university funding.

Our investment in university education has a substantial economic return. Just today, we saw another report, commissioned by the Group of Eight universities—I think done by London Economics—saying that in 2016 $12 billion was spent on their universities and $66 billion was returned in economic growth through that investment. Research, discovery, innovation and learning—the economic activity of the people who are working to supply the universities, particularly in our regional communities—makes a huge difference.

See this speech in context