Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to echo what has already been said about the appalling impacts of the substantive provisions of the legislation to lower the thresholds and make young people repay their education debt earlier—but I'll touch on that in a moment. At the outset, I want to call out the appalling process that the government has gone through, which has been almost an abuse of the House. We have debated a version of this legislation twice at length. Sloppily reheated seconds came back when the government couldn't get the first go through, so they thought, 'We couldn't get $42,000 through; we'll try $45,000.' They shunted that off to the Senate. They read the writing on the wall that it was going to again fail in the Senate and die where it should've, and at the last minute they've cooked up a dodgy deal with the crossbench, which the House has not been briefed or advised on. We haven't had a moment to reflect on what it actually means. It's an appalling way to make education policy.

From what I've been told there is a second amendment. We are debating two amendments concurrently, and the debate so far has focused quite rightly on the awful impacts on young people in our communities, but the other amendment, which we're being told we have to debate and vote on concurrently, relates to extending loans to table B providers for private universities and removing loan fees for these institutions. That may be a good idea. I understand that Labor has an open mind to this. This is exactly the kind of issue we would publicly and transparently consider with consultation in a proper, grown-up policy process. All the government muppets who ran away from this debate are going to wander back in, stick their hands up and have no idea what they're actually voting on. In fact, hardly anyone in the House has any idea what we're voting on, because the government has done some dodgy deal with Senator Bernardi in the other place.

I don't understand the policy impacts or arguments around extending loans for table B providers for private universities. The extension of the loans in the system may have some value, but we have said that, in government, we would consider it in our national inquiry on post-secondary education, where everyone can have a say. It's probably old-fashioned, with the government's approach to making policy and legislation, to actually allow members to understand what they're voting on and put the detail in front of them; nevertheless, I think it is important that the House understands that we're voting on two very different things, one of which has never been part of the government's legislative proposal and has never been considered or debated in any sense by this House.

With regard to the other provision, the government's latest attempt to make life harder for young people, we hear from those opposite that lowering the repayment threshold, the income at which young people will be forced to repay their education debts, doesn't really matter, because it's just $5 or 10 bucks a week, not a lot of money. It might not be a lot of money to people in here—to those opposite, who just awarded themselves a tax cut worth $7,000 when it fully rolls out—but $5 is a lot of money to people in my community, to students struggling to make ends meet and put themselves through university while the government opposite cuts their penalty rates. On behalf of young people in my community I don't accept that $5 or $10 is a just little bit of money; it is significant.

I have to speak up on behalf of my electorate. During the last campaign I doorknocked more than 12,000 houses over 18 months and asked people, 'What matters most?' The No. 1 priority that kept coming back was education, whether I was talking to a young person thinking about their future, a grandparent worried about their grandkids, or a parent worried about how their kids are going to get to TAFE or university. Most particularly, migrants, who come to this country seeking a better life for their kids, have a laser-like focus on education. In the electorate that I've been proud to represent almost 60 per cent of people are born in another country. They come here, work hard and look for education. This bill takes us in the wrong direction. It makes it harder for young people to get into university.

When you think about our partners and friends in Asia—our competitors in the coming decades—the OECD and everyone else say we should invest in two things: infrastructure and education. A smart country would be lowering barriers to education so that the brightest kid from the poorest family can have a chance to go to university. That was part of my family story. My mum left school at 15 in Footscray. Her family could not afford the uniforms to go to a school that offered year 12. My father, on the other hand, had the opportunity to pay his way through university. He failed a bit and just kept paying. That was seared into my consciousness: every kid, no matter their circumstances, should be able to go to university.

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