Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] This bill, the Higher Education Support Amendment (Job-Ready Graduates and Supporting Regional and Remote Students) Bill 2020, must be stopped. This bill would double the cost of many university degrees and cut university funding. This is a dog act from a bunch of selfish politicians who got free university themselves and now want to bury young people under a mountain of debt. Make no mistake: if this bill goes through, it could take 20 years to pay off a three-year arts degree. And it's not just going to be the cost of arts degrees that doubles; everyone will be hit, some worse than others. Law and business degrees are going to rise by about 28 per cent. For all those other courses where the government says, 'Oh, no, it's okay, we're going to leave you better off', don't believe the spin.

This bill also means universities get less money for teaching, and students, on the whole, have to pay more. At the moment the balance is about 58 per cent to 42 per cent between the government and students. This bill is going to shift that so that students end up paying about 48 per cent, not 42 per cent, of the costs of universities. In other words, universities are going to get less and students are going to have to pay more—some will have to pay double what they are now—and it could take them up to 20 years to pay off the cost of a three-year degree.

Why is this happening? Very simply, it's happening because the Liberals do not want people to get educated, because then they might not vote for them. That's what this is all about. This is an ideological attack from a government that has it in for universities and for people getting educated in this country. They look at the United States and think, 'What a great way to go.' In the United States you can only go to university if you're rich, or if your parents start saving from the day that you're born or sell their house. That is the vision that this government has for Australia. Not many people look to the United States and think, 'Jeez, we'd like to be more like them when it comes to education,' but that's what this Trump-following government does. This bill will make Australia a more unequal society like the United States, where education is the privilege of a few, of the rich, instead of being for everyone.

Education in Australia should be a right. It is not a privilege, it is a right. Everyone should have the right to go to university or TAFE or do whatever level of education they want. And you shouldn't be worried that if you go to university you're going to graduate with a debt the size of a small mortgage that might take you decades to pay off. But that's what this bill will do. That will mean fewer people will go to university, because they will be worried about carrying that debt for most of their lifetimes. That's what this bill is designed to do—deter people from going to university. As I said, the Liberals are worried that, if you go to university, you might get educated and you might then decide not to vote Liberal. So they are attacking universities right across the board. We know they've got it in for universities. In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, the Prime Minister got up and beat his chest and pretended to be concerned about jobs. One area where he could save jobs is in universities, because they are government funded. But what did he do? Instead of giving them a lifeline so they can keep employing people, he pulled it. He gave JobKeeper to the private sector but then pulled it from universities, so universities now have to sack thousands of people across the country. The government is pushing universities to sack people in the middle of a recession.

If you look at any other place around the world, at any other time in history, the lesson is very clear. In the middle of a recession or a depression, what you do? The government, where it can, invests to keep people on the payroll, to keep employment high. Otherwise, you end up with Depression-era jobless queues snaking around the corner. What does this government do? It oversees the sacking of people from universities—and it is deliberate. This is about social engineering from the Liberal government. This is about the government saying there are certain people it doesn't want educated—people who are poor or come from a working-class background or who might not think the same way as the Liberals. The Liberals only want people going to university if you can afford to pay for it—and not everyone in this country can. This is something the Liberals probably don't understand.

My dad was the first person in his family to go to university. It wasn't something that wasn't done in his family. It was a very working-class family. He was able to go to university because it was free—or close to free. He knew that he would be able to afford it and wouldn't graduate with a massive debt hanging around his neck. As a result of that, he managed to go on and give back to his community in a way he would not have been able to do had he not gone to university. He helped set up Lifeline in South Australia. He studied courses at university that helped him look after other members of the community. Similarly, my mum was able to learn to become a teacher and go and do other courses as well.

All of that is under threat if bills like this one get passed. People will then worry about whether they will be able to afford to pay it off and whether it is really worth the investment. And then they decide not to go to university, which is precisely what the Liberals want. When it comes to university fees, if the Liberals are looking around at how much university should cost, I've got a simple answer. When it comes to university, the only acceptable cost for a degree is zero dollars. That's what it should cost to get a university degree in this country. And we can afford it if we stop giving handouts to billionaires and big corporations. If we have a fair, progressive tax system in this country and we don't go ahead with giving tax cuts to billionaires, which Liberal and Labor voted for, which is going to cost the budgets billions of dollars, if we decide to make our society equal we can have free education for everyone in this country.

It is not a pipedream. Yes, things have to be paid for. And the question is: what is the fairest way to pay for it? Is having arts students paying double the debt and having a debt hanging around their neck for 20 years the fairest way to pay for it? Or is not giving tax cuts to millionaires the fairest way to pay for it? Maybe we could rethink the Labor and Liberal tax cuts to millionaires package, stop giving handouts to those who can afford it, and instead have free education in this country. That is what we need to do now, more than ever, as we deal with the effects of the coronavirus, because we know the coronavirus has brought about an economic crisis in this country, and the burden of that has been disproportionately felt by young people.

Before the coronavirus crisis started, three out of 10 young people in this country either had no job or not enough hours at work. I think that's a national crisis and a national shame. Within a month of the coronavirus distancing restrictions happening, it jumped up so that four in 10 young people either didn't have a job or didn't have enough hours of work. And the jobs that many young people were looking forward to—it's going to take a long time for those industries to get back on their feet. Areas like arts, hospitality, tourism and education will not go back to the way they were before, if they go back at all, because of social distancing restrictions that may well linger from the coronavirus. So young people are looking at a very bleak jobs future, indeed, under this government.

What we should be doing is offering young people—not more debt, not more attacks—a guarantee and some hope. We can do it if we have the courage to stand up to the billionaires and stop giving out unfair tax breaks to big corporations. We could fund, instead, a guarantee for young people, where every young person in this country has a guaranteed place at a university or TAFE, has a guaranteed income that they can live on, or a guaranteed job, if they want it, working on some nation-building, planet-saving projects as we invest in industries to tackle the climate emergency and make Australia more creative and equal.

We have two ways out of this crisis. We either stand up to the big corporations who've been making a mint while this crisis has being going on and stop giving handouts to millionaires and billionaires and, instead, say, 'You've got to pay your fair share,' and we can take that money and use it to invest in nation-building, planet-saving, job-creating projects and give young people a guaranteed place at university or TAFE—a guarantee that's free—a guaranteed job or a guaranteed income they can live on, or we can go down the road that the government is taking us. That is where Australia turns into a US-style unequal society: if you want to go to university, you'd better hope you've got rich parents who can start saving from your birth; otherwise, it'll be out of your reach. We'll end up with a society, under this government, where young people can't find a job either.

The government has a very big track record in blaming people for not finding jobs that aren't there. When you've got 13 or so people competing for every one job vacancy that's there, when you have young people facing, on the government's projections, high unemployment for months if not years to come, you can't punish them even further by putting them into more debt because they choose to go to university. The government is forcing people to make a terrible choice. They're saying, 'If you go to university you're going to end up with a debt that's saddled around your neck for 20 years or so,' and, on the other hand, they're saying, 'By the way, there are no jobs available in the job market, so what are you going to do? We're going to cut JobSeeker or the unemployment assistance as well.'

The government is giving young people the middle finger with this bill and saying that it does not care about the future of young people. This bill must be stopped, because it would fundamentally alter who is able to get a university education in this country and what Australia looks like. It's an attack on equality in Australia. It's an attack on democracy in Australia. Most of all, it is an attack on young people. Young people have been suffering enough. It is time to bin this bill, to say we need free education and say we'll stand up to the millionaires and the billionaires and the big corporations and make them pay their fair share so that in this wealthy country of ours everyone is entitled to a university education, no matter how much money they earn or where they come from. This bill must be stopped.

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