Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Year 12s have had the year from hell this year and, right now, one in three young people is looking for a job or looking for more hours of work. It is the very worst time to be making it harder to get an education. We should be wrapping our arms around these year 12 kids and making it easier for them to go to TAFE or to university when they finish school.

Those opposite are waging a bizarre ideological war on the humanities departments of universities around Australia, and it's so ironic—richly ironic—because you could make up an arts faculty from across their front bench. In fact, the Minister for Education himself has three arts degrees. He has spent more time in university humanities faculties than Noam Chomsky. And what about the Treasurer? The Treasurer has got two arts degrees himself. He's got a Master of Public Administration from Harvard and a Master of International Relations from Oxford. You can picture him there, can't you, in the black academic gowns, sitting there with a don at Oxford, explaining why it's such a waste of time to get a humanities degree. The Minister for Health has got two arts degrees.

This Liberal Party arts faculty runs deep. The Attorney-General has a Bachelor of Arts with honours. The Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts has an arts degree. The Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business has a Bachelor of Arts. The Minister for Foreign Affairs has a Bachelor of Arts. The Minister for Population, Cities and Urban Infrastructure has a Bachelor of Arts. And that's even before you get to the back bench. We've got the member for Mitchell—the only people who have spent more time on university campuses are the international socialists selling their newspapers. The member for Mitchell is a student politician from way back. He spent years at university getting his two arts degrees.

Do these people think that their arts degrees are worthless? No. But they want to deny other people's kids an arts degree. What they want is for university to be a small, exclusive club. They're allowed in and their kids are allowed in, but other kids aren't. Other people's kids aren't allowed in. Can you imagine? What are they planning? They're planning arts degrees—arts/law degrees—for $14½ thousand a year. Do you people know what you are voting for when you vote for degrees that cost $14½ thousand a year? A degree like mine, a four-year degree, would have cost $58,000. As someone who graduated in the 1990s going into a recession at a very hard time, I can tell you what my parents would have advised me if I'd gone home to them and said, 'I'm going to take on a $58,000 degree, and I'm not sure that I'll get a job at the end of it when you look at the labour market,' they would have said: 'Save your money. Save for a deposit for a house. It's a tough world out there.' These are the decisions that working-class families are making right now. Do we want to take on an American-sized university debt?

Given the employment market that those people opposite are delivering right now, we know that youth unemployment, high as it is now, will be persistently and stubbornly high for years to come.

Year 12 kids sitting their exams—some of them today or later this week—are thinking about the fact that the degree that they set their heart on years ago is now going to cost them more than $40,000 and, in many cases, more than $50,000. That is the choice of those opposite. What they are voting for today—make no mistake—is $40,000, $50,000 and almost $60,000 degrees because those opposite don't see the value of an education for ordinary Australian children.

See this speech in context