Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As with my other colleague in the House, I support the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Student Assistance and Other Measures) Bill 2021. But I rise today to speak predominantly to the second reading amendment and particularly to the part of the second reading amendment that notes that 'the government has made it more expensive for Australian students to undertake tertiary study, and has pushed students into taking on more debt'. That is a shame across Australia and it is a huge shame in my electorate of Dunkley, where there are many young people from hardworking families who are earning the minimum wage, or slightly above, whose aspiration is to go to university, to study commerce, to study the arts, to study law, to do degrees that help them to have careers that help others, and they can't imagine leaving university with something like a $50,000 debt or how they could possibly go on with their adult lives with that on their shoulders.

I know that this is an issue that has been raised by many people in this chamber, and it's an obvious intellectual issue that you can imagine when you think about young people from families that don't have much money. I don't have to imagine it because I've had parents and students coming into my office and telling me about their genuine concerns about how the government's approach to universities and fees is going to impact their futures. I had a mother from Seaford write to me about the fact that her son, who is currently studying second-year law, and her daughter, who's in year 12 and wants to study law, are going to leave university with massively disparate debts. Her son is likely to get a job that, even at the entry-level graduate position, will earn him more money than her daughter because, despite all the laws and despite what everyone may say, it is still the case that, at the entry level, men and women are paid differently for the same job. Her concern is that her daughter is going to leave university with a much higher debt than her son. Her son is most probably going to start earning more money than her daughter. Her son, unless he chooses to, is never going to have to put a pause on his career to look after a baby. He will certainly never have to take time off to give birth. Her daughter will have to. She says to me: 'This is the part of gender inequality that this government doesn't get. I've got two children who I've brought up exactly the same, who have the same values, who have the same aspirations for employment, yet who are genuinely looking at careers and earnings in retirement that are significantly different because of structural inequalities and structural barriers in the system which this government is not fixing, but, indeed, is making worse with the changes to university fees.' So that's one of the consequences of the government making it more expensive for Australian students to undertake tertiary studies.

The other consequence is this attempt to skew students to study particular subjects at university. We all want our young people to get jobs of the future. We know that STEM is vitally important, and we all want people to go to university and study in a way that will help them with their future careers. But my concern is that only one half of this chamber also wants Australians to be great thinkers, to be innovative thinkers, to be challenging thinkers, and to go to university and become enriched with the history of Greece and Italy and the Indonesian archipelago, for the reason that that sort of learning matters. It might not immediately put you into a STEM job or what is known as a job of the future, but it helps us as a country to be smart, to challenge stereotypes and to learn from history so that we make a better future. It appears that that is what this government wants to stop. It wants to stop critical thinking, or at least critical thinking that doesn't agree with its own ideology, with the way that it's made university fees more expensive. That's a shame for the future of our country. And that's what's missing from this budget.

We're here in budget week. There has been a lot of money spent and a lot of analysis of the budget, and there will continue to be a lot of analysis of the budget—what's in it, what's not in it, who the winners are, who the losers are, what's an announcement without delivery, what's new money and what's old money. All of that is important. But you know what is missing from the budget? You know what was missing from the Treasurer's speech and media appearances and from the Prime Minister's speeches? A genuine vision for this country—a genuine vision for the sort of country that this government wants to steer us towards; a genuine vision for when we skill up Australians, when we get our young people into TAFE or university or apprenticeships, and how that contributes to the sort of world-leading nation we want to be. There is no vision about how we can harness the challenge of climate change to have new industries and new jobs, to not only save the planet but also engage that enthusiasm and passion and fierce fighting spirit that young people all over Australia have about the future in building a better one. We'll beat and meet our emissions targets, but that's it.

That's what's missing this week from the Morrison government, and its approach to universities underwrites that. There's no vision in a government that has abandoned university students and universities in their time of need. We know that as at January this year more than 17,000 people had lost their jobs at universities across Australia since the beginning of the pandemic. More than 17,000 people had lost their jobs. They weren't jobs we heard much about in the budget speeches. Universities Australia forecast further cuts this year. Thirteen per cent of the pre-COVID workforce has been lost from universities. That's lecturers, tutors, academics and some administrators, but it's also cleaners, people who work in the canteens, people who look after the gardens and people who do the maintenance. It's also the economic ecosphere that grows up around universities off campus—the cafes, the pubs, the boutiques, the accommodation. All of that has been affected because this government walked away from universities and continued to change JobKeeper so that universities couldn't get it and are still not thinking about how to support universities.

Sure, we want universities to do research which can be commercialised—that's great—but we also want universities to support the thinking that comes before and around the research. We also want universities to support the critical thinking that feeds into having a vision for the future. We're not going to have that if we don't have universities, and we're not going to have that if we only have private universities or universities that have to function predominantly in a privatised commercial mode—which is where this government is pushing them—and to rely on foreign students. Now that the foreign students can't come, the government not giving universities any support is another irony. We lose something if we lose that sense of worth of education in being able to think, debate and ponder. We genuinely lose something. I fear that that's why we haven't heard an actual vision from the government this week—because of that lack of valuing and understanding the importance of thinking.

The people who are affected are real people. Before I conclude my remarks, I want to give an example. I have this truly amazing young woman volunteering in my office at the moment in Parliament House, Lucy Skelton. She's a first-year student at ANU, studying public policy and other things. She told me today that, if she could basically live in Parliament House, she would, because it's so exciting for her to be here and to be part of all of this. She helped to put together some notes for this speech. Sorry, Lucy, I always ad lib and don't use all the notes that are given to me. One of the things she did was go through the member for Barton's speech to highlight some of the issues and, in the papers she gave me, I think she accidentally gave me part of what she'd marked up. There was a sentence in the member for Barton's speech that said, 'Think about the year 12s, who had a hell of a final year last year with COVID-19,' and Lucy had written on it, 'That's me.' That one sentence resonated with her so much that she wrote on it, 'That's me.'

She's lucky enough that she's at university and she's doing all she can to live her dream. I want everyone to have Lucy's opportunities. I want everyone in my electorate to be able to dream Lucy's dreams: to be able to come to parliament and sleep here, if they could—as Lucy puts it—because they're so excited to be here and to be able to study things like public policy and politics because they want to be part of this democracy and the bureaucracy that supports it and everything that makes the world a better place. That's what I want for everyone in my electorate. But they can't have that if they can't afford to go to university, buy the books or pay the accommodation costs. They certainly can't have those opportunities if Monash University Peninsula Campus, in my electorate, can't afford to keep offering what it's offering because it doesn't get the support from the government. That's why I stand to speak on the second reading amendment today. I commend it to the House, and I commend the other side of the chamber to really think about the value of universities and what they give to society.

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