Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was just having a very intriguing conversation about higher education with the member for Boothby. We talked about all the things that make us so attracted, that give something so much pizzazz, colour and wonderment. You see that when you give someone the capacity for their advancement, for the advancement of that wonderful part of their body which resides between their ears. It allows people to challenge themselves and stay informed. When we talk about FEE-HELP, it is to take people with that vast experience out of their normal environs and place them in a situation where they are challenged to talk to new people, to hear new ideas, to mix with people they probably otherwise wouldn't mix with. FEE-HELP allows people to continue on to university. University should not just be to tick a box, to go there because you haven't got much else to do—although, I have to admit, a lot of us did precisely that; it should actually have a purpose and it should drive people to a more—not so much enlightened—informed position and, by their experience in university, have their minds opened and challenged by views from both sides of the political sphere.

One of the big issues in regards to university is the cost of fees. Fees are affected by basically the cost of running things and one of the major things that run things is the price of power. It is amazing tonight that, after Callide Power Station went down, the spot price of power in a 30-minute block went up to $15,000 a megawatt in Queensland and in excess of $13,000 in New South Wales. It remained in excess of $15,000 for quite a period of time. The people who paid for that are not only the students but everybody. This is the result of not having an open mind, of being rutted in a certain view and of being carted along by a philosophical zeal and a quasi-religious view which is completely removed from the logic that you believed university would teach you about.

What we have with the successes of this so-called climate socialism, the so-called renewable debate, is no debate at all about what happened to the price of power tonight. The people who have to pay that are the same people who have to pay the taxes for people to go to university and the same people who ultimately pay for fee support. Tonight we're so lucky and blessed that nobody was hurt or killed in the Callide Power Station. We must make sure that we understand that it created a test for an electricity grid and it overwhelmingly failed. Tonight, they have to do load shedding in Queensland. Load shedding means they have to start shutting things off because, if they don't shut things off, the grid collapses.

What are we going to do about this? The same people who are paying the fees should be the same people encouraging Queensland to build a new coal-fired power station in Central Queensland to avoid these sorts of circumstances again, to build a new coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley as insurance against these circumstances happening again. This is a process that should be driven by the form of an open-minded analytical assessment of the pricing facts, the grid facts, that we have had to deal with tonight.

In response to COVID-19 and the higher education system, the government is extending FEE-HELP. Loan fee exemption is already in place for another six months, so the exemption will apply for units of study with a census date between 1 July 2021 and 31 December 2021. Ordinarily, an undergraduate student accessing a FEE-HELP loan and providers other than Table B providers, mostly private providers, would incur a 20 per cent loan fee on top of their loan amount. Students accessing HECS-HELP loans do not incur this fee. This is an assistance for those at the private providers and for the students who are in that space. And, of course, being people who believe in the private sector, it's a logical position for us to hold. Ultimately, though, any support that comes from government doesn't come from government; it comes from taxpayers. And if it can't come from taxpayers, it's borrowed from people overseas to be repaid by taxpayers at a later date.

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