Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to discuss this issue that has been put forward by the Greens, because student debt is an extremely important issue in Australia. Many Australians are facing the challenge of having to pay off large debt after their university degree has finished. But the most important thing on this issue is to understand the fundamental underlying reason for that increase in cost. That is the rising inflation that Australia has experienced over the last several years. The Albanese government was left with extremely high inflation, and that inflation has caused Australia to have a period in which many elements of our indexation system have increased significantly. Student debt is one of those areas. This is an issue that the Greens have jumped on.

Make no mistake, what the Greens are doing here is seeking to shift their party from a party that traditionally has focused on environmental issues to a party that now focuses also on economic issues, specifically the economics of grievance. There's just one problem with this strategy from the Greens, which they've prosecuted in the areas of housing, supermarkets and now student debt. That is that, for all the proposals they have to spend more money, they don't have any proposals to create any wealth that would fund the programs they propose. On issue after issue the Greens are prosecuting an economic agenda that involves more spending, but with no proposals for economic growth or to promote economic growth. In doing so, they make the underlying issue they are trying to solve here, which is inflation, even worse.

Let's take a quick look at some of the issues that the Greens have been discussing in relation to their new economic agenda—firstly, supermarkets, and the previous speaker mentioned this as well. In the last couple of weeks, the Greens have been running around suggesting that we should have divestiture powers in Australia that break up the big supermarkets. This is just one of the great examples of the Greens' policies which are harebrained and half baked. They have put no thought into the actual consequences of forcing supermarkets to split up or divest. Where is the evidence that doing so would reduce grocery prices at all? We'd suddenly have a situation where, instead of having one supply chain, we'd have to have two supply chains. Instead of having one head office, we'd have to have two head offices if we force the supermarkets to split up. There's almost no evidence that the Greens have been through any process to actually understand the consequences of the proposals they are promoting, and, where these types of divestiture policies have been used around the world, they have not been successful.

Secondly, the Greens have been making proposals on housing. They've suggested that we need rent controls, but they haven't looked at the fundamental problem of lack of supply in Australian housing. In fact, they've been blocking the government's proposals to expand supply.

Again, on issue after issue, the Greens come up with a thought bubble that sounds terrific but actually makes the underlying problem that Australia is struggling with worse. It's true in supermarkets, it's true in housing and it's true in the subject of this motion, which is student fees.

The most important thing we can do with student fees is reduce the rate of inflation so that that indexation cost comes down. That is exactly what the government has been doing. We've more than halved the rate of inflation that we inherited from the previous government, we have a range of policies to support people with the cost-of-living crisis without stoking inflation and, in doing so, we're getting that indexation cost down.

Now, the easiest trick in politics is to hypothecate—to find some pot of money somewhere and say that it should be used for something way over there on the other side of the political landscape, and that's what the Greens love to do. They hypothecate money from any particular tax they can think of or any industry they don't like to some cause that they do like. The problem is that they end up spending that money many times over. This is yet another economic topic the Greens have jumped on, but their solutions are half baked and will make the underlying problem worse.

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