Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

One of the greatest hypocrisies in this place is that so many Labor and Liberal politicians went to university for free in the eighties and graduated without a student debt. Those same Labor and Liberal politicians have decided that they are going to oppose free university education today, forcing countless students to graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt just for going to university. Why is it that it's always one rule for wealthy politicians in this place and another rule for everyone else?

What we know is that, right now, there are students across this country and people who have graduated from university with massive student debts. They are huge. They are $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 and sometimes $70,000. Even after Labor's pathetic changes, their debts will still go up every year. They will still be indexed every year, which means that, come tax time when they go to collect their tax, they will get an extra pay cut because they have to pay off a student debt they should not have incurred. The reality is that we have a bunch of Labor and Liberal politicians in this place who have decided that, for them, there are no sacrifices. Every politician in this place got a $4,500 tax cut passed by this House and supported by the Labor and Liberal parties. There's a $4,500 tax cut for them and a lot of them got to go to university for free, but, when it comes to students today, they have to cop massive student debts. Meanwhile, in Norway, university is free for students, because in that country they tax their resources industry fairly. They tax big multinational corporations. They make them pay their fair share in tax. As a result, every student in Norway gets to go to university for free.

In Australia, it's the other way around. Labor and the Liberal Party will tax students and force them to pay massive student debts so that they can keep taxes on big multinational gas corporations low. That's the choice that they've made. This is a generation that is already copping low wages and skyrocketing rents and house prices, and is already looking down the barrel of a future much less prosperous than their parents' one was. Now they have to contemplate sitting on a $40,000 or $50,000 debt, which means that when they go to get a loan from the bank to buy a house they're less likely to be able to get that loan. It means that their pay will be less every year because they're having to pay off a student debt that they should not have incurred. The harsh reality is that, more often than not, young people are told that if they want to get a job in this economy they have to go to university. Well, now they're being told that not only do you have to go to university; you have to graduate with a $40,000 or $50,000 debt that goes up every year and is still indexed.

The total student debt in this country is $78 billion. To put that into perspective, over the next 10 years property investors, including many property investors in this place, including the Prime Minister, will get $176 billion in tax handouts. What if we scrapped those tax handouts and used that money to forgive student debt and make university free again? To put that into perspective again, in one year some of the biggest oil and gas corporations in this country made $100 billion in revenue and paid zero dollars in tax. Just one year of revenue from the oil and gas corporations in this country could have wiped all student debt in this country—all of it.

The reality is that over the next few years student debt is going to get bigger and bigger. It's going to keep going up as house prices keep going up and rents keep going up and corporate profits keep going up, and we're going to become a more and more unequal country. How is it fair that decades ago, when Australia was a much less wealthy country, so many people, including people in this place, went to university for free? Those people included my mum, who was the first one in her family to go to university. She grew up in Ipswich in a working-class family in the 1980s. The only reason she went university was that it was free. She was the first one in her family to go. Her parents were textile factory workers. She got that opportunity because university was free. Well, how many working people in this country right now are choosing not to go to university because they know that they will have to cop a massive $40,000 or $50,000 debt? Why is it that now the only people in this country who can go and get a higher education and go to university are those who are prepared to cop a massive debt that cripples them financially for decades to come? It's desperately unfair.

The other part of this bill is about placement payments for nurses and social workers and teachers, who as part of their university degrees often have to go and do huge numbers of hours of unpaid work. They're effectively doing the job of a nurse or a teacher or a social worker. Now, the government are claiming a victory here because they're going to pay these people $8 an hour—$319 a week—while those people are also copping a massive student debt. To be clear, the average rent in this country is over $600, which means that, for someone who is being paid $319 a week, their pay is almost half of what the average rent in this country is.

Politics is ultimately about choices, and the government could choose to tax multinational gas corporations fairly, to wipe student debt and to make university free again. They could choose to phase out tax handouts for property investors and to make university free again. Instead what they've chosen is desperate poverty for students, huge student debt, crippling debt for life, and a deeply unequal and unfair country.

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