Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. How many members of the cabinet were beneficiaries of free university education or manageable HECS? How, in good conscience, can they now slam the door on the next generation of Australians and take away the same opportunities from which they all benefited?

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There will be silence. The question has been asked. There will be quiet while we hear the answer.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am delighted to take this question from the member from the other side. I have not done a study of the frontbench of the government to discover which universities they went to or which ones paid HECS; nor have I done so for the frontbench of the Labor Caucus.

But I can tell the member that, if she wants to go back and discover who it was that decided that free education was not working—and was not bringing low-SES students into universities but simply subsidising the middle classes and the upper-middle classes—she should look no further than the former Prime Minister and Treasurer Paul Keating. He said at the opening of the Victoria University of Technology, Sunbury campus:

There is no such thing, of course, as 'free' education - somebody has to pay.

… … …

… a 'free' higher education system is one paid for by the taxes of all, the majority of whom haven't had the privilege of a university education. Ask yourself if you think that is a fair thing.

That is what Paul Keating said.

The member's question gives me the opportunity to point out how far the current modern Labor Party has moved from the Hawke-Keating legacy, and to repeat the point that I made in the previous answer and question: the current Labor Party has shredded their economic credibility. Most Labor figures of the past realised that so-called free education did not have any impact on bringing students into university.

Mr Dreyfus interjecting—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Isaacs will desist.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have a modern day example that the member for Fraser would have studied. In the United Kingdom there is free education in Scotland and there is a deregulated education market in England. As the member for Fraser knows, since deregulation in England the number of students from low-SES backgrounds is at record levels. The number of students from low-SES backgrounds has ballooned in England; in Scotland there was been no change whatsoever since free education was introduced.

So we are absolutely committed to our higher education reforms, because to us it is an equity measure; it is an equity reform. It will give more young people from low-SES backgrounds the opportunity that I had, and that so many members of this House had, to go to university and get the chance to increase their earning capacity over a lifetime. I am not going to slam the door behind me after I got a great university education, and nobody in the Labor Party should either. Get off your Green-Left agenda and start standing up for students from low-SES backgrounds, like I am.

Opposition members interjecting—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There will be silence on my left.