Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Minister for Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendments be considered immediately.

Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Preventing Family Violence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor opposes the amendments. Labor is very concerned about the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018 as a whole. We voted against it last time it was before the House, because of the reduction in the repayment threshold for higher education contributions. We think that this is another example of the Turnbull government's war on young people. We've just heard this week of young people going without food while they're studying at university.

This government seems to be making it harder and harder for people to get a higher education. They've tried to cut university funding every single opportunity that they have had throughout the entire period that they've been in government since they were elected five years ago. They originally tried to implement a 20 per cent cut to public funding for universities and a reduction in the HECS repayment threshold. They then tried to make it a 7½ per cent cut, plus an additional cut on top of that. That also failed in the Senate. Then, last year, what did they do in MYEFO? They implemented a $2.2 billion cut to university funding, and that is being felt on university campuses around this country.

Why does this government have such a problem with higher education? Why is this government seeking to find ways to cut higher education funding every time it gets the opportunity, and why does it seek to make life harder for students and people who have recently been to university? Make no mistake: that's what this bill does. HECS, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, was supposed to be an income-contingent loan scheme, because it purported to represent the private value of higher education.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I call the minister. The question is that the amendments be considered immediately.

Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Minister for Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, the amendments haven't been moved yet. I wonder whether we should move them.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I take the point. We might get to where the member for Griffith can address that.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the amendments by the Senate be considered immediately.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I understand that it is the wish of the House to consider the amendments together.

Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Minister for Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Preventing Family Violence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's important that we acknowledge that two tranches of amendments are being considered together: the first tranche by the government is to change some of the timing in relation to the implementation of these measures, and the second tranche that had come from the crossbench relates to loans fees in respect of the HECS arrangements and the FEE-HELP arrangements for certain table 2 institutions.

Labor will oppose both sets of amendments. Obviously they're being considered together. We are very concerned about the continuation of the coalition's war on young people. This is yet another example of this government trying to make it harder for people to get a higher education and trying to make it harder for people who are on low incomes to be able to get by. This is a government that doesn't care about the housing affordability crisis facing young people in this country. They absolutely do not care about the fact that young people are finding it harder and harder to get a quality education. It's not just the $270 million that was cut from vocational education in this year's budget. There was also $2.2 billion cut out of universities in MYEFO alone last year. This is yet another example of the war on young people. The government is now seeking to decrease the point at which people make a higher education contribution. This is an attempt to make people who are worse off pay HECS, even though they are demonstrably not receiving a private benefit from their higher education.

The purpose of HECS is for people to make a contribution in recognition of the private benefit they receive. How much private benefit is someone getting from their higher education if they're on 42 grand a year? How well off is someone on $42,000 or $45,000 a year? What do you think you're doing with these changes? You are making it harder for people to get by. You're making it harder for young people, particularly, to get by. We don't know, on this side of the House, why you hate young people so much. We don't know why the Turnbull government is so, so determined to make it harder for people to get a higher education.

Since the government were elected in 2013, they have taken every opportunity to attack the higher education sector. There was the 20 per cent public funding cut that they tried to bring in in the 2014 horror budget. They failed to get that through. Then there was the 7½ per cent funding cut plus an additional funding cut on top of that last year. They failed to get that through. They finally got through their $2.2 billion cut administratively, bypassing the parliament, in MYEFO, and now they're making a further attack on our university system and on young people, reducing the threshold so that people who are earning very low amounts of money have to start making an additional contribution to the Commonwealth government because they had the temerity to get above their station and go to university.

We know how the other side feels about us and the people that we represent going to university, because the Prime Minister has told us. The Prime Minister looked over at our side and said, 'Look at you people; you all went to university, ' as if having a higher education is something that we should be ashamed of. But we are proud of the fact that so many of us on this side of the parliament are the first in our family to go to university. Our parents might have left school at 15. Our grandparents might have had to live in a tent during the Depression. Our parents and our grandparents might have come from very, very working-class stock. But our parents worked hard and they helped put us through university. We understand aspiration on this side of the House. You lot like to talk about it. We like to demonstrate it. We are the living embodiment of it. That's why we'll stand up for students. That's why we'll stand up for people who go to university.

What do you think this bill is going to do to someone who goes to work for a charity, for a community legal centre, in a low-paid occupation? Do you think there's going to be an incentive to work in the community sector? Why would people do it? They're already going to take a discount on wages. Why would you punish them further by taxing them, by making further higher education contributions required so that you can just gather a little bit more money from them, even though they're working in that lower paid occupation?

Well, we won't stand for it. We'll stand up for aspiration. We'll stand up for people who want to go to university. We'll stand up for low-paid working people, because they deserve champions, and they will have them in this place as long as Labor is here. We will stand up for working people, and that includes people who went to university. It also includes vocational education. It also includes making sure that we do something about housing affordability. This government might be waging a war on young people, but young people will always have a voice in the Labor Party. The young people of Australia, who are this nation's future, will always have a voice. That's why we'll fight so hard on climate change. That's why we'll fight so hard for funding for vocational education and we'll stand up for public TAFE. That's why we'll always fight your cuts to university funding. That's why we'll always stand up against your cuts to the pension. And that's why we will oppose these amendments and this bill, because this bill punishes young people and it punishes lower paid workers—and you should be ashamed.

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We don't agree with these amendments and we don't support the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018, because it is one more example of this government's vandalism when it comes to education. This is a government that, just before Christmas, cut another $2.2 billion from our universities, not by taking it through the parliament and allowing us on this side to make clear our opposition to these university cuts but by pushing it through in the midyear economic update, just before Christmas—a $2.2 billion cut. All this government has done is make it harder for young Australians to get a university education.

And what do we want? We want every young Australian to have the opportunity, if they're prepared to work hard and study hard, to get a great education—at university, at TAFE; it doesn't matter. But we know that most jobs of the future will require one of these. They will require either a university education or a TAFE education, and this government is wrecking both. It is wrecking universities, making them harder to afford and harder to attend, and it is wrecking TAFE, by ripping billions out of vocational education, apprenticeships and traineeships, including hundreds of millions in the last budget alone. We know that many Australians are already turning their backs on a university education because they just can't afford it. This week, just days ago, we heard that one in seven university students are regularly going without food, because they can't afford to study and eat.

I was speaking today to one of our major universities that says that a large proportion of the homeless young people in their city are university students who haven't got a place to live. We saw an article this week in The Conversation about young women in particular trading sex for accommodation, including students who were doing this. What are we doing to our young Australians that we are making it so impossible to make ends meet to invest their time and their energy in a university education that gives them hope for the future?

It is incredible that we are asking young people on lower and lower incomes to pay a larger share of their income, repaying their debt sooner. We know who this hits hardest. It hits people in lower paid jobs harder, because they will be spending a disproportionate amount of their income, that should be covering necessities, on repaying their education sooner. We know that most of these people will be women. These measures disproportionately affect women, and Labor has said so all along. Sixty per cent of all Australians with a HELP debt are women and two-thirds of the Australians impacted by these changes will be women.

Of course our investment in education as a nation benefits the people who get the education. But those students, when they graduate, we hope go on throughout their professional lives to earn well and repay their debt—not just their HECS debt but their broader debt to society. Through their increased taxation as their wages increase they are supporting other young Australians to get a university education. Investment in education doesn't just benefit the individuals who receive the education; it benefits our nation. We know that Australia cannot be a wealthy and successful nation when we continue to cut university funding, as those opposite have done, and cut access to university education, as those opposite have done, by freezing university funding.

Our investment in university education has a substantial economic return. Just today, we saw another report, commissioned by the Group of Eight universities—I think done by London Economics—saying that in 2016 $12 billion was spent on their universities and $66 billion was returned in economic growth through that investment. Research, discovery, innovation and learning—the economic activity of the people who are working to supply the universities, particularly in our regional communities—makes a huge difference.

Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Vocational Education and Skills) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on these amendments. There are two points in particular that I would like to make. Firstly, I support the amendments that will be before us, and potentially discussed in a little bit more detail shortly.

What I would like to say is that I am particularly keen to support the amendment that deals with the removal of the loan fees from students of the table B providers. In particular, that affects one of the universities in my electorate of McPherson on the Gold Coast—that is, Bond University. For some time I have worked with Bond University, with the Vice Chancellor, Professor Tim Brailsford, and with students at the university for the removal of the loan fees. It has been a contentious issue. I have fought long and hard to have those fees removed, so I'm absolutely delighted to support that amendment today.

The other point that I would particularly like to make is in respect of vocational education. Let me start by saying that we are most definitely the party that is going to produce the results in the vocational education field. When Labor were in government, they absolutely decimated the sector. I've said before and I will say again—and I will continue to say it—that Labor, when in government, brought vocational education in this country to its knees. They did that by significantly reducing employer incentives in the vocational education space, and apprenticeships in particular. Under the former Labor government, the number of apprentices that we had in training dropped dramatically. When I speak of apprentices, I am, of course, speaking of Australian apprenticeships, which include apprentices and trainees. This government has put $1.5 billion on the table to increase the number of apprentices that we have in training.

There are clearly some strong target areas that we need to look at, and we're working with a number of states. There are five states and territories that have signed on to the national partnership agreement: New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory. We are continuing to work with them on the projects that they will be implementing to improve the number of apprentices that we have in training, not just in the coming year but for four years in total under the national partnership agreement, because this government recognises how important apprentices are to the future of Australia. So we'll be working with the states and territories in some targeted areas. We're certainly going to be looking at health, at ageing and at the disability sector. We'll also be looking at manufacturing, and we'll be looking at agriculture. We will work with every single state and territory to make sure that we are addressing the skills shortages that currently exist in this country and will continue to exist unless urgent action is taken.

So, when I say that we are the party that will stand up for vocational education, I can assure you that we have got the runs on the board, and we will continue to do that. It was just recently—maybe six weeks ago or maybe eight weeks ago—that one of the key stakeholders in the vocational education sector said to me that, for the first time, they can see the green shoots in vocational education, because, after such a long time in the darkness under Labor, we are now seeing some significant gains being made in that space. There is clearly more work to be done, but we have done a lot already to clean up the nightmare that we were left with when we took government.

Apprentices are and will continue to be our target into the future, but we will continue to look holistically at education. I've said before in this place that we see education as a highway where you can start with early childhood and you can go through schools, you can go into vocational education and you can go into higher education. We will continue to strongly support education in this country to make sure that everyone has the opportunity for a quality education.

When we talk about education, one of the things that we must be mindful of at all times is ensuring that the education that we are providing to our young people, not just at school but through vocational education and in higher education, is of a high quality and that those coming through higher education or vocational education are, in fact, job ready and have the skills that industry is crying out for. This is what this government stands for: high-quality education at universities, at schools, in vocational training and in our early childhood centres. So what we will do is continue to take up the fight to make sure that our children in Australia have the opportunity for an ongoing high-quality education.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Young people across this nation must look at this government and think, 'What did we ever do to you?' This government is trading off the future of young people time and time again across significant portfolio areas, making it more and more difficult for them, and it comes into this place with a bill like the one before us, which adds to that burden.

Young people in my community—and, I'm sure, the communities of many of my colleagues across the board—are facing challenges in getting, firstly, into post-secondary education opportunities. We know the impacts of the freeze on higher education funding and what that will do to universities and the offerings that they can make to students. We know that that will put pressure on them to decrease the opportunity to get a university qualification if that's where your interests and your ability lie.

I have to say I really admire the assistant minister's capacity to try and spin a good story out of what has been the devastation of the vocational education sector on the government's watch. She consistently says that this government is a serious friend of vocational education, but you've just got to look at the figures—the massive drop in the number of people undertaking vocational education, the huge decrease in the number of apprentices and trainees. It's like they've got one little lifeline that they cling to in this space, so the assistant minister constantly raises the fact that Labor cut back the employer incentives for traineeships—not for traditional apprenticeships. That was because there was a misuse of traineeships going on. If the government are critical of Labor's ensuring integrity in the provision of apprenticeships and traineeships, which is what we did with those changes, then I can only assume that they don't have any interest in the rigour and integrity of the system.

Only a couple of weeks ago, I was meeting with people involved in the TAFE sector about their concerns about the impact on diploma enrolments at TAFEs across the country—across electorates, like my own—as a result, to a significant extent, of the changes that the government has made around the VET FEE-HELP loan arrangements. They're causing a real problem. We know that diplomas are right in that sweet spot where a lot of future career opportunities are going to lie. A lot of people, particularly those retraining or re-entering the workforce, and young people straight out of school, will go and do their certificate-level courses in areas where there's going to be huge job demand—aged care, child care, disability care—and then seek to add a diploma onto that. But we've seen a massive drop-off in diploma enrolments, something the government just doesn't have an answer for. It's the same with apprenticeships: there are over 140,000 fewer apprenticeships on their watch. If, as the shadow minister says, there was a problem with what Labor was doing, why have the government been digging the hole deeper? They haven't put in place a policy that has arrested, let alone reversed, that trend. And so, as we've seen, for young people across the board, post school, the pressures are mounting.

Then let's add in the cost of housing. I've had many young people, under 30, say to me, 'I don't think I'll ever own a home.' This is what young people say to you now. They're struggling to pay rent because the market is so competitive for them. So they've got those cost burdens on them. Then they're trying to support themselves while they're studying. Let's not even get into the incompetence—how long it takes to get youth allowance processed and actually get payments coming into your bank account. I've heard stories of people who are entitled to youth allowance going a whole semester with no income. Then the government say, 'We'll get rid of their penalty rates,' if they've got a job that they work on a Sunday so they can actually make ends meet. 'Yes, we'll get rid of those too.' Then, just to top it off, they bring this bill into the parliament and say, 'Even though you're earning as little as $42,000,' which is not a lot of money—as the shadow minister said, the idea of HECS is to pay it back when you're reaping the benefits of that investment; on $42,000, you'd be lucky to be keeping your head above water—'we're going to rip into you and take some money from you now.'

It is no wonder that young people will be looking at this government, asking: 'When are you going to give us a go? When are you going to give us a future that we can look forward to?' And I haven't even touched on policy areas such as climate change or health—talk to young people about private health insurance. This government is completely out of touch with young people's needs.

Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We do not agree to these amendments. We do not agree to these amendments, and the reason is this: a few moments ago, the Prime Minister and his entire frontbench got up and walked out of the chamber, turning their back on this debate just as they are turning their back on the young people of Australia. They are turning their back on the young people of Australia. Make no mistake about it. From a government which has lectured Australians and the Australian Labor Party on the need for tax cuts, what this policy represents is a tax increase on young people at a time in their lives when they can least afford it.

They are making it harder for students to get into university by increasing the tuition fees that they pay and by reducing the funding that is available to universities to support new students. They are making it harder for students to stay at university through a whole mix of policies, which the member for Cunningham has now just gone through. The fact is that it is harder for a young person to keep a job and to ensure that they're earning enough from that job, because of penalty rate cuts and because the jobs are not paying enough to keep pace with the cost of living increases. They are making it harder for them to get into university and stay in university, and they are making it harder for them to pay their debts once they have left university. That is why young people around the country are asking, 'What has this government got against us? They are loading us up with debt and making it harder and harder for us to meet those expenses when we leave university.' They have got nothing in their policy swag for the young people of Australia.

This is just part of the suite of education policies which are having a pernicious impact on young Australians. It goes hand in hand with the $17 billion worth of cuts to school education. These people over here think it is more important that we give big banks a $17 billion tax cut than it is to give a struggling public school or independent school assistance with their teaching, assistance with their school facilities and some additional funding to help struggling students meet their education needs now and into the future. It also comes hand in hand with their cuts to TAFE. I'm reliably informed that there are in excess of $3 billion worth of cuts to the TAFE system. So it's harder to go to school and harder to go to university. What are your options? Vocational education, generally. But this mob over here, with their born-to-rule attitude, are making it harder to get into TAFE as well by ensuring that they are cutting funding for TAFE and ripping the guts out of the vocational education system, with $2.2 billion worth of cuts across the vocational and higher education system.

The people of Australia deserve better than what is on offer from this government. There used to be a time when the Prime Minister used to lecture Australians about the importance of being a smarter country. He used to tell us about how all Australians had an obligation to ensure that we pulled together and became a smarter country. You can't become a smarter country if you're ripping the guts out of the school education system, if you are ripping the guts out of the university system and if you are ripping the guts out of the vocational education system.

he message to the Prime Minister, the message to all of those backbenchers who are feeling very, very nervous indeed after the last round of by-elections, is to come back to this place and reject these amendments. They have a choice. They can stand by their Prime Minister and go down the gurgler with their Prime Minister or they can stand up for their electorates. They can stand up for the young people in their electorates and reject these amendments, reject the cuts to the vocational education system and the school education system, and say quite clearly to their Prime Minister, 'We do not support the tax cuts to big business or the $17 billion giveaway to big banks. Let's invest that money into schools, universities and the vocational education system. Let's put our priorities where they should be.' It's in the young people of this country. Not the big banks, not the big corporations. Let's get our priorities right. We can't become a smarter country if we're doing dumb things like this.

Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too do not agree with these amendments that we see before us today. It's a rotten day when you have to stand here in this parliament and defend higher education and the opportunities available to young people in this country. This should be a non-partisan matter. What happens to this country when we stop supporting higher education and stop supporting universities and the students that attend them, day in and day out, to get themselves a better life? This should be non-partisan. Why is it that the Liberal Party always pick off the low-hanging fruit? The low-hanging fruit for them is universities.

There are a number of universities around this country. I'm proud to have worked for one for about 10 years, at the University of Western Australia. It's where I learnt so many things. I was also an undergraduate there. Like many people on this side of the House, and I'm sure on the other side of the House, I'm the first in my family to graduate from a university. I was a state schoolkid—I went to Safety Bay Senior High School—and I've got to say, in speaking for the first time at the despatch box as a shadow minister, I'm very proud to have been a state schoolkid and to be defending higher education and universities in this country.

As I said, I worked at the UWA for many years, and I've had a lot to do with the five universities in my state: Curtin University in Bentley; Murdoch University in South Street, close to my electorate and the member for Tangney's electorate—I don't see him speaking against the cuts to Murdoch University, which is desperately in need of good, adequate funding to help its research program; Edith Cowan University; and the private university, the University of Notre Dame Australia. The poor public universities need this funding to help the young people of Western Australia. A $2 billion cut to their income, to the competitive grant that they get, which is an effective freeze on places for Western Australian students in Western Australian universities, is denying Western Australian young people the opportunity to go to university.

This government has no idea how the university sector is funded. We heard the Minister for Education and Training, Senator Birmingham, cry about the rivers of gold that he thinks universities have inherited over the last couple of years through the demand-driven system. What the demand-driven system did was allow more people—young people who would never have thought university was accessible to them—to go to university. That's what the demand-driven system, introduced by the Gillard government in this place, brought to the young people, to all people, of Australia—greater opportunities to go to university. And what does the current minister for education, Senator Birmingham, have to say about it? He calls it 'rivers of gold'. Well, go tell that to a vice-chancellor who has to spend several millions of dollars of their annual income trying to maintain things like, I don't know, libraries, museums or expensive art collections that they don't necessarily collect themselves but which have been gifted to them by people that are generous benefactors. They are great gifts to universities. These are some of the things universities have to maintain.

What should we have? Should we have 100-year-old institutions just crumbling to the ground so that these rivers of gold can go elsewhere? Why do the government ignore the fact that there's a cross-subsidy between research and education in this country? The reason we have a research-teaching nexus in universities in this country is so students who attend universities as undergraduates can learn from the best researchers in the country and in the world. That is of great benefit to all of us. The members on this side spoke about the Prime Minister's ridiculous and empty innovation agenda. We saw where that went. Where did it go? It just popped up, we had a nice couple of graphics that whirled around for a while, and then it all petered out. Do you know where the real innovation is happening? It's where the actual science is happening, and that's in universities. It is done by students, research students as well as undergraduate students, and their lecturers.

The bill we see today, which is going to bring down the threshold for when students have to pay back their HECS and HELP fees, is going to deny more people access to the greatest kind of education you can get. It's an amazing opportunity that this government are seeking to deny young people. It's an outrageous attack, and a continual, persistent and consistent attack, on young people in this country. The government just keep piling on the pressure on young people. They won't do anything about housing affordability. Oh, no, they won't do that. They won't do anything about penalty rates. Most young people are working in pubs and bars to try and make ends meet while they're at university, but they won't do a thing about penalty rates. Instead, the government are just going to make it harder for vulnerable people, for people from low-SES areas to go to university. That's a crying shame, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Ross Hart (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the amendments to the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018. I thank the member for Brand for her contribution. She quite rightly paid particular attention to the fact that this Orwellian treatment—so-called sustainability—of higher education is in some way supporting the university sector and supporting the ability of people to go to university and advance themselves in life. We know, on this side of the chamber, that this represents the most grievous attack not just on the universities but also on young people and people in the regions.

I have the pleasure to represent—as does my friend the member for Braddon—Northern Tasmania, an area which historically has underperformed. There has been a lot of economic analysis as to what it is that holds back Northern Tasmania and Tasmania as a whole. Of course, the fact that the Tasmanian economy has significantly underperformed the equivalent economies even in regional Australia is something that has been the subject of economic analysis. One of the theories underpinning this is the fact that educational attainment, in particular higher educational attainment, is not keeping pace in Tasmania. So what we need is not less support for higher education and the higher education sector in areas like Northern Tasmania and other regional communities throughout Australia but more.

The important thesis is that average incomes in the regions are significantly below those in urban communities. We have better educational attainment in the urban communities, while the regional parts of states, particularly in a state like Tasmania, suffer from lower educational attainment. And in the cities we see a greater representation of people who have graduated with higher degrees. It is reasonable to suggest that investment in education—not denying investment in education—is the way this parliament should proceed. We know, on this side of the House, that investment in higher education and education generally is an investment in the economy in the long term. This government, as I've said previously, has a one-point plan for the economy in Australia—a one-point plan which involves shovelling $80 billion worth of money out the door, in particular to the big banks.

We know there's a better way to proceed. We know it's not coincidental that the amount of money that is being invested in the tax cuts for the big banks is roughly the same that is being denied to education.

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a conspiracy!

Ross Hart (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Bowman. He should know a conspiracy when he looks at it. The important thing is that the Labor Party, this side of politics, has recognised that investment in education is important, particularly for regional Tasmania. That's why, during the 2016 federal election campaign, we committed to the university transformation project in Northern Tasmania. We committed to the fact that we need to improve educational attainment in Northern Tasmania. We want to see higher education with better numbers of students graduating from university, higher incomes and higher productivity, particularly within the Tasmanian economy. Every small business in Northern Tasmania should aspire to the fact that they will have better productivity by paying their highly educated workforce more and, of course, improving the economic performance of their business.

Now, there is no doubt that people recognise that universities represent a significant opportunity for economic growth. Recent studies suggest that the mere presence of higher numbers of university graduates in an economy significantly drives employment not just within the graduate cohort but within the wider workforce. What's the response of this government? The response of this government is to make it more difficult for people to attend university or, if they do attend university, they'll have a higher education debt, which they'll pay off earlier, because this government simply don't see our young people or our people in regional Australia having the opportunity to get ahead. We know that regional Australia, regional economies and the other states throughout Australia need this investment in higher education. It's vitally important that we push back, that we reject these amendments and that we reject this legislation. Thank you.

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to echo what has already been said about the appalling impacts of the substantive provisions of the legislation to lower the thresholds and make young people repay their education debt earlier—but I'll touch on that in a moment. At the outset, I want to call out the appalling process that the government has gone through, which has been almost an abuse of the House. We have debated a version of this legislation twice at length. Sloppily reheated seconds came back when the government couldn't get the first go through, so they thought, 'We couldn't get $42,000 through; we'll try $45,000.' They shunted that off to the Senate. They read the writing on the wall that it was going to again fail in the Senate and die where it should've, and at the last minute they've cooked up a dodgy deal with the crossbench, which the House has not been briefed or advised on. We haven't had a moment to reflect on what it actually means. It's an appalling way to make education policy.

From what I've been told there is a second amendment. We are debating two amendments concurrently, and the debate so far has focused quite rightly on the awful impacts on young people in our communities, but the other amendment, which we're being told we have to debate and vote on concurrently, relates to extending loans to table B providers for private universities and removing loan fees for these institutions. That may be a good idea. I understand that Labor has an open mind to this. This is exactly the kind of issue we would publicly and transparently consider with consultation in a proper, grown-up policy process. All the government muppets who ran away from this debate are going to wander back in, stick their hands up and have no idea what they're actually voting on. In fact, hardly anyone in the House has any idea what we're voting on, because the government has done some dodgy deal with Senator Bernardi in the other place.

I don't understand the policy impacts or arguments around extending loans for table B providers for private universities. The extension of the loans in the system may have some value, but we have said that, in government, we would consider it in our national inquiry on post-secondary education, where everyone can have a say. It's probably old-fashioned, with the government's approach to making policy and legislation, to actually allow members to understand what they're voting on and put the detail in front of them; nevertheless, I think it is important that the House understands that we're voting on two very different things, one of which has never been part of the government's legislative proposal and has never been considered or debated in any sense by this House.

With regard to the other provision, the government's latest attempt to make life harder for young people, we hear from those opposite that lowering the repayment threshold, the income at which young people will be forced to repay their education debts, doesn't really matter, because it's just $5 or 10 bucks a week, not a lot of money. It might not be a lot of money to people in here—to those opposite, who just awarded themselves a tax cut worth $7,000 when it fully rolls out—but $5 is a lot of money to people in my community, to students struggling to make ends meet and put themselves through university while the government opposite cuts their penalty rates. On behalf of young people in my community I don't accept that $5 or $10 is a just little bit of money; it is significant.

I have to speak up on behalf of my electorate. During the last campaign I doorknocked more than 12,000 houses over 18 months and asked people, 'What matters most?' The No. 1 priority that kept coming back was education, whether I was talking to a young person thinking about their future, a grandparent worried about their grandkids, or a parent worried about how their kids are going to get to TAFE or university. Most particularly, migrants, who come to this country seeking a better life for their kids, have a laser-like focus on education. In the electorate that I've been proud to represent almost 60 per cent of people are born in another country. They come here, work hard and look for education. This bill takes us in the wrong direction. It makes it harder for young people to get into university.

When you think about our partners and friends in Asia—our competitors in the coming decades—the OECD and everyone else say we should invest in two things: infrastructure and education. A smart country would be lowering barriers to education so that the brightest kid from the poorest family can have a chance to go to university. That was part of my family story. My mum left school at 15 in Footscray. Her family could not afford the uniforms to go to a school that offered year 12. My father, on the other hand, had the opportunity to pay his way through university. He failed a bit and just kept paying. That was seared into my consciousness: every kid, no matter their circumstances, should be able to go to university.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the amendments be agreed to.