Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

An amendment by Senator Bartlett has been circulated in the chamber. Perhaps I will briefly indicate, if Minister Vanstone does not mind, Labor’s view on that amendment, despite the fact that it has not been moved. I understand that Senator Bartlett is on his way to the chamber, so to expedite debate I will briefly indicate my attitude to the foreshadowed amendment of Senator Bartlett.

The Democrats will oppose schedule 2. I want to place on record the opposition’s view in relation to that. We do not support the deletion of schedule 2. We do support the retention of the FEE-HELP scheme. We regard it as a scheme which provides necessary support to students in certain courses, particularly those undertaking postgraduate coursework degrees. It has also become an important program for supporting students at non-government universities such as Notre Dame and with other private higher education providers. The Labor opposition has already committed to retaining FEE-HELP to help students who choose to study with a private higher education provider.

As I outlined in my speech in the second reading debate, Labor is extremely concerned about the spiralling levels of student debt in Australia. The changes that I referred to in my speech in the second reading debate will alone add an extra $73 million to student debt by 2010, bringing the total to $20 billion. The issue is how one approaches dealing with this unacceptably high level of debt. We believe that the path to that is through Labor’s commitment to the abolition of full-fee undergraduate degrees in Australia’s public universities. We do not believe that abolishing the scheme, as is essentially proposed in the amendment, is the answer. Labor remains opposed to six-figure degrees—$100,000 or $200,000 degrees—of the sort that I believe the Prime Minister said we would never have. As I said, we have committed to the abolition of full-fee undergraduate degrees in Australia’s public universities.

Accordingly, the Labor position is that, to prevent crippling debt for students at our public universities, we intend to eliminate this problem at its root by opposing full-fee undergraduate degrees in public universities and, in government, by phasing out these degrees.