Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am just about to, actually. I am about to say something to you quite directly. I understand the senator is not very happy with those remarks, but there will be a debate in the Labor Party over temporary protection visas—no doubt. To the suggestion that people will spend more on degrees than many Australians will spend on a house—not many. I do not think Senator Wong has looked at house prices lately. I think that is a serious issue.

The claim over more suitably qualified candidates is one that does need to be contested. We can have our differences of opinion over the entry mechanisms for the government funded places—the appropriateness or otherwise of TER scores being linked with interviews and various other mechanisms that decide who gets in to which faculty—but I think we have to agree that there are only a certain number of government funded places and that, while we might disagree at the edges as to how the distribution is done, it is done with good faith that everybody thinks is fair. Everyone is always looking for a better way to do it—that is, within the government funded places, those who are suitably qualified get in. There is no argument that I have heard that people who ought not to are getting into government funded places.

Nonetheless, that leaves the question: why do we let overseas students invest in themselves and not Australian students? Senator Wong’s response to that is: ‘Why don’t we just pay for them all?’ The taxpayer cannot afford it. We are not going to be a government that goes back into deficit. We are not going to borrow from the rest of the world and make our children pay the debt. That is the old-fashioned Labor way—borrow from the rest of the world to buy your way back into government. Put the government into debt and let Australians pay the bill for you to buy your way back into government. We are not going to do that.

As to the suggestion that investing in yourself is inappropriate, that is interesting—I am going to consider sending Senator Wong’s speech to universities like Harvard and Oxford and ask them if they would like to reconsider. I might spend a bit of time writing to people who have got their degrees there, asking them if they think they are rich and thick because they paid for their university degrees. It is a ludicrous notion that Australians should not be able to invest in themselves.

If it is good enough for universities to sell places, predominantly to students from India and from China—and I welcome them doing that—then it should be good enough for them to sell those places, additional places, to Australian students. It is a matter of note that the Labor Party choose to play what I think is a race card by saying, ‘We cannot have Chinese workers coming here taking jobs; we have people coming from India taking jobs,’ but they are quite happy to take money from Chinese and Indian students to fund the higher education sector. Every way you turn they want one thing on the one hand and another on the other. Just spin the dice. Which way are they going to focus today? We focus on choice and opportunity. There are only so many government funded places. Relatively speaking they are distributed fairly. But, if people over and above that want to invest in themselves, we should not be holding them back and we certainly should not be selling places to the rest of the world and refusing to sell them to Australians.