Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to take interjections on the subject of education. As the Senate knows, I take education very, very seriously, and to say that there is no problem in public education is an absolutely disgraceful thing to say in this chamber. There is a crisis, and every single public school teacher that I know says so. Those young teachers say to me that they walk into the classroom and do not even know how to teach. It is time that university educators taught teachers how to teach—less critiquing of the most recent French pedagogy and more about how to teach a syllabus in Australian primary and high schools. That is what is at stake, and it is a great pity that a former teacher does not quite get that.

The third issue that I want to raise this afternoon is the abolition of domestic undergraduate full-fee-paying students. There is a whiff of class envy here. I concede that before the election the government did say that they would abolish domestic undergraduate full-fee-paying places. That is true, and that is why we are not opposing the bill. I accept that. But there is a whiff of class envy about this policy. Why is it that overseas students can come to this country, go to a public university and pay to do these courses? They can pay, whereas our students cannot. And why is it that Australian domestic students can go to a private university and then they can pay to do these courses? Well, of course, they can. The problem with the Labor Party is that they believe that people who choose to use their own money to pay for their education must somehow be rich. That is the old class envy thing—that people who choose to spend money on education, whether it is primary, secondary or tertiary, are somehow rich. That is wrong. That is a whiff of class envy, the old cloth cap, and it is not on. Still, they did announce this before the last election. I acknowledge that and for that reason the coalition does not oppose the bill. It opposes the policy but not the bill.

The fourth point that I want to raise is compensation for the abolition of domestic undergraduate full-fee-paying places. The government is providing 11,000 new HECS places to compensate universities for the loss of domestic undergraduate full-fee-paying students. The question is: will universities be adequately compensated? That is the question.