Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We began this by trying to get rid of the retrospectivity which threatened those students, and that we have achieved. That having been achieved, to score a political point out of this, the coalition is saying: ‘Well, now we won’t support it. It is all or nothing with us and so students will get nothing.’ That is the position into which the coalition is putting students from regional and city Australia. Let them take the responsibility for it.

I remind the National Party and the Liberal Party that they are not in government. When they were in government, as my Senate colleagues said, compared to other countries, money was stripped out of public education and out of tertiary education. Now they are acting as if they are still in government and they are going to leave students with no support at all. You bear the responsibility for it. You take the responsibility for that and we will be out there telling students about the support we got for them, the retrospectivity we got rid of and the improved arrangement we got for them with the government and that you failed to get because you put politics—