Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Hanson-Young has foreshadowed, the opposition will oppose this amendment. She is prescient in her comments. I understand her argument is that at least to some degree student organisations should be funded. Throughout this entire debate one of the issues that my colleagues in the opposition have been concerned about is the capacity for student politicians to spend student money on various causes. One of the reasons I became involved in student politics, a long time ago, was that student money was spent on causes that I absolutely loathed. I have no objection to people spending their own money how they wish—I do not have any problem with it at all, and I mean that. If people want to spend their money on any particular cause, my view is that it is fine if it is within the law. But when as a student my money was being spent to fund the PLO in the early 1980s, I did not like that. I did not like the idea of my money being used to fund a terrorist organisation. For that reason I joined the Liberal club. Of course I could have joined the Labor club, but they were not quite so strong on this issue. Sadly, they were divided on my campus—half of them thought funding the PLO was a good idea and the other half thought it was not a bad idea. This is the nub of the problem.

None of us on the coalition side have any problem with people protesting or supporting any particular organisation, but we fundamentally object to the expenditure of student money for causes which most students would absolutely object to. The funding of terrorist organisations like the PLO—and other causes; today it could be Hamas—is something we would object to and for that reason the opposition opposes Greens amendment (3).