Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities) Bill 2010. Let us be clear that this is the imposition of a new tax. Australians are now very used to the Gillard Labor government imposing new tax burdens on them and this is another new burden, this time on students. It is a particularly ironic tax in that it is imposed on a group in the community that, throughout its years in opposition, the Labor Party constantly advocated for on the basis of having too many expenses associated with their education.

Time and again we were lectured about how the cost of HECS, the cost of university fees and the cost of other impositions on students were excessive and that the Howard government needed to do something about the cost on students. Today, in government, the Gillard Labor government is adding its own costs—the cost of a student services fee—which until now students have had the choice to meet as they see fit. No-one denies that people on campus as students should not have the right to contribute to organisations where they feel they will obtain some benefit, where they feel that there is some advantage in belonging and that they can get some value for money from their investment. We all make decisions of that kind. We all decide at various stages of our life to join the local tennis club, the golf club, the RSL or to belong to the P&C at the local school. We make educated decisions about what is in our interests and about what benefits we get from membership, and organisations tailor their benefits of membership to the amount they charge to the people who come forward to join them. They need to demonstrate that there are benefits in order to have people make the decision to pay the membership fees and join those organisations.

It is a freedom we all enjoy, all except, effectively, students at Australian universities, who will be told that they will have an obligation to pay a fee of $263 a year. The fee will not be voluntary; it will be levied regardless of the ability of the students to pay the fee, regardless of the extent to which students are actually on campus using the benefits of the fee. For example, there are around 130,000 Australian students at the moment who are studying externally. These students, of course, do not very often come to the campus; they cannot access the services which their $263 fee will provide, and yet they are compelled to pay it.

Students will be required to pay the fee to fund services that they may not approve of. Senator Macdonald and other senators in this debate have pointed out that there are many things which those student organisations fund which, in the eyes of many Australians, would be regarded as quite reprehensible. They shamelessly lobby and campaign in elections, for example, and we have the phenomenon of thousands and thousands of students who are great Liberal or National supporters, or with some other party, who are effectively funding the activities of the Australian Labor Party and the Greens because they are compelled to contribute to an organisation of which they do not approve and of whose politics they do not wish to support.

I know that the members opposite choose to characterise this debate as being about the Liberal Party and the coalition trying to prevent organisations that they politically oppose from having resources to run campaigns against them, that we do not understand or appreciate the work of student organisations and we are not in tune with those organisations. I have to put on record that, as a student many years ago, I was very active in my student organisation. Of course, I lived in the era when fees were compulsory and I felt that I would get involved on the basis that I had no choice in that matter. Indeed, I was elected President of the Students Association of the Australian National University and I made it my mission as president of the students association there to give students better value for money for what they wanted, even though I knew that the association would continue to get fees via the university's funding mechanisms from the pockets of the students, irrespective of how well the organisation did. The fact is, however, that in the last few years students have had that choice to make, courtesy of legislation passed during the Howard government's term. They had an election to make whether they wished to join those organisations, to pay those fees and to obtain those benefits.

The fact of that voluntary student unionism has had a very salutary effect on the operation of student organisations. They have had to change, in a very substantial way, the way in which they worked in order to attract people to belong to them. Some of the nonsense that used to go on in student organisations has, I think, to a large extent dissipated. That pressure to provide value for money will disappear when this legislation passes because it will provide once again that the students will be burdened with a fee on which they have no say and which will fund services and activities which other students do not need or which they do not support. This is a very cynical step by a government which has constantly claimed to be on the side of greater choice for students and greater capacity to support students as they go through their years of study. It now decides that it would rather take money from their pockets to support its political allies on university campuses.

The really astonishing thing about this legislation, though, is the extent to which it deprives students of any meaningful say in this process. At our universities we have people who will rise to positions of doctors, lawyers, scientists, accountants, dentists, nurses and, undoubtedly, senators one day. We have people at our universities who we expect to be leaders of our community in every sense in a generation or so. They are leaders in a sense of being political leaders, perhaps, but they are leaders in their various occupations and professions and they are leaders in the community. We expect them to be people who exercise a great deal of judgment and who will be able to make important decisions about what goes on in their communities. But we do not believe that these exceptional individuals, these talented people who make it through to our universities, are capable of deciding for themselves whether they could afford to put $250 a year, or whatever the fee might be, into an organisation on the basis that they know it is worth while. We are telling those students that, irrespective of what you think, you put your money into that organisation. We do not care whether you believe the services are good value for money. We know what is best for you. We, the Australian government, are telling you that these services are what you need. We do not care that you might live 200 kilometres from the university campus and cannot access the campus gym, or uni bar or pool. We do not care that you might make an educated decision not to belong to that organisation. We know it is best for you and we will oblige you to belong.

I do not know of any other area in a free, democratic society today where we so blatantly require individuals to belong to organisations, in effect, by virtue of them being in a particular area of the community, particular occupation group or a particular place. That is, I think, insulting to those people who we trust enough to occupy rare and contested places at our universities. It is insulting to them and it is not necessary.

I believe that the government has once again looked at the dollars, is keen to ensure that the dollars are put into places where, in effect, it obtains a benefit from them. I can understand the politics of that. I can see that the government would love to have access to those dollars, because the support that the community is giving the Australian Labor Party at the moment could be said to be at a pretty low ebb. Maybe the dollars that it would usually expect to be available to it through donations and so forth might be a little bit harder to come by at the next election, as has been the case in the past. So shoring up a source of funding from universities might appear to be a sensible bit of work on the part of the government before they face the next election.

I remind senators that that money is coming out of the pockets of people least able to afford it. It is from people on already low incomes, who struggle to pay university fees and get through those usually fairly lean years of university. It is from smart people who are quite capable of deciding whether they need to belong to a union and get services from it or not. That money will flow to those student organisations and, sadly, the blatant misuse, which we have seen in the past, of those sorts of funds I think will resume. That is a matter of great regret. The government has decided to increase the burden on students for reasons which really are more to do with politics than to do with principle. At the heart of this is the principle that the government does not trust the judgment of the students to occupy those valuable places at our universities.

It is important to acknowledge that student organisations have a right to exist on campuses. It is important to acknowledge that they can play a valuable role and that, particularly in recent years since voluntary student unionism was effectively introduced by the previous government, a great many changes have been made in the way that many of those organisations have worked. The extent to which they have been able to generate a much better range of services and demonstrate much better value for money is a question that I do not think any of us doubt. The reason that university student organisations are now able to look up and say, 'We've done a better job at selling ourselves to our potential student membership base,' is precisely because students can make an election about whether they belong to the union or not. When a student has to choose between buying textbooks, studying materials, a laptop, transport to and from the university, costs of living and so forth, they will make a very judicious and careful decision about whether belonging to the student organisation is value for money or not. At least they would have made it before this legislation came forward. They will no longer have that decision to make.

As I mentioned, a large number of students are not in a position to even use the services of student unions. A large number of students for various reasons, because they study part time or they are external students, find themselves at great distance from universities. For them accessing those services is not a practical option. People need to ask themselves: why is it that those people in particular should be required to pay these fees? The assumption seems to be that, if they are external or if they are part time, they have the resources to pay them. I would have thought that the more important issue here is not whether they have the resources to pay but whether they have the need for those services. As a nation we do not require that people recognise the benefit of their local tennis club, golf club or football club and say, 'You shall belong to these organisations because they are worth while and valuable and do some good things, and you might get some services from them one day.' We say that you belong if you choose to belong. It keeps the organisations themselves honest in a way which is not going to be the case under this legislation. This is compulsory student unionism by stealth. There are some mechanisms in the legislation which operate as fig leaves, to make it look as though the organisations have to demonstrate certain things before they can receive these funds. None of those fig leaves alters the reality that this is in effect a return to the compulsory funding of student activities by students who may not have any need for the services provided or any interest in the activities of the student organisation. The fact that student organisations provide 'representation' on behalf of students to university bodies and so on is again beside the point. We do not require people to belong to organisations in order to obtain representative advocacy on their behalf. We let them choose whether they wish to subscribe to the views of organisations before they belong to them, but that does not appear to be the motivation behind this legislation.

I note in an opinion poll commissioned by the Australian Democrats—and the Democrats would not usually have associated themselves very much with the concept of voluntary student unionism, as I recall—that 59 per cent of students voted against compulsory fees. That is not a surprising figure when you bear in mind that in most campus elections perhaps only five per cent of students cast a vote.