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

Suffice it to say that generation Y sees institutionalised civil society quite differently than people of my vintage or Senator Carr's. That means they are more likely to join a Facebook or organise their own time in their own way than to join some group at university—far more so. This, coupled with the change in the demography of Australian universities, means far fewer students go straight from high school into university these days—about half as many, proportionally, as 30 years ago. And what does that mean? It means the nature of the services that need to be provided has changed enormously. The government does not quite understand that—and perhaps it never quite has.

I could talk about this for a long time—and I know my friend Senator Carr has heard me on this topic many times. Suffice it to say that most of the services and activities provided by student unions tend to be superfluous, in the sense that they already exist and are being provided by the universities themselves, by the government and by the non-government voluntary sector. Many of them are free, others are heavily subsidised, and all of them are available to university students without discrimination or prejudice. For those reasons, the coalition simply do not support the aspect of the bill relating to the indexed amount. Of course, the coalition opposed compulsory student unionism when the bill came before this place last year—and I suspect we will never change our opposition to that. It is a strange thing. Outside of university, students would never expect everyone in their suburb, for example, to pay a levy or a tax so that they could enjoy rugby union, but it seems that somehow people think that because someone goes to university they should be slugged a fee so someone else can play rugby union or rugby league or join the beer appreciation society. Why is that? Why do we change the nature of civil society, whether that is in a university or a community, all of a sudden? Again, the government never answers that. It says, 'Oh, this is an appropriate thing.' In fact, what it does is that it tends to bolster causes that some activist students become involved with. I know my good friend Senator Humphries would agree with that. That is what it tends to do.

I know it is early days yet and many of my good friends among the vice-chancellors tell me—as I am sure they tell Senator Kim Carr and, indeed, Senator Evans—'It doesn't matter; student radicalism has died, Senator Mason.' But my concern is that money that is appropriated by universities for so-called student activities will be appropriated by students who do not represent a majority of students but only those who are activist—in other words, not by the general majority who are out there working or raising a family but by full-time students who generally are younger and generally come straight from school, as indeed I did. The fact is, though, that the world has changed.

The government has done a good thing for the universities with the uncapping of student numbers. It has freed the aspirations for many more Australians to come to university, but most of those, as the government well knows again, will be part-time, external and often disadvantaged students. And do you know what will happen? In the end, they will be subsidising the more advantaged.