Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Birmingham, thank you very much. I have lost my train of thought. Senator Carr also referred to the allegation that somehow saving money over the four years of the forward estimates of the budget was going to magically fund Labor's mythical Gonski reforms that were never accounted for. If that was the case, Labor would not have stripped out $1.2 billion from the first four years of those reforms in the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook. According to the previous Labor government, the students of Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory did not deserve to be funded on the same basis as other students. That was gutted by the Labor Party before the election. This government then had to find $1.2 billion to put back into schools education. That move alone demonstrates the hypocrisy and emptiness of what Senator Carr refers to and the fiction that Labor has tried to create that somehow these measures were going to be directed towards schools funding—they were not.

Senator Carr says that we have a myopic view—I do not know that was the word he used—that this is about spending, not about investment. That betrays Senator Carr's factional home in the socialist left, because it is all spending. It must all be accounted for. There is no magical investment budget paper that says somehow we do not have to borrow that money or raise it through taxation. There are three ways to spend money. You get it from somewhere else within government, you increase taxes or you increase borrowings. Increasing borrowings is just deferring an increase in taxation. But Senator Carr tries to create this mythical separation between spending and investment, as if by somehow rebadging it with an NTEU bumper sticker it does not actually have to come out of the taxpayers' coffers—it all does.

Given Senator Carr brought it up, I cannot resist mentioning the issue of student unionism. Senator Carr referred to how proud he was that the Labor Party and their Green allies had brought back in compulsory student unionism through the student services and amenities fee. I imagine that now in this ski season, and it is a good one I understand, Senator Carr is proud of those students working part-time jobs so that those select few can get into Melbourne University's and Monash University's subsidised ski lodge at Mt Buller. Of course, the great majority of students cannot get anywhere near it. You will not see those students who are actually working their way through university, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, in the Range Rovers up at Mt Buller this time of year. I am sure Senator Carr is proud of the fact that those students working part-time jobs, pushing trolleys around supermarkets or waiting tables in Carlton's Lygon Street or some other cafe near a university are subsidising the clubs' and societies' activities, the entertainment or indeed the legal services he referred to of the protestors who usually get themselves in trouble on the steps of the Victorian parliament.

Mr Deputy President, I think I was involved in an inquiry with you on this matter once quite a long time ago. That issue itself portrays Senator Carr's lack of concern about equity. Consider the idea that there is this poll tax, explicitly unrelated to anything to do with your university education, that you pay regardless of your means that is used to subsidise the activities of those who do have leisure time at the expense of those who might have to work. It is used to build Taj Mahals like ski lodges and subsidise those on the basis that the great majority of students can never access them. I find this a profound challenge to any vision of equity in the university education system.

This measure is made necessary by the fiscal mess the previous government left us in. Senator Carr referred to a concocted or invented fiscal budget emergency. That betrays Senator Carr's true perspective that there is no problem with government debt. The Greens and other groups run around supporting the Labor Party, saying there is no problem with public debt. They compare Australia to other OECD nations, but they do not compare actual government debt in Australia. They take a very narrow measure of government bonds on issue. They do not take into account unfunded superannuation liabilities that are not yet accounted for by the entirety of the Future Fund. They do not take into account debt that is held at state government and local government levels. The taxpayer is on the hook for all of that. Over the period of the previous coalition government, the strong fiscal position of the Commonwealth is what made sure Australia's economy was resilient from the external shocks of the Asian financial crisis. It actually provided the capital that Senator Carr claimed credit for spending. The previous coalition government had money in the bank through the Future Fund, the Higher Education Endowment Fund and the Health and Hospitals Fund. Indeed, having a positive balance sheet allowed the Labor government to undertake the most wasteful stimulus program in Australian history.

Senator Carr cannot have it both ways. He cannot claim credit for spending the money that the previous government saved and then say it is not necessary to save money again. The fiscal situation inherited by this government is on a trajectory that is utterly unsustainable. As a country, we have a choice: we can make decisions now, when we are in a position to make them manageable; or we can push them off, as other countries have done, and then they will get much more difficult and much more intergenerationally unfair. The hypocrisy of the Labor Party in proposing this motion is betrayed by that and also by the fact that this was their measure. I will conclude on this point: this measure was announced by the Labor Party in April 2013, it was in the Labor Party's last budget in May 2013 and it was in the Labor Party's paperwork—the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook—before the last election. All this government is trying to do is put in place a saving that the Labor Party themselves took to the Australian people, to actually save the money that the Labor Party announced they were going to save. They refused to do that, and the hypocrisy is on display for all to see.