Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, Senator O'Sullivan, we kept being promised this new high standard; we kept being given assurances that these promises were not going to be broken—and they have been broken.

As I said before, we have had the debate and we will continue to have the debate about promises that have been broken. I really want to try and take a step away from that debate, because I think there is a fundamental question here: what is it we are saying about the society we want to be? My issue is not just that the promises have been broken—I think that is reprehensible, and I think politicians who do that pay a price. The lesson, from all sides of politics, over the past twenty years has been that if you make commitments before an election, and if you do not meet those commitments after the election, the Australian public will hold you to account at the ballot box. I think there are numerous examples, from all sides of politics in the past few decades, where politicians have paid the price for that. That has been a bipartisan failure across politics in this country for a long period of time, and people have paid the price at the ballot box at federal, state and local government levels, repeatedly, for not learning that lesson.

I believe that a lot of this really comes down to an attack on the value system. This says a lot about the government. It says a lot about their values and about their priorities. And there is no group that is more badly affected at the moment than those younger Australians who are being attacked on so many levels. That is my concern: yes, they are not the most powerful group when it comes to speaking up and being politically engaged; they are not the most powerful group in terms of lobbyists. I commend the amazing work of organisations like National Seniors and the Council on the Ageing. They have done an incredible job in speaking up openly and publicly about their concerns. Unfortunately, I think the group that is getting really squeezed in all of this is young Australians who, for many reasons—disengagement with politics, priorities, lack of organisation—have not really spoken up.

If you look at what is happening to younger Australians as part of these budget measures, it is really concerning. You start off with the cutting of funding to school programs through Gonski—the fact that, after a couple of years, the funding will not be continued, and the educational opportunities at a schooling level will be affected; and then you add the fact that apprenticeship program are starting to disappear—gone! When you have a nation that is not prepared to protect its manufacturing base and the priorities of a manufacturing society, the opportunities go. We have to be prepared to accept the fact that we need to create different paths for different people, and for young people, to go through. Not everyone wants to go to university, or should go to university, or needs to go to university. But we have always been a country that was proud of our apprenticeship programs and proud of our manufacturing base. If that is not the nation we want to be, that is another opportunity gone.

Then you start looking at the university sector, and you look at what the deregulation is going to do. Again, I worry less about those future lawyers and doctors who can take on $100,000 of debt to become, for example, a top-notch lawyer, and this and that—those people, in many cases, will be fine in any kind of system; those who can afford it. But I worry about the migrant kids in Sydney, whose parents flew out here—similar to the way my parents did—and who do not have those kinds of connections, or the income, or the opportunities. For them, going to university would have been their path out. I worry about what happens to universities, like UWS and others, in this kind of deregulated system. I am a Sydney Uni boy; but I do not worry about the Sydney University law school—I am sure that the Sydney University law school is going to do very well out of this. But the Sydney University law school should not be the priority of this government. The priority should be those people in struggling universities, those people who are the first person in their family to go to university and those people who often have to make a financial decision about whether they can incur and carry that kind of debt or whether they are not going to pursue a higher education.

On top of that, there is an increasing rate of youth unemployment. Youth unemployment has consistently been out of control. I want to take the politics out of this. Frankly, this is an issue which governments have wanted to tackle in the past 20 years, but there has been a bipartisan failure to tackle the real underlying issues of youth unemployment. To add to that genuine issue, there is this whole notion that young people will have to wait six months before they are able to access welfare—