Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

I recall, Senator: John Dawkins introduced some changes which you vigorously opposed. Do you remember those? I think you are on the public record, down at Deakin saying that you strenuously stood on a platform opposing any fees whatsoever. I look forward to hearing you explain how you now support it. Perhaps you are like the Minister for Education, who, when he has been caught out on this, has said, 'I simply told people what they wanted to hear.' He was in training to be the education minister of the Commonwealth of Australia! As a student, he just told them what they wanted to hear—did not believe a word of it, he says now.

We have a situation where the government is seeking to delay these bills until next year. They will keep on being on the table. They will say, 'Oh, yes, we're sticking to our guns here; we're determined to fight on, but we'll have to deal with it another time.' And of course they know that come next March, under the current law, there is a need for a reconciliation between what is in the budget and what is in the legislation. They are withholding the money from universities at this time, despite the fact that the parliament has now rejected those changes three times. They are saying, 'We'll get them through later on.' We will find that by next March, under law, they are required to make a reconciliation and that universities will be able to pursue their legal rights at law.

It is not good enough for the government to simply announce that they are going to slash the budget where there is a clear piece of legislation indicating the way in which money is to be expended. They expend money on the authority granted by the parliament. They do not have the discretion simply to rewrite the legislation without parliamentary approval. The government knows this. They know it is bad policy, and they know it is flawed policy, so they need to find a new narrative to explain their funding cuts, their breach of promise to the electorate, their undermining of their commitments to the Australian people. They need to explain how they have stripped out of Australia the basic principle of a fair go. They have to explain what they have done to undermine the research program upon which our prosperity—new industries, new technologies, new opportunities—is so heavily reliant. They have to explain all of that. So they will simply be trying to run some sort of argument that the reality of their dog-eat-dog policies, their survival-of-the-fittest vision, has hit this tremendous brick wall. And that is what the Senate inquiry will be able to highlight to them—just how much of a brick wall they have hit. They simply will not be able to conceal the fact that the moral imperative of higher education cannot be escaped.

It is morally wrong to vastly increase the cost of a degree, to shift the burden of paying that cost on to students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is morally wrong to claim that you are only asking for 50 per cent in payments when in reality we know that under the charges that have already been proposed by a number of universities, particularly the University of Western Australia, the figure is between 60 and 70 per cent; it is morally wrong to undermine economic and social opportunities particularly for women; and it is morally wrong for governments to undermine the position of rural and regional families and communities—and it is morally wrong for National Party to be so supine in their approach to participating in this government.

The government cannot salvage this plan through any attempt to verbal crossbenchers about what their position has been. How many times have we been told that the crossbenchers will say one thing publicly but privately they are saying something else? Why is it necessary for people to put their views to the minister in writing? That has happened because the minister was not able to get people to the various meetings that he thought they should attend, and that happened simply because they had been told so often what the position is—and, if anything is the case, there might be people on the cross benches to the left of the Labor Party on these questions.

The government fails to appreciate that these proposals it is advancing are so deeply resented by the Australian people simply because they are not in the national interest. Education is not just about private returns. Yes you receive a private benefit—of course you do—but that is nothing to be squeamish about. Fundamentally, though, the reason the government invests the majority of the money in our universities is the public good. For the basic social and economic infrastructure of our society we need an educated people—not just an educated workforce but an educated people. We need a commitment to ensure that our learning institutions, our universities, are able to pursue important issues in the development of new knowledge and to develop public understandings and civic responsibilities. We also need to ensure we have enough nurses, enough doctors, enough scientists and enough engineers. We have to ensure we have enough vets—even the National Party should understand how important it is to at least have enough vets in this country. They have to understand that, in a market system, if you are not going to earn a lot of money you are not likely to want to go into a program as an act of charity. The government has to ensure we have enough physicists. We have to be able to ensure that the country can progress as a civilised nation. Mr Pyne does not get that. However, I am absolutely confident that the Australian people do. They grasp just how important education is. The public understand how important it is not just to the individual but to society and to the economy. That is why you have this tremendous resentment being developed not just by students but by families across the nation. That is why people have an expectation of the social right that the quality of our education will not be dependent upon the income of mum or dad. The capacity to participate in our society should not ever be a product solely of your postcode. That is why the public is so deeply hostile to what this government is doing—they know that we will all be judged on the measures that this parliament takes. That is why I am looking forward to the next election. I think this will be a central issue. The prospect of full public engagement in the discussion about what sort of society we want to be and what sort of role universities play in that will be an important issue for determining the result of the next election. We want to ensure that access to higher education should depend on individual ability and choice but it should not be dependent on wealth or family background. We believe those principles are worth defending. We want to ensure that there is equality of opportunity in this society. The government's program of deregulation, of price hikes, of raising fees and of pampering to the privileged is disingenuous. They have tried to dress this up as something that it is not and have been found out. We understand in this country how important the education system is and in many respects that is why, up until relatively recent times, education has enjoyed broadly bipartisan commitments. What we do notice—I guess it is a pattern we saw with Minister Vanstone, as we see with Mr Pyne—is that when the Liberals get in they do feel the need to change things. (Time expired)