John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not think that we will get a lot of time before question time, but I would like to commence my contribution—without interjections from my colleague Senator Bernardi, I hope! I rise to contribute on the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014. Continuing on from Senator O'Neill's comments on scholarships: under these proposed changes, anyone can go to university with HELP assistance. They can then pay for it once they start earning more than $50,000 a year. That is a pretty good system. In my days, you either won a Commonwealth scholarship—and I was fortunate enough to win a scholarship to university—or you paid. That was out of your pocket or your parent's pocket. You can walk in now to a university without a red cent and get a tertiary education, which I think is a very good system. But it is not free. We have heard in the chamber today that it is a free system. The only thing that is free in this world is the air that we breathe, and of course the previous government tried to put a tax on that. Nothing is free; someone pays. The bricklayer or the shearer out there working today who have never stepped foot on a university campus will pay, as they pay their taxes. As I say, they have never been—