Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the MPI, to talk about the Abbott government's barnacles and their budget of broken promises. It is an inconvenient truth: a promise broken is a broken promise, and, despite the Abbott government's pathetic attempts to outright deny and lie, they have broken promises. Despite their convoluted language—calling cuts and broken promises something else—voting Australians know that the Abbott government has broken promise after promise and that it has made cuts to a range of government services. Voters know fact from fiction.

On the eve of the federal election Mr Abbott told SBS there would be no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no changes to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS if the coalition were elected to government. There were of course other pledges during the election campaign. Who could forget that wonderful outburst of: 'We are on a unity ticket on Gonski!' But now Australian kids will pay the price of that ripped-up unity ticket, as postcodes will continue to determine educational outcomes—not a fairer funding system. Earlier this week the Prime Minister held his mea culpa media conference and promised us that he would take the barnacles off before Christmas. Despite the Labor opposition asking many questions here in the Senate, one of the barnacles—Senator Johnston, the Minister for Defence—is still here. There are just a couple more sitting days before Christmas if the barnacles are to come off, assuming they require legislation to do so.

The government is not winning. Despite the Prime Minister's mea culpa, the government is not winning. Its harsh, cruel budget has been well and truly exposed, along with its string of broken promises. I think that when the Prime Minister had a closer look at the barnacles, he realised that it is the whole ship that is sinking. Even if he now removes the barnacles—whether that be the Minister for Defence, backing down on the GP tax, backing down on the cuts to the ABC or backing down on the cuts to education—nothing will save the Abbott government ship, because it has become a ship of fools.

Yesterday in this place, Labor, along with the Greens and some of the crossbenchers, let the Abbott government know well and truly that the higher education changes in their bill were harsh and unfair. In fact they were just plain wrong. We voted that bill down. But, completely undeterred—the message seemingly is not getting through to the Abbott government—they have fronted up this morning with a new bill. We are not quite sure where it is up to and when we will see it, but we understand that in that bill the massive cuts to universities remain.

Despite Labor saying right from day one it would not support the cuts to that higher education bill and despite us having a Senate inquiry and hearing overwhelmingly from universities that the cuts would hurt, seemingly the Abbott government did not hear that. So the cuts remain, the new fee imposts for students remain and nothing of substance has changed, and Labor's position remains unchanged. We will not support the government's second, replica, unfair higher education bill.

What we learned from this new bill is the fact that the government needs to put forward the regional transition fund in and of itself says that what they are proposing is not going to work. We have heard in this place senator after senator and the ministers telling us that competition is good, that making a market out of universities is good. Yet what have they now done? They have suddenly realised that, if they want to go down this track, they have to stump up regional universities because regional universities, in fact all universities except the Group of Eight, told us they would not be able to survive without some sort of transitional fund. The government did not call it a transitional fund. Many of the universities told us they would need that additional funding from the federal government for ever.

It was really quite a shock to me and was revealed as an absolute blight on the system when the University of Newcastle told us that, with the cuts being imposed by the federal government, they simply could not recoup those cuts through an increase in fees. That is the Abbott government signing the death warranty of that fine university in Newcastle, a regional university. Yet the Abbott government does not seem to care. Somehow it likes to kid itself that turning universities into a market and making them compete is going to save them, when the evidence we heard at the Senate inquiry was quite contrary to that, with regional universities being very clear about their future, an uncertain future, a future they could not predict. So this nonsense of competition in their higher education market has been exposed.

Surely, if we have to stump up taxpayer dollars to take account of these harsh cuts, that says the government's plan for marketisation will not work. It is a failure right from the word go. Just now Universities Australia have put out a media release. Universities Australia strike me as a fairly savvy organisation. They are often here lobbying. They certainly meet with Labor senators and Labor shadows and talk to us about their vision for universities in the future. Guess what they are saying? That this bill does not quite get it right. Bills are not play things. The government cannot keep putting up bill after bill until they get it right. Voters of Australia demand the government get it right in the first instance. Up until yesterday, Minister Pyne was singing the praises of Universities Australia, telling us how onside they were. Yet today in black and white from Universities Australia we have a media release which says, 'Oops, you haven’t quite got it right, Minister Pyne. The 20 per cent cuts are going to hurt us.'

Finally, whatever Kool-Aid Universities Australia drank when the first bill was proposed has worn off because they are now starting to criticise the government's higher education bill by saying today that this does not get it right, that this does not cut it. And money being put into a transition fund for three years will not cut it either because regional universities have said very clearly that the cuts are going to hurt them. Again this is another broken promise from the Abbott government—'No cuts to education'. We all know there has been a 20 per cent cut to our universities.

One of the other things the Abbott government is quite good at doing—I often wonder which universe they are in. They are obviously in some kind of parallel universe. They do not live in the real world I live in because they like to invent new language for their cuts. Who remembers the increased tax on higher earners, which nobody had an issue with? But it is not an increase in tax; it is a levy. We just use different language because we know that the Abbott government promised no increased taxes. So they kind of think, 'If we call it something else, people will just believe us.' Of course they do not. We can all tell fact from fiction and there is another fiction. It is time the Abbott government realised they are deeply unpopular because their budget is too harsh and cruel on everyday Australians.