Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Assistant Minister for Education and Training (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice asked by Senator Carr today relating to higher education reforms.

What a disgrace this government is. 'No cuts to health', the Prime Minister said, the very day before the election. 'No cuts to education,' he said. 'No new taxes,' he said. But we know now what he really meant when he made those commitments. His real plan was absolutely to cut health, cut education and introduce new taxes—a new fuel tax and now a new university tax.

What is plainly evident about the sneaky new undergraduate tax that this Abbott government is proposing is that it is under construction, in secrecy. It has been flushed out into the open, and that is the only way that we can hold this government to account—by finding out the sneaky deals they are doing behind doors. We have seen a sneaky government in action for 520 days, now in their confessed 'bad-government phase' but not much different from what they purport to be the new government phase.

They have attacked Medicare. We have seen this pattern before. Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey and their cronies cooked up their plan for the GP tax behind closed doors. They did not have a word with doctors, who were just as surprised as the rest of Australia when all of a sudden they sprang it on us in the May budget.

It was only when Labor stood up for fairness alongside the health professionals of this nation that the deep problems of absolute unfairness of their GP tax was revealed. Then they had to try to have a go at fixing that disgraceful indictment on this identity we have as Australians about fair access to health. They had to make many changes as a result of the action of this side of the chamber, of Labor pushing them constantly to come out into the open.

This is what we are seeing again today. This absurd cycle is happening in the higher-education sector. The outrageously out-of-touch government has been forced to back down, on their hundred-thousand-dollar degrees, by Labor. Then we hear of another sneaky deal, their modus operandi, that they are trying to put through now, with the crossbenchers, through the side door—through the back door for many other things but through the side door now for this one.

This is a university tax that has been worked up in workshops between the education department officials and education analysts David Phillips and Professor Bruce Chapman. They hatched again this policy in a vacuum—same method as the GPs. Let's just bring this unconsidered idea, this ill-thought-out plan on an entire sector. That is how this chaotic government thinks policy should be made and this country governed. They know their solution to any issue is going to be unpopular, so they spring it on the unsuspecting public.

But you know what? The Australian public people are awake up to these sly tactics. We are figuring out right across the country how we cannot trust a single word that comes out of the mouth of this government. This undergraduate tax that they are proposing—that is under construction right now—is by a government hell-bent on building one thing: an unfair Australia. Destroying Australia's fair and equitable higher education is as much at the front of their agenda as getting rid of access to Medicare and access to the health care that Australians need. It is against education and against health. Their policies reveal it every single day.

Labor knows how important this issue is to the future of Australians and to the future of the nation. Australians understand and Labor understands that an undergraduate tax will take away the foundations of a fair go in this country. Young people cannot bear the burden of a $100,000 degree and go out and get a job or undertake a mortgage. Bank managers across the country will think of them as a debt risk after this government has got through with them. We must do everything we can to prevent this sneaky, dodgy, dysfunctional and chaotic government from advancing these thought-bubble policies that they cook up in the darkness and then try to bring out as some positive plan for the country.

Labor believes that access to higher education should not be based on the circumstances of a person's birth or where they live. We believe that it should be based on the clear principles of merit and access. This Abbott government does not understand; it never has understood. And when the Prime Minister stood, bare-facedly staring down the camera and saying that there would be no cuts to education, no cuts to health and no new taxes we knew that he meant the exact opposite! (Time expired)