Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens oppose the Higher Education and Research Reform Bill 2014. What a saga Minister Pyne has inflicted on the people of Australia! For months, students, prospective students and their families have been living with uncertainty about their university prospects. Will they be able to afford to go? What is going to happen with the way our universities are managed?

Minister Pyne has done nothing but create uncertainty for these people. He has done this not only through the destructive aspects of the bill itself but also through the way he has conducted the debate. Let us remember: a bill very similar to the one we are now debating was decisively defeated in December last year. Immediately the minister—not learning the lessons, not recognising it was time to have real consultation—put a similar bill back into the House of Representatives. The minister, by calling himself 'Mr Fixer' and telling us that he is out there creating solutions, is deceiving nobody but himself and maybe a few others in the Abbott bunker. So many of the tactics we have seen in recent weeks—particularly what he came up with yesterday—have been about trying to quarantine the Abbott government from another embarrassing defeat.

There will be a number of speakers in this debate who will clearly set out how damaging this bill is. I congratulate the many concerned people—education unions, students, staff members—who are committed to building a higher education system of the highest standard. Yesterday, while Minister Pyne was doing his backflips, many students were out there taking action and being very vocal about it. I particularly wanted to congratulate Kyol Blakeney, the SRC president at the University of Sydney. With his colleagues, he was protesting, through civil disobedience, at the university. Those sorts of actions are needed because Minister Pyne and the Abbott government have gone too far with what they are trying to do in higher education.

The defeat of the previous bill last year was a significant win for the education unions and for tens of thousands of staff and students, as well as for all those looking forward to a university education—which is their right. It was an important step because, for the moment anyway, we had safeguarded our universities from the neoliberal policies of this government. These are policies which, at the end of the day, are about heaping the cost burden of higher education onto students and their families. That is the real intent of this bill. We need to remember where the original bill came from: it was a budget measure. Purely and simply, it was about saving the government $5 billion. That is what it was about; it was about ripping $5 billion out of our public universities and shifting the cost burden to students.

The bill before us now is nothing new. It is just back to the old ways of the Liberal and National parties—another free market plan. I think it relevant to compare the old bill and the new bill. The old bill, as I said, projected savings of about $5 billion. The new bill before us has estimated savings of about $640 million. Some of the key provisions of the original bill remain. It is important to note that because it underlines the very poor tactics of the minister. He is not fooling anybody when he just brings back basically the same measures in a new bill, this time hoping he can get his way by trying to embarrass crossbenchers, by using a bit of intimidation or through a bit of blackmail. We have seen all those tactics rolled out.

Some of the key provisions that remain in this bill—