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

$30 billion, impacting the future education of every young people in Australia, and now they are talking about putting a GST of 15 per cent on all things to do with education. This government hates education. This government gets in the way at every step in terms of fair and equitable access to a decent education and this hastily cobbled together piece of legislation—a poor piece of legislation, which is now having last minute amendments made to it in some sort of tokenistic concession—is exactly what Senator Xenophon described it to be. I think he critiqued it as a cobbled together piece of legislation that is failing to respond to the reality that confronts us. And what is the reality?

The reality is that in 2012 and shortly after, when this government came into being, there were 55,000 students engaged in vocational education and training. This is a powerful part of enabling young people and people who seek to retrain the opportunity to change careers and to build careers, and to learn in ways that make a whole lot more sense than when they went to school. So the VET sector has great appeal. $235 million were being spent in 2012 on 55,000 young people predominantly but on mature wage earners as well. The average debt they had at that time was between $5,800 to $6,000. While the government has been pulling the nation apart with divisive policies and a devastatingly bad budget in 2014, we saw that they did not keep an eye on this at all. They did not have an eye to education.