Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a wonderful outcome. Andrew Harvey, Director of the Access and Achievement Research Unit at La Trobe University, wrote in June 2016: 'The improvements in equity are even more impressive when considered in historical context. The level of low socioeconomic status participation was virtually unchanged from 1990, when data was first collected, until the introduction of the demand driven system. Class is intractable but not immovable.'

Sadly, however, we now, once again, have a government which does not see greater equity in access to higher education as a priority or even a desirable objective. We've seen during the tax debate in recent weeks that this government's overriding priority is to reduce the amount of tax paid by corporations and high-income earners—the people who essentially fund the Liberal Party and the people who vote for it. That means government spending has to be cut accordingly and government revenue from other sources increased. University education is once again to be a privilege rather than a right; and access is, once again, to be cut off for students from lower income families and government schools.

This bill must be seen in that context. Its primary motive is to cut costs to fund the government's high-income tax cuts. Its secondary motive is to roll back the Labor government's reforms and reduce equity in our higher education system. The dissenting report by the Labor members of the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee's inquiry into this bill sets out in detail our objections to this bill. Firstly, we oppose the government's move to lower the HELP repayment threshold to $45,000—only $9,000 a year more than the minimum wage. This completely contradicts the original premise of the HECS and HELP schemes, which was that students should only start repaying some of costs of their university education when they reach an income level high enough to enable them to do so while also meeting the other demands that people face at that age, such as buying a first home and raising a family.

As the dissenting report says, the government has made no sufficient case for changes to HELP beyond budget savings. The report quotes Professor Bruce Chapman, an economist and academic, who designed the original HECS student loan system. He testified: 'I think it is unfortunate when people focus on the stock of the debt. It is really not very interesting. What's interesting is the overall amount that is not repaid. If that number is even at 25 per cent, there is no crisis here, there is no crisis in the system.'

Labor also opposes the government's proposal in this bill to introduce a limit on how much students can borrow under HELP. Currently, students enrolled in Commonwealth supported places have no limit to the amount they can defer through the HELP scheme. The proposal in this bill would create a borrowing limit across all of the HELP programs. The shadow minister for higher education, Ms Terri Butler, made it clear in her speech on this bill that Labor does not oppose the principle of loan limits operating as price signals. But we believe that the proposal in this bill is too rigid. It ignores the fact that our rapidly changing economy and workforce require more and more students to take on additional study throughout their lives to meet the changing needs of the labour market.

This proposal also ignores the fact that the universities—in particular, the elite universities—are now free to charge whatever fees they like and that there is a growing gap between what university courses cost and the assistance available to students to pay for them. As a result, a student in graduate debt is a major concern and has the potential to be a drag on the economy. Young families cannot buy homes if they are crippled by student debt. Labor does not want a system where students have to take out commercial loans to pay for the gap between fees set by universities and the loan borrowing amount. This bill does nothing to discourage reckless high-fee settings. For these reasons Labor opposes this bill and urges the Senate to reject it.

While we're on the subject of higher education, I want to say something about the current controversy over the Australian National University's decision to reject a proposed course on Western civilisation sponsored by the Ramsay Centre. As with so many other policy debates in Australia at present, this debate has become yet another episode in the culture wars. On the one hand, supporters of the Ramsay Centre course say that the ANU has surrendered to a coterie of left-wing academics and students who hate Western civilisation and all of its works, while admiring or at least excusing the behaviour of totalitarian regimes, and who fear that such a course would undermine their ideological hegemony in the universities. Opponents, on the other hand, argue that such a course would be mere apologetics for the West's sorry history of imperialism, colonialism, militarism, racism, and all of the other isms, and would ignore the history of non-Western civilisations, people of colour, women and other oppressed people. Both of these positions are, of course, caricatures and neither of them is very helpful in understanding the issues involved.

I'm a big fan of Western civilisation and I think that our universities should be teaching students about it and about the Jewish, Christian, Greek and Roman foundations of Western culture, religion, politics, literature and art. I studied both Latin and Greek at school, and, perhaps less usefully, Mediaeval French as well. My life and career have been hugely enlightened and enriched by my studies of these subjects. There is no contradiction in teaching these things and also teaching about non-Western civilisations, particularly the civilisations of our Asian neighbours. Indeed it can only help with diversity and understanding of different cultures if we study a variety of courses and if we study different cultures. Australian universities are perfectly capable of teaching both and Australian students are perfectly capable of learning both—nor should any course on any type of civilisation shy away from teaching about the failings of those civilisations.

To go back to the bill: we don't want to discourage people from learning. I would argue that we need more, not less. We don't need cuts, and we don't need a more-euphemistically-phrased freeze on higher education. The sector needs more support, not less. Why don't we not give tax cuts to big banks and foreign billionaires? Why give $80 billion in tax cuts to those groups and not support the education of everyone we possibly can in our society with a merits based system?