Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak against the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018. First, let's look at what this bill does. It amends the Higher Education Support Act to provide a new minimum repayment income of $44,999. In plain English what that means is that, where previously we had a threshold of somewhere around $53,000, the threshold for repaying a HECS debt has been dropped by close to $8,000. But what does it mean in the real world? It means that when a university graduate is earning about 700 bucks a week, taking that home, they're going to be expected to start paying back their HECS debt. Previously, they started paying back their HECS debt once they were earning more than 700 bucks a week. Now the threshold has been dropped. Let's try and translate what that means for people in the real world. If you're a young person taking home about $700 a week, let's face it, it's not a goldmine. Once you've paid your rent and energy bills, and paid for your groceries, shopping needs and transport needs, there's very little left to spend on anything else.

Put that in the context of what else this government is doing. We were here last week. This is a government that gave a whopping great big tax cut to people earning over $200,000. If you're earning $200,000 or more, you get an extra $11,000 in your back pocket. Someone on $200,000, $300,000, $500,000, $1 million or $2 million gets an extra $11,000 in their pocket. Yet the government is saying to a young person who has just graduated from university, 'We're going to make life harder for you. We're going to make life harder for people on Newstart. We're going to condemn you to a life of poverty. Indeed, we're going to make it worse than that. We're going to come after you. We're going to allege that you have debts you haven't repaid and in many instances we're going to make your life miserable.' Look at what they're doing in health care, with increasing out-of-pocket costs and the freeze on Medicare. 'We're going to make life harder for people with chronic illnesses. But we're going to make life easier for people who are already earning many hundreds of thousands of dollars.'

It is a reflection of the priorities of this government. It is no secret that young people are getting royally screwed over by this older generation of LNP politicians. This bill is just one of many examples of a government that is intent on making life harder for young people. Just have a look at the last budget. What did we see in the area of housing, which is one of the great areas of intergenerational inequity that's emerged in our country? We saw nothing. What did we see in terms of addressing insecure work for young people? Again, nothing. Did we see a rise in the youth allowance? No. What did we see to make child care more affordable for young parents? Again, nothing. When it comes to climate change, 'the great moral challenge' of our time, as it was once described by a former prime minister, it was not even mentioned in the recent budget. There is nothing to stop the extinction crisis, or the crisis on the Murray River or the Great Barrier Reef.

This government is presiding over one of the greatest acts of intergenerational theft ever seen in an Australian parliament. Look at what happens to that young person who's now being to forced to repay their HECS debt when they're earning less than they were previously. They're expected to save for their first home. But of course we know that housing prices have increased exponentially over recent years. We know that many young people are locked out of the property market because of skyrocketing property prices, all because they're competing against not people buying their first home but investors buying their third, fourth or fifth home. That's who they're competing against. So is it any wonder that as a young person in this country you would be looking right now at members of the Liberal and National parties and saying to them, 'You had it pretty good and you're making life tough for us.' This is a rigged system that young people are entering into now, where investors who are buying multiple properties get huge tax breaks, yet somebody who's aspiring to buy their first home gets almost nothing.

It is time we started to do something about the young people who are going to inherit many of the consequences of decisions made by this parliament. We're seeing a generation of politicians who enjoyed free education, free health care and affordable housing, who were able to pollute the planet for free with no consequences, now saying to young people in this country, 'We had it pretty good, but we're pulling the drawbridge up behind us and you need to clean it up. You need to fix up the mess that we've created.' Right now they're not only asking young people to pay for something they never had to pay for but also condemning young people to a life of struggle because of the decisions that are being made in this parliament.

We have some very important choices to make. We can recognise that investing in our young people, in the education of the generations that come after us, is an investment in our own country, an investment in the foundations of a decent society and an investment in the prosperity of current and future Australians—the teachers of tomorrow, the nurses of tomorrow, the doctors of tomorrow, the engineers of tomorrow. We can choose to make their life harder or what we can recognise is that we all benefit when we have a well-funded tertiary education sector. We can recognise that those young people who come after us shouldn't be condemned to a life that is made more difficult than the life that we enjoyed. Indeed, one of the very markers of human progress is to look at our young people and say, 'Your life will be easier than the life that we live right now.' We're reversing that trend in this parliament through these acts of intergenerational theft. Look at the housing market, climate, energy policy and, of course, now this retrograde step when it comes to making life more difficult for people who are pursuing tertiary education.

It's time for governments to end this act of intergenerational theft. It's time for governments to stop acting in the interests of the rich and powerful, of corporate Australia. The government should be dropping its plan for corporate tax cuts. It should recognise that what this parliament did last week, when you look at what it's doing today through these changes to the HECS system, is making Australia a less egalitarian, a more unfair and a less caring society. We are here with a duty to act not just for the interests of people who put us here but also for the interests of those generations that follow. And the passage of this bill is emblematic of a government that cares more about its mates at the big end of town than it does about the generations that will follow us.