Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018. This bill would reduce the income level at which people have to repay their Higher Education Contribution Scheme debts and would mean that people who have a HECS debt would have to pay it back more rapidly. It would have huge impacts on young people in particular across Australia today and would lead to us having far fewer people who are willing and able to undertake higher education. The fact that this has been proposed by the government speaks volumes about how out of touch they are with people on low incomes and young people—in particular, the intersection of young people on low incomes.

Look around this chamber. There's hardly anybody here at the moment, but, if you look around this chamber when we're all here—at question time, for example—there is hardly a young person here. In fact, there is only one person in the whole parliament who is under 30, and that's Senator Jordon Steele-John, who, at 23, is really the only one of us who is in any position whatsoever to understand what the impacts of this legislation are going to be on the average student and the average young person saddled with HECS debt. In fact, less than 10 per cent of the whole parliament—MPs and senators alike—are under 40, and the government, which is proposing this legislation, has the grand total of 10 members who are under 40. This is my first point: it's pretty clear that, consistent with that, the government is totally out of touch with young people. It is, in fact, more than out of touch; it's committed to selling them short and selling out their future in the interests of its corporate mates today.

This legislation is yet another attack on young people, students, the leaders of tomorrow and our future. Add this to the already $2 billion worth of cuts to higher education that are resulting in a really serious squeeze on the number of young people who can access higher education. Then, if they get there, they get to experience poorer quality teaching and learning because of bigger class sizes and more overworked teaching staff who are doing their very best but are absolutely stretched and on insecure contracts. There's absolutely no doubt that this measure, on its own, will mean that some people who would have gone on to tertiary education are not going to. One might reasonably ask: who are those people likely to be? It's not going to be those who are happily living at home with their parents, with the privilege of knowing that their parents can support them through the 'Bank of Mum and Dad' and knowing that they always have the safety net of a parent to fall back on if they ever find themselves struggling to make ends meet. No—those people aren't going to be the ones who will be impacted by this legislation. It probably won't affect those who've got a family history of going to university and are confident of finding well-paid work after their degree or the ones who are studying high-status degrees, like medicine and law.

No, the people who are going to be hit hardest by this legislation are those who have had to struggle all their lives—who are doing their best to lift themselves out of poverty; who have attended an underfunded public school and succeeded in getting through Year 12 nonetheless; who don't quite know what they want to study; who often haven't got a family history and people who can guide them in what they want to study; and who don't know whether their study path is going to be a pathway to a secure career or a reliable income. The people who are going to be impacted are those young people who have a difficult relationship with their parents or where life at home is crowded and fractious and they've decided that, overall, life is going to be easier if they leave home. They're likely to be working in casual, underpaid work, living in absolutely crappy, poor-quality rental housing and struggling to pay the bills. The people who are going to be affected by this legislation are those who are newly arrived to Australia, maybe with no family here at all, having survived violence and persecution in their home countries, who are struggling to find their place here, experiencing racism in their everyday lives, finding it hard to find work and thinking that maybe studying is going to be their way forward.

These are the people who will decide that they can't commit to study, because having to pay back their HECS debt when they are only just earning above the poverty line will be too much of a risk and it will add to the stresses on their already overstressed lives. Yet these are the people who we need to be doing everything we can to encourage to study, for their own sake and for our country's sake. For our future as a country, for us to thrive, we have to a well-educated community and workforce. We need to be removing inequality and to be ensuring that everyone has a chance to achieve their full potential, regardless of their background and regardless of their postcode.

We have so many challenges ahead of us as a country that we need the best-educated society that we can provide. Other countries realise this. Germany offers free tertiary education, not just to their own residents but also to any overseas students, because Germany realises the benefits of having a highly educated society. New Zealand is now offering free degrees as first degrees to anyone. So for us to be putting more barriers in the way for young people to be able to access higher education is entirely the wrong direction for us to be heading. In fact, it's entirely the wrong thing to be doing if we want to have a thriving and prosperous country.

So let's think about what the impacts of this legislation are going to be. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who has been struggling and has managed to get their way through uni, and they've now got a debt of maybe $30,000, $50,000 or more. Think of people in their early career years who aren't on a big income, who are paying half their income in rent for the crappy rental housing that I was just talking about. This legislation would tell them that, when they are earning just above the poverty line, they have to start paying this debt back. Think about women who are working part-time while bringing up their kids, where every dollar matters, or single parents suddenly having to pay off their debt on their limited income, where it's most likely going to be a choice of paying off the debt or putting food on the table or clothing their kids. Eight dollars a week is nothing to the people in here but, to people on a low income of $45,000, $8 is a meal for the family, a second-hand coat for your young son or petrol to drive to your daughter's netball match. Eight dollars might mean telling your child, 'Sorry; we can't afford for you to go on that excursion this week. You're going to have to stay home. I'll write a letter to the school to say that you're sick.' And $8, of course, pretty much wipes out what people are getting in their low-income tax cuts, doesn't it?

This government talks about aspiration and talks about working families. This government has no idea! And, as for encouraging and supporting women to stay in the workforce, couple this with the increasing childcare costs, and it's yet another barrier for women going back to work. When it's going to cost you more to go back to work—particularly when insecure, casual, underpaid work is all that's on offer, despite the fact that you've got a tertiary degree—because of your childcare costs and because you then have to start paying back your HECS debt, that's when you decide that it's better to stay at home.

This bill is going to save $231 million. It's a relative pittance that will have massive impacts, but this government don't care. It's clawing back just under twice of what the marriage equality plebiscite cost us last year. It's a choice that the government are making. The big choice, of course, is the choice to forego an income of $200 billion because they are dancing to the tune of the big end of town—$200 billion in tax cuts to big business and the wealthy. But, no, we have to claw back $231 million from people who in all likelihood are doing it pretty tough. That's the choice that the government are making. In short, they like rich people. 'To those who have, let us give them some more.' And they don't like poor people. They think being poor is your fault. 'Why don't you get a better job so you can afford to buy a house?'

It's a bill that sees education as a commodity, a transaction. As I heard Senator Paterson say in his speech when we were last here:

Providers need to think of the product and the service they are providing students for the significant taxpayer investment they receive.

They view education as a commodity, and if you can't afford it then bad luck—that's your fault for being poor. Instead, they'll give tax breaks to their corporate mates, who certainly aren't poor. They'll give themselves tax breaks. Each of us senators earning $200,000 a year will be pocketing a tax break of $11,000 when all the tax cuts are in place. Each of us will be given a tax break that's enough for the yearly repayments on the HECS debts of almost three people who are struggling to survive on $45,000 a year. Not to worry—I'm sure at least some of the people in this place and the other place will donate a small fraction of that to a charity that can then dole out largesse in the form of food parcels for which poor people can feel truly grateful.

The Greens have a very different view of education and of how we should be encouraging people to participate. We see investing in higher education, in all education from early childhood, as a priority, because it's an investment in people and in our shared future. Education helps people to flourish, to fulfil their potential, to understand the world and to work out their place in the world—where and how we belong and how to create a better society for all of us. At every step and stage of life, we should be encouraging people to be learning and should be supporting them in their educational journey.

If you want to talk dollars and cents, then it is an economic investment too. A highly educated society where everybody has the opportunity to be educated ticks every box imaginable for what you need and want in a well-functioning economy. The economic benefits of free education far outweigh the supposed economic justification for giving tax breaks to global corporations and to people who are already well-off. We can afford to do so. It is a choice that we could be making as a parliament. There's a simple example of how it could be so.

I've already mentioned Germany and New Zealand, but let's remember back to 1974 and the decade and a half that followed, when tertiary education was free in Australia. I was one of those lucky ones who didn't have to pay a cent. In fact, around half of this parliament are of an age where they would have been able to benefit from free tertiary education, along with being able to buy a house. This is intergenerational inequity at its most stark. Yet this government are punishing the young people of today to even dare to dream, to have the audacity to contemplate that maybe we could rebuild a more equal society that would have accessible education at its heart.

The Greens would invest in education. Instead of obscene tax cuts, we would invest in education. We would invest in that more equal society, a forward-looking society, a society that values and supports its young people and allows them to thrive. We would make sure that legislation like this before the parliament today would not see the light of day. And we will keep on fighting. We will keep on campaigning against injustices like this bill until we get to that fairer, more equitable society.