Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to join with other opposition senators to oppose this bill. I do so on the basis of equity reasons and also what might be called economic reasons and what's best for the nation's economic future. I don't think that there would be anyone in this place who would deny that Australia's economic future is completely dependent upon us investing in the skills and knowledge of Australians. Everywhere we look around the world, we are seeing technological advances. We are seeing other countries investing increasingly in their higher education sectors, their vocational training sectors and their schools to ensure that their people of all ages are as well prepared as possible for the kinds of jobs of the future that are going to rely increasingly on high levels of knowledge and skills. I don't think there would be anyone in this place who would disagree with that. So it defies belief that, yet again, we're in here debating another bill from this government which tries to take the country in exactly the opposite direction. Even in the short time that I've been here, we have debated a number of bills that have seen the government take the axe to funding for schools, for vocational education and training, in particular TAFE, and also for universities. So at the very time when we need to be investing more in the skills and knowledge of Australians, to make sure that they are prepared for the kind of jobs that are growing in the future, this government is taking us in exactly the opposite direction. That's what this bill does.

In particular, this bill will reduce the income threshold at which people will start paying back the loans that they've taken out to pay for their higher education. I was fortunate to graduate from university in the early days of what was then the HECS system, when some form of fees were re-introduced for university studies in Australia. As a result, from memory, the debt that I took out was in the order of $8,000 to $10,000. That did take me a number of years to repay. I wasn't from a family that had millions of dollars lying around spare and was able to pay for my fees up-front. Like most Australians undertaking higher education studies, I paid it back once I graduated from university and started earning a reasonable income.

The problem with what the government are trying to do is that they are not only going to make students pay more for their degrees than they have had to in the past but they're also going to make students pay that back at a much earlier stage, when they hit $45,000 a year. That is not only below the median income for Australians overall; it is below the median income for graduates from university. So they're actually hitting up people below the median and forcing them to repay their fees at an earlier stage. There's nothing in this that's going to affect wealthy students from wealthy families whose families are going to be able to pay the fees up-front. This will only impact students from working and middle-class backgrounds, who have no choice but to take out a loan in order to go through university. It's another example of this government training its guns on people from working and middle-class backgrounds and doing nothing to disadvantage students from wealthier backgrounds.

As I say, these changes from this government come on top of a range of other cuts that they've imposed on the education sector. These changes come on top of the $17 billion that they've cut from school funding, particularly from state schools—which, again, educate most kids from working- and middle-class backgrounds—and they also comes on top of the cuts that we keep seeing from this government to TAFE and vocational education and training for the future. I don't really know what kind of future the government think they are preparing the Australian people for if they are not prepared to put serious funding into our education system to make sure that young and older Australians have the opportunity to compete for the kinds of jobs that are going to be opened up in the future. But, arguably. the worst thing about this bill—in addition to them jacking up fees for university students and cutting funding to universities, cutting funding to TAFE, cutting funding to schools and making students repay their university loans at a much earlier stage—is that the reason the government are doing this is that they've desperately got to cobble together a pot of funding to pay for the tax cuts that they want to give to big business.

I was listening to Senator Anning, who spoke before me, and there have been other government speakers on this bill. They always like to trot out the class warfare in these debates about higher education funding, and they always like to talk about why people from working-class backgrounds or poor backgrounds who don't have the opportunity to have a university education should have to pay for those elites who get to go to university. For starters, the entire community benefits from having a highly educated population. It doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor, the nation's economic future is dependent on having a highly educated population. But even leaving that aside, do you ever hear anyone from the government get up and talk about how unfair it is to make poor people and working-class people pay more in taxation so that the government can give the banks or big business a tax cut?

The government and the crossbench supporters that they have are completely missing in action whenever it comes to standing up for working-class and poor people who are having to pay more in taxes to pay for a big-business tax cut—people who are losing funding to their hospitals, schools, TAFEs and pensions in order to pay for a big-business tax cut—but, all of a sudden, they become the friend of working-class and poor people when it comes to higher education. Everyone can see through this. It is just nonsense. This government and their crossbench supporters have no interest in helping working-class or poor people in Australia. If they actually did, they would get rid of this bill, which is going to require people to repay their loans at an earlier stage—not the wealthy students who've got parents who can pay their fees for them, but the working- and middle-class students who actually have to take out a loan to get a university education.

I don't think it's very well known that Australians already pay the sixth-highest contribution to their own cost of university education of any country in the OECD, in any country in the developed world. We are the sixth-highest already. So it's not as if we aren't asking students to make a contribution to their education—I'm completely fine with doing that—but it's about the level at which people should repay these loans, before we actually start making a disincentive for people from poorer backgrounds to undertake university studies in the first place.

If this bill goes through it's going to have a particularly big impact on younger people—who, to my knowledge at least, still make up the highest proportion of university students in the country. At the very time young graduates are trying to put together the money to buy their first home and maybe to have a family, they're now going to be saddled with higher debts that they have to repay at a much earlier stage than is currently the case. So it's going to impact on young people.

Senator Bilyk was talking about the particular impact that this bill is going to have on women. Pleasingly, in Australia over recent decades, we've been able to increase the proportion of women who go to university. It's not like when my mum was growing up and women had very little chance to go to university. It's great that there are so many more women going to university these days. But all of the statistics show that it's mainly women who take longer to repay their debts and, therefore, their university debts, and therefore rack up greater interest, because, unfortunately, occupations dominated by women still tend to pay less, and many women take time out of work to have children.

So it will have a particularly big impact on women as well—not to mention the particular impact that this bill will have on regional students. I just want to say a little bit about this. I've pointed out, on a number of occasions across different pieces of legislation, how hypocritical it is for Queensland LNP senators, particularly those who line up with the National Party, to come down to Canberra and pretend that they're the friends of regional Queenslanders and then consistently vote for legislation dreamed up by their Liberal Party colleagues which will actually hurt people in regional areas.

We know—it is beyond dispute—that people in regional areas, particularly in regional Queensland, do tend to have lower levels of income than those in the big cities; they graduate from degrees and get less pay than their colleagues in the big cities. What LNP senators, particularly those lined up with the National Party, are going to do by voting for this bill is make their own constituents in regional Queensland pay more for their courses and pay it back earlier, before they've actually even started earning the median wage for university graduates. So that's how much of a friend they are for regional Queenslanders; they're prepared to, yet again, come down to Canberra, stab them in the back and vote for legislation that's going to help out their Liberal Party mates and sell out their National Party supporters back home.

In conclusion, as I've already said, no-one could seriously debate that this country's economic future is completely dependent upon having the most highly educated community that we possibly can. What we need is a government that actually is prepared to invest in our schools, invest in our TAFEs and invest in our universities. We need to have a government that's prepared to take people who've worked in blue-collar jobs all of their life and give them training opportunities to make sure that they're prepared for the kinds of jobs that are going to exist and grow in the future.

This bill takes us in exactly the wrong direction. It's cutting funding to universities. It's cutting funding for places for universities. It's making students pay more for their education and it's making them pay it back much earlier. This is the wrong direction for our country to be going in, and that's why I'll be joining opposition senators in voting against it.