Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I'm just going to make a short contribution in this debate on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Job-Ready Graduates and Supporting Regional and Remote Students) Bill 2020, but I do want to put on record my position and Labor's position, especially insofar as this bill affects regional universities in my state of Queensland and students and aspiring students in our regions. For reasons that have been explained by a number of my colleagues, Labor will oppose this bill. This legislation makes it harder and more expensive for Australians to go to university.

It's hard to imagine a worse time in Australian history for a bill to be introduced which seeks to increase the cost of higher education for students, making it more expensive for students to attend university. This is at a time when we have seen hundreds of thousands of Australians lose their jobs and, for the first time in many years in some cases, consider undertaking university or other studies to reskill so that they can re-enter the workforce. At a time when we've got hundreds of thousands of Australians losing their jobs, making decisions about retraining so that they can get a new job, the government wants to make it more expensive for people to obtain those qualifications which will assist them to get that new job that they're looking for. It's absolutely bizarre and an incredible disincentive to people to undertake the sort of study that they may need to obtain a new job. But it's consistent with the approach that this government has taken to education and training the entire time it has been in office. We've seen their cuts to universities in the past. We've seen them increase the cost of study and put more of the burden onto students, and that's just for higher education.

If we look at apprenticeships and traineeships, arguably the changes have been even worse than in higher education. There are 140,000 fewer apprentices and trainees in Australia than when this government came to office in 2013. As usual, they make all the promises in the world. Only a short time ago, they were going to create 300,000 new apprenticeships and traineeships. But, if you look at the facts, there are 140,000 fewer apprentices and trainees in this country now than there were in 2013 when this government came to power.

So the government have cut universities, they've made it more expensive for students to go to university, they've cut apprenticeships, they've cut traineeships, and, all of a sudden, they realise that we've got a massive skills shortage. This is only going to be exacerbated by the fact that they won't be able to use the trick they've used for years to fill skills shortages, which is to bring in people from overseas. We are going to pay a significant price, as a country, in coming years for this government's failure to invest in universities and in training. We're not going to be able to resort to bringing in people from overseas to fill skills shortages. We never should have had to rely on that as the way of filling skills shortages in the first place. If this government had properly invested in the skills of Australians, by properly funding universities and training, we wouldn't have needed to rely so heavily on bringing in people from overseas; we would have had more Australians able to fill skills shortages rather than be on the dole queues. So we've already paid a price for this government's failure to invest in universities and training, and it's going to really catch up with us in the next few years, as we are not going to be able to resort to bringing in people from overseas in the way that we have done for year after year.

This bill just makes it worse. There has been a lot of attention given in the last 24 hours to the extremely disappointing decision of Centre Alliance to back this bill. One group who haven't had enough attention for their decision is One Nation. Senator Hanson and Senator Roberts, once again, as they have done ever since they entered this parliament, line up with the LNP to pass legislation which will hurt the battlers who they say they care about. We've have an upcoming election in Queensland. Day after day, we see One Nation candidates out there masquerading as the people who are standing up for battlers in our community. If only that were true. If only that were true, because we know that a lot of the people who vote for One Nation are battlers. They are people doing it really tough. They are people who need someone in this parliament who's standing up for them. But what we have seen day after day, month after month and year after year from Senator Hanson and her party is that they come down to Canberra and they vote with the Liberal and National parties to shaft the very battlers who they say they care about. We've seen them do it on pensions. We've seen them do it on apprenticeships. We've seen them do it on labour hire. We've seen them do it on however many examples you want to pick, and now they're doing it again on universities.

The reason that Senator Hanson and One Nation think that they can get away with this is that they perpetuate this idea that universities are only for rich people—that universities are only for elite people in the big cities. That is total rubbish, and if Senator Hanson and her party had bothered to actually speak to any of the regional universities in Queensland, they would know that these claims that universities are for snobs and for elitists, and not for regional people, are wrong and are insulting to regional Queenslanders. I have bothered to speak to regional universities in Queensland. I have learnt, as a result, that, for regional universities in Queensland and probably the rest of the country, one of their core missions is to offer university education to people who have never had a family member go to university. To give you one example, CQUniversity—but the same could be said of James Cook University, the University of the Sunshine Coast, the University of Southern Queensland and other regional universities in my state—has a national reputation for offering university study to those who are called 'first in family': people in families who have never had a family member go to university. They are people who have the school marks to qualify, who want to follow some sort of career that requires a university qualification but who were always shut out of pursuing their dream because university places weren't available or were too expensive. The system that was brought in by previous Labor governments, opening access to higher education, has allowed regional kids and mature-aged regional Queenslanders to go to university for the first time, to be the first person in their family to have that opportunity. As a result, they've been able to get certain jobs that they've never been able to access, sometimes on higher pay than any member of their family has been able to achieve. These are universities for battlers. They do a fantastic job in research. They do a fantastic job of educating high-achieving people from families who have had access to university before. But the thing that's special about our regional universities is that they do an incredibly good and important job for regional Queenslanders and regional Australians whose families have never had access to university before.

This bill, which One Nation is voting for, is going to take that opportunity away. What an incredible sellout of the battlers you say you represent! You say you want people in regional Queensland to have a better life. For some, that's going to be getting an apprenticeship; for others, that's going to be getting into a university course. You're ripping that opportunity away, by making the courses more expensive and by increasing class sizes through reducing the funding that universities are going to get, and just making life a whole lot harder for those battlers. It is yet another sellout from this government and from the One Nation Party that supports it.

We'll be opposing this bill because, unlike One Nation and unlike the Liberal-National coalition, Labor actually does stand up for battlers. It does stand up for the people who want to go to university and be the first person in their family to do so; who don't want to come out of it with a crippling debt, like you see in America; who want to be able to get on after they've graduated—buy a house, take out a loan and build a family. These are things that are pretty expensive and much harder to do if you have a big university debt. That debt is just going to become bigger as a result of this bill being pushed by the Liberal and National parties and their accomplices in One Nation. Labor will continue to support higher education for all Australians—rich and poor. The Liberal and National parties, aided and abetted by One Nation, want to go back to the old days when universities were just for rich kids. I can tell you: Labor will fight that tooth and nail as long as we are in this Senate.