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

Before I was interrupted, I was talking about the struggles that so many students face—living in poverty, with totally inadequate student and youth allowance, and then ending up at the end of their degrees with this massive burden of debt around their necks—and about how the Education Legislation Amendment (Startup Year and Other Measures) Bill 2023 is going to give some support to students but the cost is that it's actually going to increase the amount of debt that they've got and how this is just not doing our future generations any favours at all.

I have just met, for example, with the president and vice-president of the Australian Medical Students Association, and they had three concerns that they wanted to raise with me. One was the medical students cost-of-living crisis. The second was medical students in the rental crisis. The impact of the cost of living on those living in poverty is really hitting all students hard. For medical students, the consequences included people having to drop out of their studies and people not being supported because they have to live on a totally inadequate youth allowance and are living in poverty and cannot afford to live. The reality of the workload of doing a medical degree is that you just have not got the time to do any part-time work, which means it's incredibly inequitable. It means that the only people that can afford to really devote themselves to their studies are those who either have been working for a long time themselves to build up the reserves so that they can continue to afford their studies or have got a very well-off family behind them that can afford to support them. This means that working-class kids, people that you'd really want to be doing a medical degree, just can't afford to do it, and they drop out.

In fact, the Medical Students Association were telling me that, for one of the people that I met with, they had seen if they could organise their study load so that they could afford to fit in part-time work, and it was basically, 'No, you need to be at uni from 8 am to 5 pm every day, so there's no time for you to do part-time work.' What was suggested to the person was that they might like to take a year off from their studies to go and work and build up some income so that they could then come back—that is, delaying their studies for yet another year and probably, because they were building up that amount of money, living in poverty for another year.

We've got to be able to do more. Although this bill is going to give support to students, it's not the direction that we need to be going in. Basically, we need to be making different budget choices. As I said earlier and as our spokesperson for education, Senator Faruqi, will be putting in the second reading amendment, we feel that we should be wiping all student debt rather than adding to student debt. The cost of wiping all student debt is estimated to be $60 billion over 10 years, which sounds like a pretty substantial amount of money—nothing to sneeze at. But what I want to point out is how affordable that would actually be if we had a government that was willing to raise the revenue, to consider that supporting students and other people to not live in poverty was worth it, and to make some budget choices in order to support people rather than giving tax breaks to the big end of town.

So we have $60 billion, on the one hand, to wipe student debt. On the other hand, how much revenue could we raise if we had a government that was serious about it? The obvious one, of course, is to scrap the stage 3 tax cuts. The stage 3 tax cuts, over 10 years, are going to cost the budget bottom line over $300 billion. That's five times the amount of revenue that would be needed to wipe out all student debt. Then you could add in the fossil fuel subsidies. We're currently subsidising the burning of coal, gas and oil, which is creating the climate crisis. We are subsidising that fossil fuel use by over $100 billion. Get rid of all of those subsidies. There we go. We've now got $400 billion that could be raised over the next decade.

We've had a lot of talk about housing and how to increase affordable housing and make rents more affordable. Instead of having negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, you could actually be putting money into building more affordable housing. If you scrapped negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts for second, or more, properties that would save over $100 billion over the next 10 years. You could institute a billionaires tax; our proposed billionaires tax would be a six per cent tax on all of Australia's billionaires—the 122 billionaires. That's not very many people, but if you tax their wealth by six per cent annually that would raise $48 billion over the decade.

How about a super profits tax, incorporating actually getting a decent amount of money out of the petroleum resource rent tax? A 40 per cent super profits tax on corporations with more than $100 million in turnover in Australia would yield $430 billion over the decade—$430 billion! That puts the cost of wiping student debt almost into small change. These are the sorts of choices that could be made. We can afford to wipe student debt and we can afford to have income support payments above the poverty line. We can afford to put dental into Medicare. We could do all of these things if we were making different choices.

And there are a few extra things that the Greens propose. There's a coal export levy; that would raise $21.7 billion over the next 10 years. There's cracking down on tax avoidance—that would raise $4½ billion over the decade. If we add all of these up, basically, we would have a budget with over $1 trillion—a thousand million dollars—over the next 10 years to make different choices. That's the direction to create a fairer society. To create a society where no-one is left behind, these are the sorts of choices that this government should be making.

The Labor government like to talk about how they don't want anyone to be left behind. I tell them: you are leaving plenty of people behind at the moment, and doing little things like adding to student debt by having these startup loans. Those aren't going to help much; we will still have so many people who are left behind. You can make different choices. It is possible to support people and to build a just and sustainable society—to build an Australia where everybody actually does get a fair go to achieve their potential. That's what we, the Greens, are calling on the government to do: to make different choices and to create that better Australia.