Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

During the cost-of-living crisis, it is exploitation to push students into doing unpaid practical placements. We should be setting up students to succeed, but instead we force them to live in poverty and to balance their work, placement and study commitments. To work in many of our sectors with the most extensive workforce shortages right now, like teaching, students are required to engage in weeks upon weeks—sometimes even months—of unpaid work whilst barely subsisting on poverty stipends.

Decades of neoliberal policies have reshaped universities away from being a public good into operating as corporations in a market. When we shape universities in this way, they are no longer about ensuring students are educationally enriched. It just becomes about numbers and incomes on screens—about shifting blocks of students for revenue.

A decades-long bipartisan commitment to the privatisation of education has also driven thousands of passionate, experienced teachers out of the public education system. With the teacher workforce crisis deepening, we desperately need teachers to stay in the profession, but we also need university students to want to finish their teaching degrees and to join the teacher workforce. But, if their first taste of the profession whilst on prac is months of poverty and a teacher's excessive workload, it's no wonder they don't stick around.

Like my colleague Senator Faruqi, I too would like to express my solidarity with Students Against Placement Poverty, who have been fighting for fairer conditions. Despite the hardship these students are facing, they're still rallying and organising for change.