Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

I am a proud working-class woman. My dad drove trucks and my mum worked in a factory. I went to a public school and lived in public housing. Thanks to the Army, I got some real skills eventually, and thanks to the love and support of family and friends I made it here to the Australian Senate. There are not many like me in this place. In fact, 50 per cent of Australian federal MPs went to private schools.

A Tasmanian woman contacted my office the other day. Her parents were also working-class, and they moved to Tasmania in the 1950s. They got what we used to call a 'bank house', known on the mainland as a council house. Her parents paid a little bit of rent each week, and after 30 years they finally owned it. That meant they had an asset, and because higher education was free, all the kids got degrees. This Tasmanian wanted to ask: what would happen to her family now? They wouldn't have been lifted out of poverty and the kids wouldn't have had careers that they have today. She said, 'What happens to families like mine now?' The top earners in Australia have about six times as much income as the lowest earners.

But it's about more than money and wealth; it's about class. Australia likes to think of itself as a classless society, but if we ever were, we definitely aren't any more. Clive Hamilton and his daughter Myra have written a book called The Privileged Few. For the book, the authors did a lot of research and put in FOIs that show how the wealthiest and most privileged dodge the rules the rest of us have to abide by. For example, in July 2021, when Sydney was suffering through their worst COVID outbreak, the whole city was in lockdown. Workplaces and schools were closed to everyone except essential workers. The most impacted area was Fairfield, one of Sydney's most disadvantaged areas. Kids were being schooled at home, mainly in situations where both parents had jobs and their educational levels were, unfortunately, low. Homeschooling was pushing many of these parents to the point of no return. Meanwhile, just a few kilometres away, it was a completely different story for the children at Sydney's most elite private schools. As experts wrote about kids in Fairfield falling further behind, students at Scots College were allowed by the government to travel to the school's outdoor education campus in Kangaroo Valley for a six-month camp. How lovely! Soon after that, students at another elite private school, where school fees are $42,000 a year, were given a free pass by the New South Wales government to travel to the other campus in Jindabyne.

Wealthy Australians—the elite—know the rules and how to manipulate COVID restrictions and other restrictions. They did not accept COVID restrictions the way Australians had to. They travelled freely to their holiday homes until a decision of the New South Wales crisis cabinet explicitly prohibited travel to holiday homes, except to carry out necessary maintenance. I don't know when millionaires carry out their own maintenance—let's put that on record right now. Reports then began filtering back that wealthy Sydneysiders were travelling to their holiday homes—would you guess, to mow their lawns? I doubt it, I doubt if they know how to pull the choke on it. Everyone knows rich people don't mow their lawns. In one of the authors' focus groups, one of the participants reflecting on the elite schools said, 'Even if you have the capacity to solve the problem, unless you speak to the right person at the right time in the right circles, you know you're never going to go anywhere.'

Expensive private schools like to boast about how well their kids do in exams, but actually they don't do better than the kids from public schools. So why do the wealthiest Australians pay these massive fees? I'll tell you why. The privileged few suggest that private schools are about accessing privileged networks—mummy and daddy's friends. These are networks that get them into career breaks, networks that put them in front of the queue. Even if they don't have the necessary skills, they get the opportunities. These elite networks aren't interested in giving a leg up to the kids from our poorest households, even if they have the qualifications to do so.

So my question is this: what is the government doing about this? What are you doing about this elitism? What are you doing? You haven't done a damn thing to bring down those arts degrees fees. You haven't lifted JobSeeker and you haven't done nearly enough to lift the three million Australians living in poverty out of it. And this is from a party that say they are all about levelling the playing field. Really? How about we see a lot more action and a lot less of this talk and flapping going on? I'm sure that would be great.