Robert Simms (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Education and Training (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice asked by Senator Simms today relating to income support for students.

I asked the Minister for Education and Training a very simple, straightforward question earlier. I asked what the government is doing to assist students from low-income backgrounds in light of the fact that they will be saddled with more debt as a result of a deal done between Labor and the Liberals on the last day of parliamentary sitting last year to convert the start-up scholarships into loans, basically tacking these scholarships onto the end of someone's HECS debt.

I asked a very simple question: what support is being provided to students from low-income backgrounds? We got a lot of waffle but not much detail. Of course the reason for that is the government are doing nothing. They are doing nothing to assist students from low-income backgrounds. In fact, what they are doing is worse than nothing because they are making things more difficult for students from low-income backgrounds to get an education in this country. That is in the Liberal Party's DNA. I remember when I was a student activist, over 10 years ago now, and the Liberal Party had an agenda then to increase fees for university students. Now under the Turnbull government, nothing has changed—it is still their agenda. They are still trying to price people out of our university sector—that is their modus operandi.

But let us consider the implications of this decision to convert these scholarships, which are effectively a grant provided to students from low-income families, people on Youth Allowance. These grants were provided to help with some of the up-front costs associated with going to university—things like spiralling costs of textbooks, potentially buying laptops and so on, things that are going to help students with the costs they need to cover on campus. Let's think about the implications of converting that into a HECS and HELP debt. Most university degrees these days take about three years to complete and these scholarships were valued at around $2,000 a year. So what you are going to see happening is debt increasing for students from low-income backgrounds by an average of $6,000. If someone is doing a law degree, for instance, with five years of study, they could see their HECS debt increased by $10,000. That is a huge impost on students who are already doing it tough.

Of course we know that on top of this decision to slash these scholarships—which, in effect, is slashing the scholarships, getting rid of the grant and instead saddling students with more debt—the government are still pursuing their deregulation agenda. It is not dead yet; it is just resting and waiting for Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Simon Birmingham to dust it off after the election and bring this corpse back to life. That is their plan. They want to bring back deregulation and all of the consequences that flow from that.

I have been in this job now for only six months but it is very clear to me, from the discussions that I have had with people in my home state of South Australia and across the community, that Australians do not want to see $100,000 degrees in this country. They do not want to see a US style university system, where you have the big end of town finding a pathway into university but people from disadvantaged backgrounds, people who went to public schools like my myself being shut out of university because they simply cannot afford to buy a seat at the table. That is not the vision that the Greens have for higher education in this country. We are committed to free education. We are committed to accessible education. And we believe that all Australians should have access to quality education.

With the federal budget due to be handed down in May, there is an opportunity for the Turnbull government to abandon the Liberal's ideological crusade against universities, to abandon their slash-and-burn approach to the university sector and actually put some money on the table so that we can see a first-class education system that is accessible to all. That is the Greens vision for education and the Liberals should come on board. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.