Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Rachael Gunn's performance of breakdancing at the Olympics has shone a light on the culture of entitlement and frivolity in Australian academia. How many billions of dollars are wasted on useless degrees at universities? We have a skills shortage in this country because we aren't training our children in the skills that matter. Not only do we allow universities to engage in such frivolity, we actually subsidise it. Meanwhile, thousands of Australians are homeless because we do not have enough tradies to build the homes to house the hundreds of thousands of foreign university students and immigrants we have to import to deal with the skills shortage, because we aren't actually teaching our children the trades to build houses, grow the crops and add value to our manufacturing sector. It's time that we cleaned up the rorts in the university sector, started to focus on our trades and started getting more children into those trades.