Kelly Hoare (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw it. This was the exact concern that Professor Ian Chubb, Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, expressed in an interview with the Australian newspaper when he said:

There will come a point when you charge too much to too many people and a number of people won’t participate ... It’s a big debt to walk out of university with.

It certainly is a big debt. If you knew as a young person that the cost of your education was going to prevent you from owning a house, buying a car or even being able to afford to have and raise children until much later in life, would you still choose to pursue it? Of course not. Young people want the same things as people everywhere—the chance to own their own home and be self-reliant and financially secure. They should not have to choose between this and their education.

The Howard government has already diminished the standard of student life and lessened the student experience with its forceful introduction of voluntary student unionism, so I suppose we should be grateful that this current bill is not another slash and burn of students’ rights. The introduction of VSU was and is detrimental to the nature of university life, to the quality of vital services students receive and therefore to the kind of graduates our universities will produce in the future. Do we want our universities to produce mindless, spiritless drones—the kind of colourless individuals who have spent their three or five years dutifully memorising and then regurgitating tracts of information without ever participating in a sporting event, joining a rally or getting involved in something outside themselves and their career track? Perhaps this is exactly what the Howard government wants: generations of people who will step quietly and uncomplainingly from university into the workforce, plough away for 50 years and then retire, never having asked for anything, made a complaint or questioned the status quo. For this is what will happen now that VSU has sucked the life out of our university campuses and made them less like places of life learning and more like training institutions designed to turn out corporate automatons en masse.

But to return to the bill before the House, Labor believes that those provisions in the bill that will further skill the number of Australian medical and health professionals represent a long-term positive step forward in addressing Australia’s critical medical skills shortage and making more funds available to those valuable young people who are willing to hock their futures to pursue the kinds of skills and training this country desperately needs. Whilst not opposing this bill, there is much to be opposed to in the Howard government’s callous and mercenary approach to tertiary education in this country. The time will come when we need to do far more than fund extra loans and create extra fee-paying places to address the shortage of skilled and educated workers in this country, but it seems that this government simply lacks the vision to make more than these small changes. I urge all members to support the member for Jagajaga’s amendment.

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