Damian Hale (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am the perfect person; it is one of the core things I talk about in the marginal seat of Solomon, and I take that interjection in the spirit in which it was given. Education and health are two things that I really do look at. As governments we can bicker a little bit around the edges with different issues, and we do. I love the debate at question time, in the Main Committee and in the chamber but when it comes to health and education I do think that there is too much that divides us in this place. We need to make sure that we continue to develop education and that we continue to be at the forefront of developing education for the young people coming through in the future in Australia.

We are such a lucky country in regard to education that we probably take it for granted. We say at times that we are trying to find ways of making sure kids go to school. Yet I know that, in Third World countries, in developing countries, school is a luxury. The kids there yearn for school. They love it. I remember some AFL guys telling me about going to South Africa once and about the kids they met over there. The kids saw a biro, and they could not believe this thing that wrote. So the guys ordered in a heap of biros, boxes full of biros, and just gave them out to the kids, because they did not have pens—they had not even seen pens before. Pens to us are something so simple that we take them for granted and leave them all over the place, but those kids found them unbelievable. They wanted them. So the AFL guys just gave out pens.

This bill amends the tuition assurance provisions in the act, to remove the administrative requirements for higher education and training organisations to have tuition assurance arrangements in place at the date of their application for approval, to offer FEE-HELP or VET FEE-HELP assistance to students. In addition, the bill provides the amendments to allow recommendations from approved national and state based agencies to be used as part of the assessment and approval of training organisations to deliver VET programs. That is very important. As I said, education is, for me, the cornerstone for our society. It should be the right of every Australian to be well educated, and I fully commend and support the bill.

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