Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities) Bill 2009 is encompassed in the explanatory memorandum, which states in its opening paragraph:

This Bill will amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to provide for a fee to be imposed by higher education providers—

from 1 July 2009, so it is virtually retrospective—

for a compulsory student services and amenities fee. The fee will be capped at $250 per student per annum and indexed annually. The Bill provides for the establishment of a new component of the Higher Education Loan Program (HELP): Services and Amenities-HELP (SA-HELP), which will provide eligible students with an option to access a loan for the fee through SAHELP if they wish. In addition, the Bill will require higher education providers that receive funding for student places under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, to comply with new benchmarks from 2010 onwards, for the provision of information on and access to basic student support services of a non-academic nature; and requirements to ensure the provision of student representation and advocacy.

Why was this voted down when it was previously labelled ‘compulsory student unionism’? It was for a simple reason. As I heard the member for Herbert say: firstly, those who do extension courses—and there are universities now within Australia that have something like 90 per cent of their undergraduates doing extension courses—cannot access the amenities. They cannot get discounted beer at the bar. They are unlikely to exercise a vote in the student union elections; they are not there, they are not canvassed, they are frequently working mothers and others who are attempting to extend their credentials in anticipation of future employment and they will not bother themselves with all the activities practised by the young and the enthusiastic in that particular situation.

But this is just another tax. It becomes even more illogical, more hypocritical, when today, as we have for the last 10 days, we heard the Deputy Prime Minister, as Minister for Education, bemoaning the loss of certain funding that she proposed to selectively provide to tertiary students, such as a $1,000 scholarship—give them $1,000 with one hand and take back $250 with the other. Why? So that universities with huge revenues are able to strip a bit of money out of a student who—if the Minister for Education’s own ambitions were secured—would still be working 30 hours a week to qualify for Youth Allowance rent assistance. In other words, if they did a whole gap year, as the Deputy Prime Minister proposes, earning money for 30 hours a week, they would still have another six months to do, which would mean either that they have a two-year gap between secondary and tertiary education or that they attempt to do 30 hours work a week whilst attending university. As we know, the face-to-face times vary greatly in that regard. Some students do not have many hours a week of actual face-to-face time—they have another word for it that I cannot recollect at the moment. Others, such as those in veterinary science, medicine and those sorts of things often have to attend the university for 30 or 40 hours a week anyway. They have to try to make a living and, more particularly, if they are forced to pay rent because they have come from regions outside of the normal travel time of the tertiary institution they attend, they have got to find the money for it.

This legislation says that if you want to go to university you will be taxed $250. We heard the member for Corangamite and previous speakers telling them how much value they are going to get for this money. Well, if you do not want any of the services, what is the value? If you are there every day drinking subsidised beer in the bar, eating subsidised meals in the restaurants, having a massage, going off to counselling—and if you spend too much time in the bar you will probably need the counselling—you get it for nothing, or it is heavily subsidised. But if you are someone who rushes in and does their lectures and their tute and rushes off to the restaurant where they are working at night for the purpose of funding their education, what benefits do you get? And do you get $250 worth? And if you get up in the morning and, because you are battling financially to get yourself through university, you cut a small lunch and put it in a brown paper bag and take it to the university to eat out on the lawns, or something like that, why should you be paying to subsidise the other person who has enough cash in their pocket to go to the subsidised restaurant or cafe? There is a simple factor applying here. Students are fully capable of deciding the services and representations they desire. If they have the financial capacity to do so, they can pay for them.

If I am a young person who takes a job with a builder, or a council or something outside of the tertiary sector and I want to play tennis, or cricket or football in the various codes, I go along and join the relevant club and I pay the annual fee for that purpose, which funds the club. What is more, those basic services, frequently the tennis courts or the other amenities such as the oval or anything else, are provided by the local government authority that is levying rates against my boss or against my parents if we happen to reside in the same area. Those rates are not going to go down when this government taxes me $250 to go to university, when I am not going to use their sporting grounds or when I am not going to use the other amenities that are applicable. If it is my desire to be in the university rowing club and the rowing clubs needs funds for the purpose of operating, they say to me, ‘Mr Tuckey, it is $50, or $100 or $200 a year to be a member.’ That is what happens elsewhere in society and those services are all there. If I think that the university club is a bit elite at $200, I can join the Woop Woop rowing club for half that; surely that is my choice.

Why has there got to be a legislated amount of money that I pay for the purpose of utilising a service provided by a university whose basic function is not to provide those services? They are the attractions to try and get the students in. Their basic function is to deliver education. If I am of the view that I do not want some feisty young individuals to represent me—on what I am not sure because they do not need to represent me as to the prices in the cafe as I can make that judgment—I can go across to the deli on the other side of the road if I think that the restaurant or cafe is too expensive. I can go down to the nearest pub, where there will be a lot of other young people anyway, and buy alcohol. I do not need to have it available to me on the campus. I might be better off without it. If all of those services are going to be provided by the university administrators, then let them fund them from within their revenues. This fee, of course, will not apply necessarily to an overseas student because, when the overseas student turns up, the university will tell them that they will pay full fees for the services and that will include a fee because you get a subsidised meal down at the restaurant. That is fair enough.

The fundamental issue before us here is that all of those fees should be voluntary. As I said, if you want to have some union representative—you might even approve of them attacking a political party from time to time—you pay them the money and you assess their services accordingly. This is the whole issue of trade union membership these days. If a young person can go to the internet to find out what the award wage is that they can expect to be paid as a minimum for working as a brickies’ assistant or something else, they can do that. They do not need to pay a couple of hundred dollars a year to be a member of a trade union for that service. Of course kids, as far as I recollect over a long period as an employer, had a very good idea of what they were worth. And if they were in some doubt today they would send an SMS on the telephone to one of their mates, ‘What are you getting paid down the road to serve behind the counter or to do any other sort of service?’ It is the same in a university.

We have this charade, this farrago, that there is a situation where a university cannot teach you unless you can get subsidised alcohol, subsidised food and child care. There are a very small percentage of students who required child care. It was a service that was recognised as being mostly available to the staff of the university. But again, if someone wants to set up a private childcare centre on the university, it will become eligible for the 50 per cent government subsidy. Why do I have to pay more for it? Why do thousands and thousands of students have to pay for something like that when they have no need for the service? It is as simple as that. There is no need for it.

More particularly, as I have just read out, we have this heartbreaking suggestion that their debts to the government should be further increased by allowing them to borrow this money. They do not get it for nothing. They must pay that back at a later date. There will be interest accumulated and, if they are an extension student, they are paying for nothing. We know very well why the government wants this money. It is the same as it would like to force every individual worker in this country into a trade union because those funds become available to this government by one means or another. I made the point the other day when talking about donations to political parties that political parties would be better off if they had no sponsors, no donors, because, obviously, people who make large contributions to political parties expect something in return. Nobody expects more than the trade union movement. I have seen the situation in Western Australia when the CFMEU were not getting their way on some particular issue and they cut off the state Labor MPs’ funding. Boy, they came to heel then. That is apparently okay, but if anybody else in the private sector tries to do the same thing it is not okay.

People might say, ‘Okay, we will no longer allow trade unions to donate to the Labor Party. We will no longer allow the Chamber of Commerce or some other industry group’—who in this day and age tend to share out the money anyway—‘to donate to the Liberal Party.’ That is fine. But if they all go out, as I saw in the West Australian newspaper the other day, and take out full-page ads tipping the bucket—as they did on one occasions—on the state premier for his decision to protect all the taxpayers of Western Australia from a certain claim for more money by state government employees, how do you prevent that? How does the government or the opposition of the day, when contesting an election, respond to various interest groups? There were two or three advertisements in one newspaper—one of the others was about something of an environmental nature. The political establishment is being bombarded by the supporters of both sides but they do not make donations any more.

This bill is a process of taxing the tertiary community when in fact they can voluntarily pay for whatever they like. In the provision of fundamental services, they pay the going rate. If they think it is too expensive, they go elsewhere—not one of these university services is unique to a university. They are all out there in the private sector anyway, in a competitive environment. Why is it that, having paid for these things, someone else will decide where they are allocated; whether there is more money for the bar, more money for the restaurant, more money to print a paper that nobody is going to read? Surely if someone believes there is sufficient demand in the university for a local paper during prosh, or any time, you have a news stand and people will pull money out of their pocket and pay for it. But why should they be forced to? They might be totally disinterested in campus politics. They might be of a religion that does not even vote. Why should they be taxed for that particular service ?

I made some mention of the youth allowance and I note that the other day the ABC news in my electorate quoted the Labor member for Albany, Peter Watson. He said regional students should be the only ones eligible for the Commonwealth’s Youth Allowance scheme. I can tell the regional members of the Labor Party that Peter Watson survived the last election by 86 votes. Peter has worked it out. He has worked out where the politics are. The minister representing Senator Wong in this place told us the other day that the Labor Party had a clear list of those in the Senate who had the temerity to talk against the emissions trading scheme. Well, I can tell the government benches that I have got a list. I will make sure that those who are more foolish than Peter Watson, the state Labor member for Albany in my electorate, who has got on the bandwagon and is in the pretty happy position of saying what he likes because he does not have a vote on the issue, go on that list. All these members opposite have voted down the concept of the old youth allowance and now they are waiting to take another 250 bucks off the same people if they can comply with Minister Gillard’s new deal. Why would you do any of that? It is wrong; it is unnecessary. I am fed up with having the minister tell us what the universities want. I am not here to address the interests of a few fat cat academics. I am here to represent the young people in my electorate who want a tertiary education and will have to finance their own affairs to get one. We get this silly argument that each and every one is on $300,000 a year. What a joke! (Time expired)

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