Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

To put some context on that charade, the member for Throsby clearly asked the member for Bass to explain himself, and the member for Bass has eloquently explained himself. There is no need to interrupt him, member for Throsby. You called for it, you asked for it, and you got it. You got the facts straight up from the member for Bass.

It is a privilege to rise tonight on this very important set of education reforms from a competent reforming education minister, Christopher Pyne. It is pertinent to note that at the time of his recent birthday we saw some student protests around the country. I think it is emblematic of the case against these generation-breaking reforms—these leading reforms that are going to be once-in-a-generation according to the Go8—that the protesters protesting against his birthday could not even burn an effigy of the Minister for Education effectively. It is emblematic of the case against these measures because the Labor Party know in their hearts that these reforms are absolutely correct. While the member for Throsby says 'Go and read the social justice paper', we are too busy reading Dr Andrew Leigh's Imagining Australia book. It is a book I would recommend to you—it is a good read. I have a signed copy in my office, signed Dr Andrew Leigh himself, and he said:

A deregulated or market-based HECS will make the student contribution system fairer because the fees students pay will more closely approximate the value they receive through future earnings.

I have to say to the Labor Party that I could not have expressed that better myself than the shadow Assistant Treasurer, Dr Andrew Leigh, who says that a deregulated or market-based HECS will make the student contribution system fairer. That is the whole point of the government's reforms. It is important to note at the start of this debate that the government is increasing access to higher education opportunities. We are increasing those opportunities to tens of thousands more Australians. These education reforms are needed. They are necessary. They are necessary because the Labor Party started the process of deregulation. To anybody who is listening, to understand this debate we are having today we have to understand that Labor deregulated student numbers at universities. Once you have deregulated student numbers at universities, you have to deregulate the fees—you cannot simply deregulate student numbers without having a mechanism to fund those numbers of students. This is the exact position of the Group of Eight chairman and ANU Vice-Chancellor, Ian Young, who said:

We have created a perverse incentive that rewards universities for enrolling as many students as possible and teaching them as cheaply as possible.

Deregulation is a game-changer, as he describes it. It is a game-changer because you cannot deregulate the numbers attending university without having a finance mechanism for governing those numbers at university, which of course is the competition between universities. The competition will bring great benefits. There will not be $100,000 degrees in Australia until that is appropriate in the market. There will be fees set by universities according to the demand, and, to address the concerns of the member for Throsby, regional universities will be right in the competitive space. As many of the vice-chancellors have acknowledged and publicly said, regional universities can now compete on cost to maintain numbers as a competitive advantage. So this is going to not be bad for regional universities, as you would think from listening to some of those opposite—it is going to be good for regional universities. It is going to be a winner because they can compete on things that the big universities cannot compete on. I know that is the case from speaking to the UWS—the University of Western Sydney—one of the most competitive, innovative, modern universities in the country. It competes on cost, it competes on facilities and services and it competes on degrees. I think this reform will allow UWS to compete with the bigger universities—the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales in Sydney—in a way they are unable to currently.

There is nothing to fear here, because the government is preserving equality of access. Anybody who is considering this package of reforms has to understand that unless equality of access is preserved—that is, no-one will pay anything for a degree up-front if they do not want to; nobody pays a cent up-front for a degree if they do not choose to—then you have no equity access issues because, as per the current system, you are making a contribution to your own education. I have to say, without speaking out of class, that every single member in this chamber agrees with that. Every single member in this chamber agrees that a student ought to contribute to his or her own education. There is no such thing as a free education. The taxpayer has to foot the bill and at the moment we know, as the minister has put very eloquently, that 40 per cent of contributions is made by the student and 60 per cent is made by the taxpayer. We are changing those arrangements under these proposals to a fifty-fifty arrangement. Given we know that university educated people who successfully graduated on average earn more over a lifetime—

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