Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

What we are doing is a major microeconomic reform that will protect our international education export industry, which is worth $15 billion a year. Admittedly, it was $19 billion a year under the Howard government, and Labor managed to shrink it to $15 billion. I see you have gone very quiet again. So you cut higher education spending by $6.6 billion, you shrunk our international export industry in education to $15 billion, which we are now rebuilding, and you have run a scare campaign in the last few months about nonsensical $100,000 degrees, which has been exploded by the University of Western Australia.

What we are doing is a major deregulation of higher education which will free our universities to be the best education system in the world with some of the best universities in the world. It will give more students the opportunity to get a higher education qualification and go on to earn 75 per cent more over a lifetime than the more than 60 per cent of Australians who do not have a higher education degree. Do not just take my word for it, Member for Kingston. You have asked more questions than the member for Adelaide ever did on education. You have given me the opportunity—and I am grateful for it—to say that one member of this House very sensibly wrote:

I clearly remember being among a distinct minority of university students who supported paying for our degrees through HECS. I supported it because I could see the inherent logic. Our incomes would be higher because we had been to university.

Mr Champion interjecting—

See this speech in context