Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you don't mind, I will have a few moments to have my own words on this.

Australia was a very different place under the time of Whitlam. My mother tells me that people put on a hat and gloves before they went into town. God Save the Queen was our national anthem. But one of the features of that time was that families and parents around Australia had to make very cruel choices about which of their children would go on and access higher education that all of those young people deserved. In my mother's family, they had to make that difficult decision. Three daughters and one son: who do you think got the chance to go on and access higher education? So I say today, in this tradition, that we are opposed to the Americanisation of our system. We are opposed to $100,000 degrees. We are opposed to a system where the young people of this country have their access to higher education determined by the size of their parents' wallets rather than the intellect and motivation of those young people.

I want to talk about some of the issues that we see with this system. When we hear those on the other side of the House argue about this system, they are unfortunately very clouded by their vision of Australia—the chums that they went along to private schools with or that they went to university with; the people who many of them represent in their electorates—but I want to tell them a little bit about what happens in my electorate. I want to talk about the suburb of Springvale—one of the suburbs I am very proud to represent. Do you know what the median income is in Springvale per household? It is $49,000. That means half of the people who live in the electorate of Springvale live in a household where $49,000 is less than their entire family income. I think it is important that we put this into context: when we talk about $140,000 or $100,000 for degrees—that we will see, that we know we will see because Universities Australia have told us this—we are talking about more than double the entire annual household income for one of these families. When I talk to these families about how this will affect their decision to educate their children, they tell me that they would be incredibly uncomfortable with taking on anything like that level of debt, and I think if your household income was $49,000 a year you probably would not feel too excited about taking out a $100,000 loan either.

I really want to spend some time addressing the argument that has been made that because there will be scholarships provided that somehow this will resolve the equity argument. Firstly, I want to point out how profoundly unfair that is. Why should we take a handful of the brightest young people from lower socioeconomic families and decide that they are allowed to go to university while a much broader range of students from more wealthy families will get the opportunity to go to university. In Australia that is simply not how we do things. Secondly, I want to point out that when we look at trying to deal with the equity problem by looking at the experience of scholarships overseas, we see that it just simply does not work. We know that those on the other side are so in love with the American-style system—

An honourable member interjecting —

I will take a lead from there. When we look at a university like Harvard, they have enormous problems getting equity in their undergraduate population. So what do they do? They say to every American family, 'If your family earns less than $40,000 you can come to Harvard 100 per cent for free'—they will pay your fees, they will pay your board, they will pay for your food, they will pay for everything. Of their 1,650 freshman students that came in last year, do you know how many came in under that program? Fifteen. The reason for that is because this is about setting expectations. We want the message to go out to every young person in this country that you are entitled to a fair go, and like every Labor Party caucus before us, we will fight to the end on this issue.

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