Clive Palmer (Fairfax, Palmer United Party) Share this | Hansard source

I come here today full of admiration for the education minister and his confidence in the education he himself has enjoyed, which has taken him and put him on a pedestal for all Australians to look up to in this parliament. It has given him the opportunity to bring forth his ideas for us to consider and discuss. I come here too with admiration for the Treasurer, who has gone to university, toiled through his university career and come here so the nation can enjoy the benefits of that education. But I, like the Treasurer and the Minister for Education, was the beneficiary of real reforms in the education sector made by Edward G Whitlam when he was Prime Minister of this country. The Treasurer did not pay for his education, nor did the Minister for Education. They never would have got to this place without a university education; they never would have had the opportunity.

The cost of educating someone from primary school through to high school for 12 years is far greater than the amount we lose in one year's unemployment in this country. A good education policy is not only good social policy, it is good economic policy. This country benefits by capturing its resources and there are no greater resources to be captured for the benefit of the nation than the intellect of its citizens. Intellect is not distributed evenly across society. It is not a measure of how much money you may have or what your prospects may be but of what you can contribute to the nation. No Australian, wherever they may come from, should be handicapped from going to university. I have a friend whose daughter recently graduated from university and now has four years debt. She cannot buy a home—she is newly married, but she has to slog away for four or eight years before she can get a housing loan.

When you are 23 or 24, that is the most important time of your life for taking risks, being bold and taking initiatives. We have seen what has happened in the United States with Google, Apple, and Facebook—a whole lot of innovations. Do we really want our young people to leave university and be saddled with debt—to be so conservative that they are too frightened to think, to take risks and to stimulate our economy? Because that is what this bill does. It creates more and more costs for students, the people who can least afford it. It saps their creativity. It takes from them the opportunity for the whole nation to benefit from their endeavours at a time of their life when they could make a real difference.

The Prime Minister has recently said, in the last two days, that there has been a fundamental change in the Liberal Party—a fundamental change in the government. He said they are going to listen to what is happening. Well, they are not listening to the people of Australia. They are not listening to the Senate. They are wasting their time in the House of Representatives because only an idiot expects to get a different outcome while repeatedly doing the same thing time after time. How many times does the Senate have to reject this legislation before the government gets the message? The message is: this legislation will not pass the Senate. This legislation is through, finished, wound up. Every one of our senators in the Senate will vote no. They will not take an amendment. They will not take a compromise because they believe the right to a fair and proper education is the indelible right of all Australians. The right of our people to enjoy a better and rising standard of living is fundamental to their welfare, and it is to the benefit of our nation.

What is all this about? It is about a lie. It is about saying that Australia has too much debt. We know that our debt is only 12 per cent of our GDP. We know that when Bob Menzies was Prime Minister of this country, our debt was 40 per cent of our GDP. We know that our country has the third-lowest debt in the OECD. We are one of only 13 nations that has a AAA credit rating—yet we are supposed to be having an economic crisis. The Treasurer comes out this morning. He says to the Liberal Party that he has to pursue his cuts—he has to pursue austerity in this country. In the United States, President Obama has stimulated the economy. He created real growth. It has been so successful that the European Union has done the same thing. We look around the world and find Uzbekistan and Ghana, two countries with a balanced budget. We look at the United States economy and see that for the last 50 years it has only has 12 years of a balanced budget. Are we going to follow the Uzbekistani model in our economy and balance our budget whatever that means or are we going to go for prosperity, for growth, for a strong economy and follow the lead of the United States of America?

What are we going to do? Are we going to spiral down? I tell you what: if these cuts continue, they will destroy demand in this country, they will collapse the economy and we will never get the budget back to surplus, because it is only through growth creating real wealth that you can really support our economy, support what we have got. So, rather than saying that we are going to cut, let's accept the challenge to make this country stronger, better. Let's believe in ourselves that we can create greater growth and greater prosperity for Australia.

Why does the government go away from the challenge that previous governments have accepted—to provide a better standard of living for Australians? Is it that we believe our members of this House do not have the same capability, the same talent as those that went before them to maintain the fight to keep Australia growing? Is it because we want to give up? And why do we need to continually increase taxes and introduce levies and fees that other people pay? Can't this government be as efficient as the last and the one before it and the one before that? Are we going to continually sink in a hole of non-performance, negligence and incompetence?

This bill will not become law. It will not go through the Senate. It wastes the taxpayers' money by having it considered in this House yet again. It is just a sign of the political process where an arrogant attitude is prevailing in the government and they think they can pass legislation through this House without any discussion or consultation. We have seen in Queensland what happens to an arrogant attitude. This is a time for the government to change, to listen, to adjust its policies for what is best for all Australians. If they continue down this path, they will be defeated at the next election. Let's face it: without our preferences, they would not be there now. And the reality of it is they do not have the support of the Australian people.

We only have to visit universities and talk to the students, discussing with them the difficulties they have even coping with the large levels of debt that burden them and which take away their creativity, knowing that that just will not happen. What we need in this country is more compassion and a real understanding of how the economy works, to know how important education is in the economic process and to know what opportunity means as an Australian—to benefit from our assets. We need to know that you cannot buy success in this country. You cannot buy success by just having a lot of money and going to the best university if you have not got the brains to pass it, if you do not have the ability to compete. Shouldn't we in Australia hope that all Australians compete on a level footing so we get the very best people through our universities? If we go to Japan, China and other parts of Asia, we see the whole country competes in education performance to get these places.

Why do we want to stifle competition? Why do we want to say that you have to have enough money to go to university? Why do we deny people who do not have enough money to go to university? I was the beneficiary of a free education and a free university education. I have produced more money for this country than any member in this House—that is the fact of the matter—and I would not have done it without Gough Whitlam's support and a free education when I was 20, because I could not afford to go to university. Billions of dollars of exports would have been lost to this country. That is the hard reality.

You people sit here and deny opportunity for Australians to compete in our economy, to be all they could be. I think it is a great disgrace. And it is irrelevant; this bill is going nowhere.

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