Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, he got a full scholarship; he had to sit it twice—but that is the point. That is wrong. It is fundamentally wrong and you don't get it. You do not get how obscene that is. You now want university students, poor kids, to pay for the scholarships of other students, and you have put no parameters around them, have you? You have not said they will only be for poor kids. You have not said they will only be for rural kids. How decimating to kids in my electorate who live in Clayton and know that they will never be able to afford to go to that university in Clayton. They are not rural; they are not wealthy. This is what is fundamentally wrong and why you just do not get it.

It is obscene to threaten 17,000 scientists' jobs on top of the cuts that are already happening. At the largest CSIRO institution, again in my electorate, I have seen jobs lost. I have seen, for the first time, hefty rises in unemployment in my electorate. As one scientist living in my electorate, who was in contact with my office this week in a despairing situation, said, after two decades of research excellence, a mortgage and four school aged children, he has no certainty of a job in six months, when his funding runs out. There is no certainty about this. He was openly wondering whether getting his PhD and pursuing his research was even worth it. He cannot move to private industry now; he is locked into his career and even wonders why future students would want to follow in his footsteps. With $100,000 degrees, why would the young people with the extraordinary intellects we need in science research follow in his footsteps to be rewarded only with constant career uncertainty, job insecurity and crippling debt?

This is what you are doing: creating uncertainty in an environment where we need children to go to universities; we need kids to go to TAFE—we need kids to get the education they need for the jobs of the future, jobs we have not even been able to think of yet. We are not skilling up our society, we are not making quality citizens and it is down to the current government of this day.

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