Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Labor 2013-14 Budget Savings (Measures No. 2) Bill 2015. Labor and the Liberals are joining together to put students into more debt. The average student is going to end up with $6,000 more debt as a result of Labor agreeing today to support the Liberals' way of trying to balance the books. Instead of saying, 'Maybe we could go after unfair tax breaks for the very wealthy, the top one per cent, or maybe we could wind back on some unfair superannuation tax concessions,' Labor and the Liberals have joined together to come after students. It is almost as if they do not understand just how tough many students are doing it at the moment. People are graduating with very large HECS debts. We know that the cost of a HECS debt is forcing some to rethink whether to go to university at all or whether to stay there. But they are doing it, and they are coming out at the other end with a very big debt already. As they are trying to work their way through university, they are doing it at a time when youth allowance and other payments have not been put up for many years. As a result, students are getting nowhere near enough from Youth Allowance. But the cost of rent is skyrocketing, especially in major capital cities, where many of the universities are. Students at the moment are in more debt, they have less money in their pocket from government assistance and the cost of rent is going up. So what is happening to students at the moment? Students are having to work more hours in paid work to try to make ends meet. But, because the cost of rent is so high and because they have to work more, students are often living far away from the campus that they are studying at. That means more time is spent trying to get to and from work and to and from classes. As a result, the idea that maybe the Liberals and Labor have in their heads about the life of the university student being a life of leisure is not the modern-day reality. Students are working around the clock to make ends meet and are doing it under significant pressure.

One thing that gave students a bit of relief was the Student Start-up Scholarship. It was a little bit of money that arrived at the time when you might need it to pay for books, meet some other outstanding bills or meet those fees that are part and parcel of going to university and being a student. It was useful. Anyone who thought that it meant that students could live the high life does not understand the life of a student at the moment. This was going on essentials. Rather than saying, 'How can we make life easier for students?' the government and Labor have now decided to add that money on to students' HECS debts. So now, in an attempt to balance the books because they have not got the guts to stand up to the very wealthy, the top one per cent, and ask them to pay a little bit more, Labor and the Liberals are coming after students. This is going to have a big impact on people. The idea that you can just keep loading up debt on students is not fair and is not right.

When I was a student many years ago, we shared a three-bedroom house in Fremantle, and the cost of rent for me was about half of what I was getting in Austudy, as it then was. The rent was $60 a week and Austudy was $120. That meant I only had to work one shift a week to live a comfortable but frugal lifestyle as a student. Now in my area of Melbourne, if you wanted to rent a very average three-bedroom brick home in Collingwood, you would be lucky to get change out of $600. That is almost $200 per bedroom. That is about as much as people are getting in Youth Allowance. A person's Youth Allowance is gone just on rent, and then come all the other costs. We should be looking for ways to make life easier for students and saying, if we truly believe it, that education is critical for Australia in the 21st century. If we want to be the high-tech, high-value economy that the Prime Minister and others talk about, we are going to rely on an educated population. We are not going to be able to compete with China or India on wages, and nor should we try to. Our big advantages include our people and our smarts, so we should be doing everything we can to try to keep people in education and put more money into it. Instead, we are cutting university funding, budget after budget, and now we are coming after students as well.

There are many better places to look if we want to raise money. At the moment, most people in Australia who fill up their car with petrol are paying about 38c or 39c a litre in tax. When the likes of Gina Rinehart put diesel fuel in their trucks, they get a tax rebate that Australians pay for. Let's keep the rebate for the farmers—no-one is arguing to take the diesel fuel rebate away from the farmers—but, in relation to the miners, it costs Australian taxpayers $2 billion a year in subsidies so that the likes of Gina Rinehart can buy cheap diesel. Then we wonder why there is not enough money and we come after students. Labor joins in with the Liberals to come after students instead of going after Gina Rinehart. If we were really serious about raising the revenue we need to fund the services that Australians expect, we would close that unfair tax break and get rid of that fossil fuel subsidy. We would say to those top few per cent of income earners who get massive benefits from superannuation, 'If you've got a superannuation balance of half a million dollars or so, maybe you don't need more help from the government.' Maybe that money could be better spent somewhere else.

We would start by winding back some of those super tax concessions, because, at the moment, if we do not do that, the cost of superannuation tax concessions alone will soon outstrip the cost of the age pension. In other words, we set up superannuation in order to take the burden off the budget so that people were not reliant on the pension. But, soon, it is going to cost us more to prop up this superannuation system than it will to prop up the pension. So there is a place we could look to save some money. What about asking millionaires—people who earn over a million dollars a year—to pay an extra 5c tax on their marginal rate, just for the money that they earn over $1 million? That would bring in a few hundred million. If we asked millionaires to pay a bit more tax, if we had a millionaire's tax rate, the top one per cent in this country, then we would not need to come after students to help balance the budget.

So the question is: if we have got to raise money, what is the fairest way to do it? Who is in the best position to bear a little bit of extra cost to help balance the books? Well, it is not students. The answer is not to put students into more debt. Any time Labor and the Liberals gang up on a budget savings measure, you know it is going be bad news. In the last parliament it was single parents. They came after single parents to try and balance the budget. This is a group of people who are already working hard at home looking after their kids and who are the highest proportion of people in paid work who receive welfare. They know they need that extra money to make ends meet. Labor, with the support of the Liberals, came after them last time. Why? Unlike the mining industry, single parents do not tend to have a spare $26 million lying around to run an advertising campaign against the government. So the government went after the easy target, and they are doing the same again with this legislation.

We in this parliament have got to stop going after the people who can least afford it and asking them to pay more. It might be easy to do because they do not patrol the corridors of this parliament with well-paid lobbyists and they do not have millions of dollars to threaten running against people in marginal seats and saying, 'You can vote for this measure, if you like, but then I'm going to run a campaign to turf you out.' Our job is not to give in to the special interests, which then have a cost on the budget. Our job is to act in the public interest, and that at times means having the strength to stand up for what is right. It means, especially if you call yourself an opposition, not agreeing to just putting students in more debt in the hope that they will not protest. It means saying, 'No, perhaps there are fairer ways of raising the money.'

I am very, very disappointed to be here speaking on this bill, because I thought it was one that we could knock off in this parliament, that if enough people joined together we could send the government back to the drawing board and say: 'Don't come after students to try and balance the books. Go after some people who can afford it a bit more and who are getting substantial tax breaks.' But, no, here we are yet again finding that it is the Greens who are standing up for the community. We are not standing up for special interests but standing up for the community. So I think students will very clearly know this, as we go to the next election. They will look back at previous governments and understand that $2.3 billion was being ripped out of universities by the previous Labor government. When students look at how much is coming in in their youth allowance or other payments, they will realise that those payments have not gone up for a very long period of time. They will know when they try and make ends meet, when they try to find enough money for rent and see that it is not there and when they have to work more and more or spend less and less time at university that it is only the Greens in this parliament who are standing up for students and it is only the Greens who are saying that there are much fairer ways of raising the money we need to fund the services that people expect than coming after those who can least afford it.

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