Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I reflect on a couple of things the member for Forde said earlier about the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018. One is the consultation said to have been done with the sector and students. I struggle to find any support for the measures the government is trying to introduce in this bill before the House. Universities Australia has done quite a lot of study into exactly what contribution universities and students have made to budget repair, and estimates that since 2011 universities and students have contributed over $3.9 billion to the task of budget repair in this country. I agree with what Universities Australia has said, that perhaps they have contributed their fair share to budget repair in this country. This government might want to consider its tax reform and the $65 billion worth of tax cuts it's giving to large companies, as well as to individuals earning more than $180,000 a year, rather than attacking universities and students earning $45,000 a year, if they even get to do that.

This side of the House does not support an attack on students, as I've suggested. This bill would attack and undermine the fairness of Australia's world-class student loan scheme. We on this side of the House, the Labor Party, have a proud record when it comes to higher education. Back in 1989 Labor introduced the first income contingent loan scheme, HECS, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. It contributed to an expansion of higher ed in this country and was part of the foundation of our fair and accessible higher education system. When last in office we increased funding for universities from $8 billion to $14 billion a year. We introduced the demand-driven funding system, which enabled more people to go to university. This led to an increase in participation from disadvantaged students. In fact, the system allowed an extra 190,000 students to go to university. This is an important point to consider when research tells us that by 2020, in only two years, two out of every three jobs created in Australia will require a diploma or a higher education qualification.

Despite this, the government introduced a bill that ignores the reality of the modern world, where further and lifelong study is essential to our economy. It is working to limit the aspirations of students and their families, denying university access to students and undermining the qualifications this country needs from its workers and workforce in the future. We need more, not fewer, people to go on to further education and gain the qualifications they need for the benefit of this country. This government has systematically attacked universities, students and education as a whole. This Liberal government has attacked higher education with a freeze on university grants—effectively a $2.2 billion cut—meaning 10,000 university places will be unfunded. So that means 10,000 fewer students at universities.

We witnessed this government introduce an unfair funding regime that cut $17 billion from schools, hitting public schools the hardest. We all remember the 'not a dollar difference' campaign—well, there's a lot of difference. We've witnessed this government wallop vocational education and TAFE, with a whopping $3 billion being ripped from their funding. This government has the gall to say these cuts are necessary, while, at the same time, they can throw a staggering $65 billion tax cut bonus to the big end of town. I mean, what a nerve.

We have consistently fought this Liberal government's attempts to introduce $100,000 degrees in this country, and we'll continue to fight this attempt to undermine the repayment threshold on student loans. It's known that higher student debt is a genuine barrier for low-income and disadvantaged students when it comes to study. We know these government cuts will affect students from Brand, from across the towns of Rockingham and Kwinana. We know this, yet instead of increasing participation and assistance in higher education this government is making it harder for people to study and harder for their families to support them.

This is not the first attempt by this Liberal government to lower the repayment threshold for HELP. In last year's budget they tried to make students start repaying their HELP debt when they started earning as little as $42,000 a year, and they failed. We will not support this latest attempt at lowering the Higher Education Loan Program repayments to a $45,000 threshold, which is only $9,000 a year more than the minimum wage in this country. It is simply too low. It will be a millstone around the necks of new graduates who are looking to begin their working lives. This debt will be a burden to people.

How can someone starting out even think of paying a mortgage or getting married, or starting a family, when their income is sequestered by student loan repayments? Add to that the increased casualisation of our entire workforce, across the professions as well as in blue-collar work, where long-time employment contracts no longer exist or rarely exist. People find it impossible to secure housing loans, even personal loans for cars and the things that everyone takes for granted. Then you add in, with your profession, a debt of this magnitude—much higher than when I went to university and paid HECS—and they have to start paying it off at $45,000 per annum from their income.

Contrary to the Prime Minister's advice that people go out and buy homes for their children, in the real world—certainly in the real world of Brand—this does not happen. In my electorate, I can tell you, parents struggle with paying their bills, thanks to this government's attack on penalty rates. I can tell you that parents are struggling every day with underemployment, unemployment, rising costs of living and stagnant wages growth. I can tell you that parents are struggling to pay their own mortgages—never mind being able to help their kids buy a house. I can tell you that in the everyday world, when they finish uni, young people, students, are on their own when it comes to finding their own homes and paying for them.

Another concern to be had with this bill is the impact that the proposed changes to the HELP repayment thresholds will have on women. Mark Pace, the president of the National Union of Students, has stated: 'We know from the National Tertiary Education Union's submission to this Senate inquiry that 60 per cent of all Australians with outstanding HELP debt are women and that two-thirds of the Australians who will be dragged into the debt pool with the new proposed repayment thresholds will also be women.' So I cannot support this.

In conjunction with this, student debt overall is a major concern in this country. Australian students already pay the sixth-highest contribution to the cost of their degrees in the OECD. This is significant. Making it harder for students to study, we are risking participation in post-secondary education that we need for the benefit of this country and for the economy of this country. We risk being left behind the rest of the world with short-sighted punitive measures such as those in this bill. We do not want a system where students have to take out commercial loans, or their families have to take out commercial loans, in order to fund their university fees.

By putting universities in a funding vice, I can only imagine that the intention of this government is to push institutions toward having to institute higher fees. We saw this happen under the Abbott government when they tried to deregulate the entire system. That's when we saw the announcement of $100,000 fees—sadly, out of my home institution at UWA.

There is no equitable scenario in the agenda being pushed here. What we are seeing is the opportunity of a better future that higher education affords being taken away from those who cannot afford it. This bill is about the wrong priorities of this government. We have a government driven on giving tax cuts to millionaires—to the detriment of those in need of support. It's a government delighting multinationals with tax cuts—showering the big end of town with a $65 billion tax cut—and then getting them to write letters to crossbenchers. This is the great compact that this government has with large corporations to buy some votes in the other place—a letter.

The flipside to the largesse of this government is the educational future, the employment opportunities and the standard of living for everyday people for whom university will be out of reach. Instead of breaking down barriers to higher education, this government is actively looking to build up barriers that prevent access to university. What we need to be doing as a country is investing in people and enabling them to realise their potential. We need to embrace the fairness of our world-class student loan system and we need to protect it, and we certainly should not be doing this act of destruction.

I mentioned at the start of my contribution on this bill the magnitude of what universities themselves, as well as students, have done in the activity of budget repair. I'm going to read from a Universities Australia paper from April of last year, 'The facts on university funding', where they conclude:

Australia's universities and their students have made a very substantial contribution to repair Australia's Budget position since 2011. They have done their bit.

Any further reductions would increase financial pressures for students already under stress and put at risk the ability of our world-class universities to continue to deliver excellence in education and research—the foundation of our third-largest export industry and the bedrock of future economic prosperity.

It's important to understand how universities are funded. To ignore the fact that, over the many years of universities in this country, student fees do end up subsidising research is to ignore what is true. Maybe people don't agree with that being the case, but it is the case and, until we have a greater reform of our research and science funding system and how it intersects with our higher education student payments and fees system, it will remain the case—and we need to address the world as it is.

I want to chat briefly about the student experience because the bill before us will affect that. It puts the current student experience at risk, and I note that the student experience has been in decline for some time. It's a critical part of the role of universities to provide a safe and inclusive environment that enables young people—and mature age students, of course—to actively participate in the university community through clubs and societies, sporting or interest based, or culturally based focusing on international students, who provide us with our third-biggest export in this country.

As costs to attend universities increase, especially for local students, and students are exposed to ever-increasing fee liability on completion of their degree, it becomes harder for student societies, student unions and guilds to attract members, participants and the volunteers that keep these groups running—groups that add so much to the life and vibrancy of university campuses around this country. In parliament today, I spoke with the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, which is celebrating its 20th year. Groups like this get together and depend on the volunteer students who can generate interest on topics. Today, they were asking parliamentarians to talk about their experiences in this place and the road to this place. Firstly, I'd like to thank those students for their terrific work and what they're doing, and for organising for 60-odd members of the Union of Jewish Students to be here in the House today. But these kinds of groups are at risk when people can no longer afford the time because they have to work ever-increasing hours at their jobs, which pay less because penalty rates are cut, so that they can, in some way, contribute to their education because their parents are unable to support them, or they're simply not able to move out of home—all the things that seem to go along with a university education, or did once. I'd also like to thank Ariel Zohar for the invitation to speak to the Australasian Union of Jewish Students today.

There are other institutions that are important across universities. At the university I studied at, unbelievable fundraising activities took place. These groups face the very real challenge of students no longer being able to participate in them. I think of the university camps run at the start of each year for disadvantaged children across Western Australia. It's been going for a long time, but it's increasingly challenging for those groups to have students involved because of the pressures that the costs of education are placing on what we might think of as not study time but, nonetheless, a valuable part of the student experience at universities in Australia.

These institutions and international societies—the Association of Malaysian Students and the Singapore Students' Association—of course, are very important in the system in Western Australia, as they are where our educational exports come from. The highest number of Singaporeans outside of Singapore reside in Perth, and a lot of that is off the back of Singaporeans having come down from Singapore to study in Perth because it's close to their home. And so I thank all those students who participate, who help to welcome new international students to our shores and who make them feel welcome at our campuses.

Obviously, many of us in this chamber have been to orientation days. Recently, I was at Murdoch University and Curtin University, and whilst I did say hello to the Liberal clubs, of course I stayed and said hello to the Labor clubs. I would like to shout out to some good people who are engaging with local students about getting involved in talking politics: Lewis Whittaker, Kai Donaldson, Erin Horrigan, Chris Lesiter, Jay Wood, Conor McLaughlin and Braydon Wagstaff.

Over at Curtin, a great institution where I went with the member for Kingsford Smith, we talked about the Australian republic and the move for an Australian head of state. We had the great support of Jason Lawrence, Beck Bogdan and Bridget Edwards. There will always be students who can do it and who will do it, but I think it's time that all governments laid off students at universities in their passion for budget repair. We know that budget repair is critical. We support that, but these people—students and universities—are not the people to use to correct the budget.

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