Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There will be a lot said about allowing access to education, and the impacts that the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018 will have. I'm very pleased to be able to speak against this bill, because that is the key. As the member for Oxley has outlined, it's the disincentive that it creates and not just the cost that it forces still-young people to bear while they're trying to move from university and transition into a working life.

I want to tell you the story of Ellie. Ellie struggled to get through year 11 for a whole lot of family reasons. She was a bright student, but it wasn't always a place where she could concentrate. However, she made it through year 11 and she made it through year 12. In fact, she did so well that she was offered a place at university. She was to be the first person in her family to go to university. That seemed like a fantastic thing to start with—the idea that you get to university and this whole life would open up for you. At the time, she looked at what the costs of surviving university would be, but not the debt she would accrue and pay back—that conversation came later, and that whole process in itself was pretty daunting. But Ellie was lucky that she had people around her who said, 'You know what? This is worth it. This is an investment in yourself that is worth it.' And that was in spite of other voices saying to her: 'Why do you want to go to university? You're going to do an arts degree. That won't get you anything. Why don't you go and do hairdressing?' Well, Ellie wasn't terribly gifted at hairdressing, so that wasn't an option. But what appealed to her was the unknown of a degree at university.

So, in spite of different voices having different influences on her, she did accept her place at university. She went to the University of New South Wales and she began her arts degree. As luck would have it, Ellie thrived in that environment, but that doesn't mean it wasn't hard. Anyone who has taken a child through their first year of university knows the challenge of those first assignments: the tears, the late nights, the computers not necessarily doing what they ought to do and the struggle—not just the struggle of the practical but the struggle of the mind when you're struggling to deal with stuff you don't understand—but the very process of being at university and working through it is where you get the benefit.

Ellie got through this process. She got through her first lot of exams. She got through her next lot of exams. She got midway through second year, and suddenly the debt that she was carrying started to weigh on her. She started questioning herself: 'Can I actually repay this debt? I'm doing an arts degree. Will I ever get a job that will allow me to pay back all this money I owe?'—and by then it was already more money than she could ever imagine paying back. Again there were good people around her to encourage her, to keep her going, to say: 'You know what? This is the hard bit. You're halfway there. Keep going.' She managed to get through, but always there were other voices saying to her: 'You don't need to do this. You don't need to be worrying about this. You could go and get a job.' Fortunately, Ellie stuck with it throughout it all. There were lots of tears. She finished her final year, she did really well, she got offed a place to do honours and she did honours—the first in her family to have a degree and the first in her family to have an honours degree.

When I think about this legislation, I think about the one extra straw that it would have taken to dissuade someone like Ellie from going down a path that is hard. If anyone sits here and thinks, 'Oh, what a bludge, going to uni,' you have obviously forgotten what it was like going to university or you sailed through it differently from most of us, because it is hard. You are struggling with things that are making your brain explode. When I see legislation like this I think, 'Is this really what we want to do to young people? How much hope and possibility do we want to take away from them? How much debt do we want them laden with?' That's one aspect of it. And then, as they move from one phase of their life to their next, how much do we want to make it hard for them?

Clearly the government has decided it wants to make it a bit harder than it already is—in fact, significantly harder than it already is. I think the Prime Minister and this government think that, for students who are transitioning into the work environment, it won't really matter to them. I talked to some young graduates about their budget. I asked them what it would look like to repay on $42,000 a year instead of starting to repay their debt on an income of $45,000 a year. Here are the sorts of things that they told me.

For a budget for someone who's just graduated from a university in Sydney and has a job nearby, let's assume that the weekly take-home pay of someone who is earning, say, $45,000 is $736. That's the weekly breakdown. So let's do a weekly budget. Let's assume this person is trying to avoid the two-hour commute each way from the Blue Mountains or the Hawkesbury, which my electorate covers, but is happy to do a bit of commute into the city, so they rent in Strathfield. The average rent for a three-bedroom house is $680, and they pay a third of that. That leaves them with $510. Let's take away the cost of their mobile phone, their train tickets to get to work each day and about $150 a week for food: they now have $300 a week left. Then you've got the house-running costs, such as the cost of home internet, because, of course, we all work in a mobile world, and the chances of their job being nine to five, clock-on clock-off are pretty remote. Like all of us, they will be working late from home. Hopefully they will be able to download the odd Netflix here and there, but I haven't got that in the budget so I'm not sure that's going to be a viable option unless they can share someone's Netflix account. They've got their home internet, their water and their electricity, and those average at about, let's say, $200 a month—about $50 a week—and that's very conservative. Now they have $250 a week left, and that's if you somehow manage not to get a shock electricity bill for summer or winter. But that's only $250 left after the basic costs come out.

Now that doesn't include putting in for your fair share of cleaning products in the house, nor does it include medical, dental or optical expenses. It doesn't address occasional costs like renewing a licence, maybe paying a fine, replacing a broken phone or computer, getting a haircut, or even joining a local sporting team or the gym. If you have a car, that's at least $50 a week in petrol and whatever the weekly breakdown of rego and insurance is. I haven't mentioned home contents insurance; of course, young people find that really stretches their budget. What if the washing machine carks it? What if you get a hole in your shoes in the rain? What if you're using a dodgy washing machine and it rips one of your tops and you need to replace it? There is no room in this budget for buying new clothes. You sure as hell can't afford to go out to dinner to celebrate a friend's birthday. You probably can't afford to buy your mum much of a birthday present or a Christmas present, and you certainly can't have a pet. You might be able to afford one of these things: maybe you can allow yourself a haircut one week; the next week you might get petrol; you might go to the doctor the next. There really isn't even room for two of those things to happen in the same week.

I don't actually think that you've got the opportunity to think about having children, buying a dog or buying your first home. There really isn't room in that budget. That is what we are saying; that's how you should live. What about a deposit for a property? Well, to get a deposit for a $600,000 property in the situation that I've just outlined, that person would have to not spend a cent outside of the bare necessities budget—certainly no children and no medical expenses or one-off expenses, like replacing a fridge. They could not buy one item of clothing, eat out, buy friends or family gifts, or even get a haircut. If you saved every one of those cents for five years, you might get yourself a bit of a deposit for your home. Of course, in that time the costs will have gone up and so you'll need even more.

So this is what this government thinks is a suitable position for people to be in when they start paying back their HECS debt. This government wants to stick its hands into the pockets of people and take a chunk of the $250 that's left over. Not only do I fear that this will leave young people short of enough money to live properly, to eat properly and to look after their health properly, but the feedback I get is that it will absolutely reduce the number of people who even consider going to university in the first place, and that would be a tragedy. It's a tragedy for our economy, because our future depends on people, young and old, wanting to educate themselves.

We know that accumulating a student debt is a genuine barrier to study for people from particularly poor and disadvantaged backgrounds. We already know that. It isn't an unknown; it's not a possibility. It is a fact. We also know that investing in education gives more back to society in the long term than it costs us in the short term. Let's picture Australia in 20, 30, or 40 years from now, and ask ourselves the question: do we want people who are doctors, nurses, journalists, teachers, engineers, planners, scientists, health professionals—anybody who requires a university degree—only to be coming from wealthy and privileged families? Do we only want one type of person who can afford to do those courses? We're already seeing an imbalance in professions like veterinary science and medicine. This sort of legislation is going to exacerbate that. I would have thought we'd want a mix of people. We want industries to be filled with people of different colours, different abilities and different genders—people from rural and regional Australia, Indigenous Australians, and people who know what it's like to go to school with a pair of shoes that has a hole in them.

Debate interrupted.

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