House debates

Tuesday, 27 March 2018

Bills

Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018; Second Reading

12:17 pm

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

In continuing from where I left off yesterday, in opposing the original bill and supporting the amendment, I'd like to draw together the comments that I made.

The Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (Student Loan Sustainability) Bill 2018 would force people to start repaying their student debt when they earn $42,000. In fact, it's part of a broader agenda to cut and cut and cut our education budgets. There's a $17 billion cut from schools, there's nearly $3 billion from vocational education and training and there's $2.2 billion from universities. Of course, this is a government that has to find savings in order to pay for one of its big-ticket items, the $65 billion tax cut to big business. The consequence of that policy is going to be a disaster for education, but it has other ramifications. I think the Australian unions put it best when they wrote:

Privatisation hasn't resulted in the cheaper power prices we were promised. Penalty rates cuts haven't resulted in the jobs we were promised. A $65 billion corporate tax cut won't result in the higher wages being promised.

What the result will be is that it will be harder for people to get an education; harder for them to make a change in their life that would lead them to possibly maximising what they can offer back to our community professionally. No-one who's invested in improving a society would sacrifice education to big-business tax cuts that deliver absolutely nothing back to society.

I always think context is important, and when we're talking about students it's particularly important to remember where Australia sits in terms of the contributions that graduates are already making. Our students, whether or not they've finished a degree, already make the sixth-highest contribution in the OECD to the cost of their degrees. In the context of my local university, the Hawkesbury campus at Richmond of Western Sydney University—and, of course, students from my electorate attend Western Sydney University's other campuses in Penrith, Parramatta and Campbelltown—we're talking cuts in the 2018 to 2021 academic years of $93 million. This is at a time when the government talks of a science and innovation focus, where it wants to upskill people, yet at the same time it's cutting the very institutions which will equip people to be ready to face those changed working demands. So, when you combine this with the university funding cuts and with the disincentive to students because of the early demands to pay their loans back, you're setting our education system and our young people up for disaster.

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