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

People are under enormous pressure at the moment. If you finish university, you enter a world of insecure work where many of the jobs are available on a casual basis or on a contract basis. These often count as full-time and non-casual work in the employment stats, but can belie the fact that we have teachers who are getting employed on contracts which finish at the end of the term and they have to go and get work at Bunnings over Christmas because they don't have work to keep themselves going all year round. Many people are being told, 'You'll only get a job to be an Uber driver or a Deliveroo driver for us if you call yourself an independent contractor.' We know insecure work is growing, and it's increasingly becoming a reality for many people, including those who finish university.

Not only are they facing a world of massive insecurity on the job front; if they get a job, they'll find that their wages buy a lot less than they used to. Wages growth is now at record lows and in some years is, in fact, going backwards. So what you get for the money that you have is much less. Meanwhile, at the same time, the cost of housing is going through the roof. Back in 1990, the cost of an average house was, on average, six times an average young person's income. Fast forward a couple of decades, and it's 12 times an average young person's income.

That is the world facing young people, in particular, at the moment. And that's the world facing them even if they do the right thing—if they do all the things this government asks them to do: finish your school, go on and get further education and equip yourself for this changing world. You do all of the right things and you still find yourself facing massive insecurity, unaffordable housing and incredibly low wages. There's a direct correlation when you look back over the reforms of the last 30 years and the situation people find themselves in now. To deal with this, not only are people getting much more anxious—anxiety and mental illnesses are on the rise—but people are left with no option but to go into debt just to try and stay afloat. So now we have the shocking situation in Australia, that's gotten worse under this government, where the ratio between disposable income and the amount of debt a household has has blown out. In other words, this is about how much money people are bringing in versus how much debt are they in. Back in the late 1980s, it was 60 per cent—your debt was 60 per cent of your average income, which was eminently serviceable. Sometime around the 1990s, the two started balancing out and the amount that households on average owed was about the same as what they were bringing in. The ratio now is up at 200 per cent. It is nudging 200 per cent.

People are in debt more than they ever have been before, and this government rails about government debt. Well, it's much easier to service government debt than it is for households to service personal debt, and part of the reason that we have governments is so that we can share the burden. We can share the burden for things like education, because it's much easier when a government, through taxes, says, 'We're going to ask the rich to pay a little bit more, because they can, and then we will use that to spread the burden and fund good public education and share the cost, share the risk and share the burden.'

But over the last few decades we've seen, under governments of both stripes, this idea that we can't have government debt anymore, even though it's much easier to service and you get a better bang for your buck when you have things like universal public education and universal health care and you keep the costs low, if not free. Instead, they're pushing all the costs and all the risks onto everyday people. So now, compared with a couple of decades ago, young people graduate from university and find themselves in debt and facing a world of insecure work, owing more than generations ever have before, and being unable to get themselves into a house. And what's this government's response? It is to come up with this bill to put these young people into even more debt and take away even more of their disposable income by saying that if you've done the right thing and gone to university then they want you to have even less money in your pocket on a weekly basis.

If you couple that with the government's other reforms that are about putting students into even more debt by increasing the cost of higher education, you start to understand why people around the country are saying, 'Enough is enough.' We are on the verge of being the first generation in peacetime history to leave a standard of living for coming generations that is worse than the one that we inherited. That will be in large part as a result of this government.

I feel deeply about this issue of the cost of education, because my dad was the first person in his immediate nuclear family to go to university. His dad—my grandfather—worked in the post office, served in the war and did a number of other odd jobs. His mum did what many people in that generation do, which is look after and raise the kids and raise a great family. When my dad went to university, that was something that was unusual for people in his immediate family to do, and he went off and became a social worker and contributed greatly to Lifeline in South Australia, the community that he came from. But he was able to do that because education was free.

And we all make mistakes in our youth. I'm happy to admit that my mistake when I was at high school and at university was that I joined the Labor Party. I joined the Labor Party because that's what people in my family did; that's the background they came from. The reason I left the Labor Party was that in the nineties I could see the Labor Party making education more expensive, beginning the process of HECS—and then increasing it—and putting people into more and more debt. And you could see, as surely as night follows day, that once you start saying that education isn't a public good that the whole country benefits from but is instead a personal commodity and a personal debt, then the door that the Labor Party opened the Liberals was going to open even wider—and walk through it and trample all over people—and that's exactly what has happened.

But once you start making it a personal burden, then that personal burden is only ever going to increase. And because Labor has swallowed the same lines about government debt that the government continues to promote as part of this trickle-down troika of Labor, the Liberals and big business, we have this approach where we can't possibly ever borrow more on the government books, and we have to shift the burden onto people. People need to understand: every time someone from the Labor or Liberal parties stands up and talks about getting government debt under control and cutting it, what they're talking about is shifting it away from the government and onto households. That is why the household debt-to-income ratio is 200 per cent now, when it used to be 60 per cent, back in the 1980s.

We need to stop and turn this ship around. If this keeps going, people are going to break. There is a much better way of running society, and that is by saying that these individual burdens of debt and risk are something that we're not going to push onto people, to make them suffer and try to navigate a world of high electricity bills, high housing costs, insecure work and high levels of debt. No. We say that is a system that breaks people, and we're going to do one of the things only government can do: spread the risk and the burden. We could fund our universities even more and get rid of the debts that people have if we had the guts to stand up to big corporations and the very wealthy, who are enjoying unfair tax breaks that are now completely unaffordable and unsustainable.

At the moment, most people who put petrol in their car are paying 38-odd cents per litre in excise tax. When the likes of Gina Rinehart and her wealthy companies put diesel in their trucks on their mining sites, they pay the 38 cents and then get a rebate, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer, and pay zero. It costs us a couple of billion dollars a year so that the likes of Gina Rinehart can get cheap petrol. Australian taxpayers are spending $2 billion plus to subsidise cheap fuel for Gina Rinehart. Why don't we get rid of that unfair tax break and put the money into higher education so that people are no longer in debt and we continue to have a world-class education system? Why don't we ask the mining companies to pay a fair share of tax by getting rid of some of the tax lurks that they have around accelerated depreciation? There are so many ways in which the top end of town, the billionaire class, are getting away with financial murder by having negotiated from Labor and Liberal these incredible tax lurks, because they have managed to patrol the corridors of parliament and get these slices of the national pie brought to themselves in the budget.

In an attempt to balance the books, governments are now coming up with outrageous plans like putting students and former students into more debt. No. The time has come to say that this place should be about standing up for the public interest, not succumbing to sectional powerful groups who have the ability to negotiate tax breaks for themselves and not doing what the Liberals have tried to do in this term of parliament by making people pay more to see the doctor or what Labor did in their last term by cutting payments to single parents. No. This place has to stand up for the public interest. A good place to start is education, because, if we don't ensure that everyone in this country, like my dad, can go to university without having a debt the size of a small mortgage hanging around their neck by the time they graduate, and if we don't say to every graduate, 'We're going to make life easier for you when you leave, by making sure you have enough disposable income in your pocket rather than dipping our hands in and taking out more,' then people are rightly going to say: 'What is the point of parliament if you are making my life worse and worse and putting me under even more pressure at the same time as giving tax breaks to big business and continuing the unfair tax breaks they already have? What is the point of government if you can't stand up for the public interest?'

The Greens will be opposing this bill because it's a continuation of an attack that we've seen for several decades, where education is increasingly treated not as a public good, the key to our national prosperity and something we want every person in Australia to have, but simply a way of making money and shifting debt onto individuals and households. If you don't want to be in any more debt, you will oppose this bill. If you want to take away people's income, as the government wants to do, then you will support this bill, but, if you want people to have more money in their pockets, then you've got to oppose this bill. At a time of low wages growth, a time of high housing costs and a time of record personal debt, there can be no justification for saying to people who are on below average incomes, 'The government is going to put its hand in your pocket and take out even more.'

Let's do what we're meant to do and stand up to those big corporations, who are getting away with financial murder. If we do that, we can fund education and take the pressure off students and former students.

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