Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Hansard source

I really want to commend the member for Macnamara for that address. It turns out some of the best people in the parliament went to Monash! I'm really pleased to be able to make a contribution to the debate today about upfront payments tuition protection. Labor will be supporting the bills that are before the House, the Education Legislation Amendment (Up-front Payments Tuition Protection) Bill 2020 and related bills. We're doing that because the shadow minister for education wrote to the relevant minister—I think almost a year ago—asking him to consider these exact changes. There were some issues between upfront payment students and other students in the way that their degrees were being handled, and we're really pleased to see that the government, after the creaking wheels of how things operate around here, has finally gotten around to fixing this problem.

But I want to spend a little bit of time today talking about some of the broader issues facing the education sector, and specifically the vicious and unwarranted attacks that have been dealt out year on year on year since this government was elected seven years ago. I have a real passion for the subject on the table today. That's partly because I went to Monash University myself—I was there for 6½ years—and also because Monash University's main campus is right in the heart of my electorate, and I can tell you that thousands of people I represent are among the incredible number of people around Monash University—including students, ex-students, teachers and researchers—who are doing awesome and creative things and making our country a better place.

What has happened in the last seven years has been an absolute disgrace, and I utterly condemn the approach that this government has taken to education. It has been anti-intellectual, short-sighted and virtually Trumpian in how it's treated the education sector. You would think that, if there is one thing that we can come into the chamber and agree on, it would be that education is valuable and a part of our future. We know that, if a country denigrates its education system, reduces the quality and standard of education and reduces the number of young people in that country who get these awesome opportunities to get themselves educated, that country is going backwards, and that is exactly what is happening on the Morrison government's watch.

One of the most unspeakable betrayals of this sector came through the recent Job-ready Graduates Package. I have to start by saying: the job-ready package? Can we just kill the marketing slogans in this House, please? It was a vicious cut to the support that's provided for education and for thousands of young people around this country. The legislation makes students pay more for their degrees. That's the long and the short of it. In fact, for thousands of students it means approximately doubling the cost of their education.

Other speakers have pointed out the extraordinary hypocrisy of this policy. Every single member of the cabinet of this country went to university, and they used that opportunity and got all the great things from that. Many of them went to university for free. Then they got to the pinnacle of their careers, into the cabinet room down the hall here, and they made it harder for the Australians who follow them to do the same thing. I just think that is rank hypocrisy. It is a disgrace. Why would you come into this place and think, 'Yes, what I'm going to do with my great opportunity here is make things harder for the generations that follow'? But that is what we've seen under this government.

The timing of this is also a complete outrage. We are in the middle of the first recession that we have had in this country for 30 years. For the first time, many Australians who never thought they would face unemployment are in a dole queue somewhere, and young people are particularly badly affected by this problem. Any government worth its salt would see this for the huge opportunity that it is to get those young people who are not fully occupied with work and give them a chance to improve their skills so they don't bear the scars of unemployment and underemployment for years down the track. But, instead of doing such an obvious move, the government have chosen this moment to make it harder for them to go to university, and for that I think they need to be held accountable.

It's also part of the context here that young people are going through an incredibly difficult time anyway. Even before COVID, we had a generation out there who were really struggling. They are far less likely to own a home than even people my age and certainly people a bit older. As I said, they're paying more for education. They're far more likely to be underemployed or unemployed. They're far more likely to have lost their job because of COVID and far more likely to have missed out on JobKeeper, that important support that's helping so many Australians right now. What are we doing for these young people? Why are we kicking them while they're down by trying to make their opportunities to go to university harder? I just don't know how hard Scott Morrison wants to make life for these young people.

I want to say a couple of things that are a bit specific to Monash now. A lot of the people I represent are employed by Monash University, and those people are acutely aware of the impact of seven years of neglect by this government.

This is a sector that is rife with casualisation. It is rife with poor treatment of researchers and scientists, these people who contribute so much to the value of being Australian, and this has had its toll. Just in the recent COVID crisis we've seen Monash University lay off somewhere around 277 staff, and this has had a particular impact on its performing arts department. I am sure those on the other side of the House don't have too much concern about this, because we know the way they treat the arts sector has been very shabby in the last few months. But this was a vibrant part of the university, quite a famous part of the university. I want to say to the students who are tackling this problem at the moment that I'm standing with them in their fight and I hope they are having good discussions with the university about how this is going to unfold.

If I can say one final thing about universities that I have found incredibly upsetting over the last couple of months, it has been the exclusion of university staff from JobKeeper. It is insult after insult after insult. We need to do better than this, and that is what Labor wants to do. You have heard over previous weeks the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, stand in this chamber and speak with such great passion about how he values education. Labor knows that, if we want a brighter future for young people and our country, we are only going to get it one way, and that is through the education system.

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