Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It will be hard to pick the silliest bit of that previous speech, given by the member for Mackellar, but I think the funniest bit was the claim that the government were concerned about the overreliance of universities on international students. This is coming from the government where the Prime Minister, when he cut $2.2 billion from universities only three years ago—another little cut that he snuck into the budget—said, 'Well, they can go out and recruit more international students.' The government literally said only two or three years ago, 'Go and recruit more international students,' and now they're saying: 'They're a bit reliant on international students. We couldn't have that.' It's nonsense!

I saw this motion on the Notice Paperyou know when you're flicking through thinking, 'What's up for debate?'—and I thought it had to be a joke. It must be April Fools Day. But, no, this is trolling the parliament. Government MPs congratulating themselves on what we are seeing as the decimation of the university sector. It's a waste of debate time, and I notice the member who moved the motion is not even here. She ran away. No wonder. To paraphrase the motion: 'Congratulations, government, on supporting universities through the pandemic.' There was no JobKeeper. Just about every other sector in the country got JobKeeper but not public universities. In fact, they changed the rules three times to make sure that public universities didn't get a cent of JobKeeper. The latest level of job losses is 17,000. That's just the jobs from position descriptions that were on org charts. Probably—I'm not exaggerating—tens of thousands more jobs, if you look at the ABS labour force statistics, have been lost, including those of casual teachers and researchers. We hear government speakers going, 'We care about STEM.' Well, they don't care about the hundreds and thousands of laboratory researchers walking out of science labs because they have no funding. Scott Morrison, or the Prime Minister, as we call him, did nothing to stop the job losses. I would hate to see what the mob opposite think supporting universities looks like.

Dr Allen interjecting—

Then the motion says, 'We gave $1 billion this year.' I have to say that, this year, the billion dollars has been cut in the budget that they just handed down. There is a crisis in research, as the member for Toorak over there should well know. There's a crisis in research. International students have lost billions from universities.

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