Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is wonderful to talk on this motion. Higher education is so important to the future of our country as well as to the individual. I, like many in this House, am fortunate to have a degree. I can say that without the HECS system I wouldn't have had that opportunity. When I was growing up we did not have the financial means to pay for university. So, to be able to delay that payment was so important to me and to my siblings in being able to get an education at university.

As the member for Sturt talked about, when talking about HECS, the biggest issue facing higher education that I hear about all the time is the inflation rate, now at 7.1 per cent, which means that HECS debts are being indexed at that rate, so many students are incurring an increase in their debt that is greater than their repayments, which is causing significant anguish and concern for them. It's not something we hear the government talking about. The obvious and first solution is to bring inflation down and focus on that, through their fiscal means, which they need to continue to do to drive inflation down to our two to three per cent band.

But they also need to be creative and look at other ways to support students. I think we should have a conversation about mechanisms that we have—potentially pausing, much like the former government did with the fuel excise, cutting that rebate in half for six months because of the war in Ukraine. It was immediate action to give people relief at that time. We need to have a conversation about what we can do to help students who are incurring these HECS debts as we speak. So, I'd support any conversation that we can have in a bipartisan way to address this challenge for all students.

But moving to the motion, I must say, it was a little bit light, after what this government says about 12 months of achievements, and in many ways it sums up some of the challenges here. There's not a lot happening in this space. But let's go through it in a little bit more detail. If we look at the 20,000 places that they've announced, it sounds great, although I always get concerned when there's a big announcement from this government about big numbers and what they've achieved, because generally when you look a little bit deeper it's actually not there in the detail. So, I trusted my instinct; I did a little bit research on the minister's own website about the 20,000 places. Interestingly, he lists only 13,389 that have been placed so far. So I thought, well, there's still 2023-24; we're running out of time, but potentially there are more to come. But applications closed on 19 September 2022. So, they closed last year, and almost 12 months later there's an almost 7,000-place shortfall in that 20,000. So this is question for the minister: is the announcement of 20,000 so we can get it out into the media with our press releases and move motions like this? Is it actually 20,000 places or are we going to end up at about 13,000? That would be a long way short of the 20,000 figure.

Also in that detail—which the minister didn't talk about at the time—is the fact that this program is temporary. By 2028, the funding will be gone. It's not even going to exist. They didn't mention, at any stage, that it was temporary. Again, if you look below the media release and the headline with this government, the detail's not there to actually be supporting students. Obviously, facilitating the return of international students is fantastic and amazing. We've opened our borders and students across the globe are coming back. Well done! It would've happened anyway.

Going to the introduction of the start-up legislation: when Labor talk about supporting start-ups and entrepreneurships, what they don't talk about is the budget. They shut down the Accelerating Commercialisation program. They don't talk about how they closed the entrepreneurs' program, and they definitely don't talk about how they've frozen, and are potentially stopping, the Boosting Female Founders Initiative that supports female entrepreneurs to grow their businesses with seed money of $250,000 to $500,000. Again, we hear a lot about what they're doing; they don't talk about the cuts. We hear a lot about female participation in the workforce. It's vital. I can't think of anything more than important than supporting female entrepreneurs, particularly post COVID, as the digital economy has continued to climb and there are so many opportunities for all Australians. I know there are many women, mums in particular, that started their own business through COVID, and now they've had this program paused. It's taken away from them the certainty that they can create a great future for themselves and their families.

This motion is light on action. Even the measures they've included don't stack up, and it is not delivering for higher education.

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