Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Labor is clearly not the party of Gough Whitlam anymore. I'd love to imagine today's Labor Party doing something as groundbreaking as making university free. In 1974, I was one of the very first to benefit from Whitlam's free university reforms. It's no exaggeration to say that it had a huge impact on my life and many others. There was a really striking difference between our cohort and the previous year. The previous year were clearly comparatively privileged families who could afford uni fees.

Our year represented a real cross-section of Australian society, opening up higher education to many who could not access it before. The transformative effect of that on Australia is still being felt. The Hawke Labor government ended free university in 1989. They introduced a flat fee at first, which was then refined by the Howard government into tiers depending on how much they thought you could theoretically earn from your degree. If you ended up going into a different field, too bad. Then there was the Morrison era's utterly shameful—shameful!—Job-ready Graduates scheme, which caused huge fee hikes for some degrees, saddling young people with tens of thousands in debt that many will carry for their whole lives. It's not immaterial. It's deducted from your income in this cost-of-living crisis and affects your ability to buy a home, as if buying a home isn't difficult enough at the moment. But there is a better way. Germany, Austria, Finland and countries all around the world know there is a better way, as we did back in the seventies. It is possible to make university free again. It's an essential investment in our country's future.

Our tax system is so broken that HECS collects four times as much revenue as the royalties from giant multinational oil and gas companies, and that's the PRRT. Students should not be paying four times more tax than gas companies. In 2023-24, students paid a collective $5.1 billion. In stark contrast, the PRRT raised only $1.1 billion, which is a comparative pittance for an industry that's sudsidised by taxpayers and generating $70 billion in revenue. You might say, 'Well, they pay income tax,' but so do students. Students collectively pay much more income tax and GST than the gas industry. Norway taxes its fossil fuel corporations properly and is able to offer free university, a life free of student debt. Instead of taxing our mining corporations, we make students and graduates fork out—in some cases for the rest of their lives. Those fossil fuel corporations are also taxing us all in another way, worsening the climate crisis. Why is this happening? Labor takes millions in donations from gas corporations. Woodside is their 10th biggest donor, and Labor literally had them in the room when they were writing reforms to the PRRT a few years ago. It's no surprise then that while students get fee hikes, Labor's mates, the gas corporations, get tax breaks.

Some maths. Let's say you had a $30,000 student debt in 2022; since Labor came to power it would have gone up to $33,454. Labor's HECS reduction takes it down to around $27,000. Within a few years it will be back at $30,000. That's because Labor have actively chosen to keep indexing your debt. Your debt goes up with inflation each year. There's no reason this debt needs to be indexed. This is a choice Labor have made—a choice to not properly tax gas corporations but to keep your debt rising. There's no reason a uni degree should put you in debt in the first place. Labor used to support free university. Labor have also chosen not to reverse the outrageous fee hikes from Scott Morrison. Labor were happy to talk a big game about this in opposition. They opposed the legislation and said it was creating 'an Americanised higher education system characterised by high levels of private debt', but they're not touching it now they are in government.

We have the Morrison-era fee hikes on top of an incredibly unfair student debt system, plus several years of indexation. I won't stand in the way of Labor's small HECS-debt reduction—let's get it done. But then let's demand much, much more.

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