Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I did. I did pay mine off. I take the interjection. He asked if I paid off my debt, and I did.

An honourable member interjecting—

I've had a hard life, mate. One of the things that's interesting in this, in paying off university debts, is the one regional city that doesn't have a university. They've put the money aside, but they haven't started building it. It's Tamworth, with the lowest tertiary education rate in regional cities in Australia. So, while you're throwing garlands down on tertiary education, when are you going to actually get a university campus into Tamworth, or is university only a thing for the big cities? Little ones don't have to worry about it. That's something you can put your energy into. I'll hear back from the minister, talking about how we're going to go ahead with the university. We've got the land for it, we've got money put aside for it, but you just never started the university. It's just sitting in abeyance.

What I'd also like to bring to people's attention is that when you talk about degrees—we have arts degrees and we have all sorts of wonderful white-collar degrees that have been brought up—you have to be aware right now of one of the great disruptors is coming to Australia. You cannot stop it. I've had briefings on it today. It's going to happen around the world. The great disruptor today is going to be AI. What you are going to see is that if you have a job that requires a keyboard, a computer and a person, over the next decade, that job will probably go, because it has to. AI works around the clock, 24/7. It doesn't require superannuation, it doesn't want overtime and it doesn't need an office. It doesn't need it. In the past, in the Industrial Revolution, we had machines that replaced trades. They replaced weavers and other trades. AI is a product that replaces people. What we have to do in this nation is realise: are we setting up tertiary degrees to put people into jobs which won't be there? Has that discussion happened in this bill? Have you worked out that this is not a dream; it's actually happening?

Whether it's Elon Musk, who I was reading about just then, and the new generation of chips that he's developing, or whether it's Meta, there is a range of houses in the world now that are developing AI. We don't have OpenAI, but it's going to happen in myriad places. I'll tell you why they want to do it. It's because they're going to make trillions of dollars in profit because they're going to be able to take out people's jobs. If we're not prepared for that, we're going to get smacked between the eyes with a big AI stick. This is the thing. We'll also have ramifications because once the jobs go—and they will go; there's no point smirking about it—you don't need the real estate. You don't need the offices. You saw the precursor to that during COVID, with people staying at home. This time it will be permanent, because they won't be staying at home; the job just won't be there.

We haven't, in this nation, really had a forensic look at how we are going to do this. One of the things you must do is broaden your economy to be resilient enough to absorb these people who will be put out of work. To broaden that economy means you have to really concentrate on areas which are not a computer, a person and a keyboard. You need trade jobs. They are your chippies, they are your boilermakers, they are your electricians, they are your contract musterers. They are jobs that require hands and legs and moving. We haven't really focused on that. But with these macro policies—and, I hate to say, such things as net zero—you're actually taking an economy, a nation, to a place and pushing it towards the jobs which will disappear and which won't be there. I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow. But in the next decade, though? Absolutely, a hundred per cent.

We had them upstairs in the Mural Hall. They were fascinating people to talk to. You should have got up and had a yarn with them. How fast they're getting this ahead is amazing. We had people from Silicon Valley at Mural Hall. I had some of them come down to my office. We were just churning through where this world is going to end up. But there's a conversation to be had—when's it going to happen?—about how you have jobs for your children and grandchildren. If it's a white-collar job and you put them through uni and you pay off 20 per cent of their HECS debt, what is the point if, in 10 years time, that job is just not there? We sit back here blindly going forward. In fact, the only thing we've done in this chamber is take away the prospective jobs that they could have otherwise had if we had cheap energy, if we had the capacity with cheap energy to drive forward manufacturing and drive forward heavy industry, because you just put heavy industry out of business. Those jobs have also gone. So what's your nirvana for that?

In closing, I would like to thank the boilermakers, the fitters and turners, the meatworkers, the farmers and all those other people who have never been to uni. You should be thanking them for paying off somebody else's debt, because this is what this is all about. Thank them for paying off another person's debt. Next time I'm in an abattoir—there are a number in Tamworth—or out with those workers, which is what I do when I go home, I'll just say to them: 'At the end of the day, are you happy that you paid off a uni student's debt? How do you feel about that? Does that blow your hair back? That is what fascinates the Australian Labor Party—that you pay off white collar workers' debts.'

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