Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I rise to condemn this government's higher education changes that are currently before the Senate. What we will see is $100,000 degrees occurring across our higher education sector. Just to give one example about what this would mean to people accessing higher education, I would like to share with the House my mother's story.

My mother grew up in Western Sydney in Mount Druitt. Because of family circumstances—her father was dying of cancer—she had to leave school, give up the scholarship she had received under Whitlam to go to university, to work to help pay the bills. My mother then decided, later on in life, because her cleaning job had become difficult because she had had several workplace injuries, to go to university. She enrolled at the age of 47. Not only did she do an undergraduate degree; she went on to do her honours and then her PhD. Today she is an academic at the University of Canberra. Tonight I will see her for the first time in a month because she will have just returned from overseas where she was presenting two papers at two conferences in Europe. That is a higher education success story. That is my mother's story.

But my mother would not have enrolled to go to university under these changes, because a woman of 47 would not have earnt enough in her working life to pay back a degree costing anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000. This is the problem with these reforms, and this is why they should be voted down in the Senate. (Time expired)