Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister is so desperate to make it harder and more expensive for Australians to go to university that he's now stooped to using dodgy numbers to back in his case. In a media release yesterday, the Minister for Education made a claim about the employment prospects of humanities graduates. The only problem was that those numbers were completely dodgy. The release compared employment rates for humanities students one year after graduation with employment rates for other students three years after graduation. That's like comparing the development of a one-year-old and a three-year-old and then saying the one-year-old can't run as fast! It's really quite outrageous.

The truth is that, within three years of finishing university, humanities graduates are employed at the same rate as science and maths graduates, both at around 87 per cent. But the government is trying to more than double the cost of a humanities degree. The minister should know that humanities graduates are employable—after all, he's got three humanities degrees, and it hasn't stopped him getting a job.

The Liberals can hide the facts all they like. They are still jacking up fees for tens of thousands of students. This year, when it's been so hard for those year 12 kids who've been in lockdown and remote learning, they should know better.