Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, Carers and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

The passage of the former coalition government’s Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union Fees) Bill 2005 helped to lift a substantial financial burden for students in Australia. For the first time students were empowered to make their own decisions about the services they needed, and it enshrined freedom of association on campus. The results were not surprising: student unions, bereft of the power to force their members to pay their fee, had to radically cut the cost of membership and tailor their services to the demands of students. At my alma mater, the University of Sydney, union membership fees dropped from $590 in 2005 to $99 in 2008. The University of Melbourne dropped its fees from $392 in 2005 to $99 in 2009. RMIT went from $500 to just $80 three years later. Thanks to VSU, students at these campuses have hundreds of dollars back in their pockets that they can choose to spend as they see fit.

Many students were sick and tired of seeing their money wasted on extreme political campaigns. But ultimately the debate was never about whether student unions promote left-wing or right-wing causes. Student unions should be free to engage in whatever political activity they wish, provided their membership and funding base are entirely voluntary. That is freedom of speech.

To many, these changes seemed long overdue—after all, compelling Australians to join an organisation against their will was regarded as objectionable in every other part of society. Workers long ago won the right to freely associate, and today no government would ever think of making union membership compulsory in the workplace. But, for some reason, university administrators and the Labor Party believed that student unions were the exception. For some reason, the services they offered and the value they provided to their members was so high that students had to be forced to join and forced to fund them. Aside from the obvious logical fallacy that if an organisation offers its members value for money it should not require compulsion to have high membership, there are also a myriad double standards.

These students, who are supposedly incapable of choosing whether to purchase union membership, are called upon to vote in elections, electing political leaders who will chart the course of the nation. They are allowed to drive, purchase alcohol, join the Army, own a firearm or take out a loan. They are even expected to be able to choose their course, their subjects and their future career paths. But the same students who possess the faculty to make these important decisions suddenly become incapable of looking out for their own interests when it comes to student union membership.

Labor’s plan is to slug Australia’s university students with a new tax of up to $250 per year, and that will rise annually with automatic indexation. The government will establish a new loans scheme to assist some students to defer their fee payments. This is an admission, if one were needed, that students do not have the capacity to pay. This policy is also a clear breach of Labor’s pre-election commitment to Australia’s students. In a doorstop interview on 22 May 2007 the then shadow education spokesperson, Mr Stephen Smith, said:

... I’m not considering a compulsory HECS-style arrangement, and the whole basis of the approach is one of a voluntary approach, so I’m not contemplating a compulsory amenities fee.

That is pretty clear. Fast-forward to less than two years later and Labor introduces a compulsory amenities and services fee, with a HECS style loans scheme. When considering their vote at the last election, no doubt some university students were swayed by Labor’s assurances that they would not seek to return to the days of compulsory union fees.