Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

school halls and all the other things that the government are so good at wasting money on. Maybe they need to have a look at their $350 billion budget and find some things that they can reprioritise so that they can fund the services that obviously senators on the Labor side and senators like Senator Hanson-Young think are so important. Why should all students have to pay for the services that Senator Hanson-Young values, irrespective of whether they access them or not? They should not. They should not be required to. This is the crux of this issue.

The Higher Education Legislation Amendment (Student Services and Amenities) Bill 2010 does not introduce a fee-for-service arrangement. If it were a genuine fee-for-service arrangement, students would be offered choice about whether or not to access the service and pay for it. This is a compulsory levy imposed by socialist green government legislation, which the universities would be required to collect as tax collectors. Senators on the government side—Labor and Greens senators—have said universities support this. What a surprise. Universities are in this with the government. They are going to be the tax collectors collecting the tax and they are, of course, seeing a benefit in this for them.

Has anybody on the government side asked the students? Let me tell you what the students think about this. Out of the submissions received by our Senate Select Committee on Scrutiny of New Taxes, 89 per cent of students making a submission to the committee were opposed to this tax. Further, the Australian Democrats actually went out of their way, when this issue first came up, to survey students in their Australian Democrats Youth Poll. Maybe the Greens are so removed now from what happens on campus that they have lost touch with where students are at. Maybe Senator Hanson-Young should do a survey on campus to find out what students really want. Maybe Senator Hanson-Young needs to spend a bit more time on campus and ask students whether they want to pay another tax irrespective of whether they will access the services that are to be funded by it or not. The Australian Democrats Youth Poll 2008 showed that 59 per cent of those surveyed did not believe that voluntary student unionism legislation should be reversed. This is of course a broken promise, yet again. If it is such a good idea to slug students with another tax, if it is such a popular thing to do, if the services are so important, if they are going to be so valued, if this is such a great concept, why didn't the Labor government tell us before the 2007 election that this was something that they would do? In fact, this is what the shadow minister for education said at the time, when he was asked the question 'Are you planning to introduce compulsory student unionism? Are you looking at reversing the voluntary student unionism arrangements?'

No, well, firstly I am not considering a HECS style arrangement, I’m not considering a compulsory HECS style arrangement and the whole basis of the approach is one of a voluntary approach. So I am not contemplating a compulsory amenities fee.

There is a theme here. Why is it that the Labor Party before an election tells us that they are not going to introduce a tax and then after an election they do? Why is it that they keep deceiving people around Australia about what their true intentions are when it comes to taxes like this one?