Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise to happily speak once again on an education matter—the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014. I want to put on the record that in this place I have spoken on school funding, that there is legislation before the other place with regard to childcare funding and that this legislation completes the suite. What we are seeing from this government is a massive reduction of investment in education as an economic and social driver of equity for Australians. We are seeing this barefaced attack on every level of education right across the country. Today's particular focus, in terms of this government's cuts to education, is the higher education sector.

I have to go to Senator Ruston's comments about why we should not be afraid of deregulation. She said that, if we have a responsible government with a well thought out policy, we should not be frightened of deregulation in this sector. Anybody making a judgement of the Abbott one year in can clearly see that the government are not responsible and that we cannot trust a single word they say—not a single word they say. Higher education is too important an area for us to go on the say-so of a government in a deal with well-meaning and well-intentioned crossbenchers, who are doing their level best to coerce this government to come to the point of figuring out that we need to support and invest in higher education. I note the efforts of Senator Madigan and Senator Day.

Frankly, we have seen over and over in this place already in the first year of the Abbott government that we cannot trust a word of this government's commitment. If we do trust the government on deregulation, what essentially is happening? What does that word mean? For every student who intends to go to university, for every parent who looks over the education for their child, for grandparents who have aspirations for their grandchildren to go to university and for mature age students who want to improve their life and that of their families by returning to university, what does this government's deregulation mean? Essentially, it means the removal of price control for student contributions to the cost of their bachelor and sub-bachelor degrees. Let us not be misguided in any way about what is going on here. This is about getting rid of a cap and letting the market rip. We had Senator Ruston saying that the market never gets it wrong. Even those opposite with a little bit of respect for history and a little bit of decorum in terms of economic conversations should be able to say that they might have noticed the odd market failure—just the odd one.

We cannot trust this government in moving forward in this area. There are cuts of up to 50 per cent in course funding for undergraduate students. While they say, 'We cannot afford to put this on the debt for the nation,' they are in a mad rush to load up individual students with massive levels of debt. In their arguments they continue to separate Australians who want to learn from those who earn and pay tax. They try to construct students as somehow different from taxpayers. In my conversations with students many are completely offended by this marginalisation, as if they are not taxpayers already. Many of our students are mature age students, particularly in the regional areas, and are already paying taxes. With the taxes they are paying they are relying on the Australian government to give them the opportunity of further education in a rapidly changing economy so that they can reskill, upskill and advance their own interests and those of their families. They are already taxpayers and they want their money invested in good things for this nation, and investing in higher education is a powerful economic driver of the advancement of our economy as well as our society. Taxpayers do not sit outside the student population. Even those doing part-time work and study early in their life, who are in their early 20s, are taxpayers. I am sure that they are very keen to see the taxpayer dollars they are contributing invested in their future in education.

If the argument put by those opposite in their quite mild mannered way were to actually hold water, taxpayers in New South Wales should never put money in that could be used to invest in a road in Western Australia. Here we see revealed what is really going on with this government in every policy area. They are seeking to create fear, constructing policies of division and putting taxpayers separate from the people who are being affected by the policy they are trying to get through this place. We are not a fragmented nation. Yes, we have states, but we are Australians. We are a federation. We need to grow Australian students, who will move all over this country and indeed around the world. We need to give them the opportunity of a great education and we need to make sure it remains affordable. One thing we know is that we cannot trust the government to do anything that they say they are going to do, so when they give their word that deregulation will be looked after and they will set up a system, I do not believe them and I do not think any thinking Australian, going on the record of what we have seen so far, could possibly believe that.

In the seat of the member for Warringah, the leader of the government, Mr Abbott, I had the opportunity to meet with many students. Large numbers of them were year 12 students, who I congratulate on completing their qualification. I know many of them will be waiting with bated breath for results that they hoped prior to this legislation coming to the parliament was going to allow them to go to university. The economic profile of the people in the seat of Warringah is a lot different to the economic profile of the people in the seat of Riverina, where Charles Sturt University is, or the economic profile of people in the seats of Robertson and Dobell, which are well served by the University of Newcastle. There is a lot more wealth in the Prime Minister's seat than in the two seats I mentioned and the seat of Riverina, which is looked after by Mr McCormack. The other seats I mentioned—Riverina, Dobell and Robertson—have much poorer communities so any impact is going to be amplified, but in the Prime Minister's own seat students and their parents are alarmed. Career counsellors from across that whole area—right up and down the northern beaches peninsula and going into the Speaker's own seat—have communicated with me that families are rethinking their capacity to support their son or daughter to go to university. Young people themselves are saying: 'I don't know that I can afford to do this. I did want to go to university, but I am thinking that I can't.'

And perhaps there are young people here in the gallery today, who have a grand vision of a future that has been instilled in them because we believe in education in this country—at least we do when Labor is in charge. We believe in the opportunities that education gives, and we build hopes and dreams on the back of being able to provide that into the future, using those taxpayer dollars that we have earned and put into the bank because we want to make sure that we give our kids a chance.

But today there are fewer students that are applying for university places. There have been fewer immediately, even before this legislation passes, because this government has put a big question mark over the rights of young Australians even to think that they can go to university—even to begin to think that that is possible. That is a retrograde step. It is taking us back to a very dark day.

In a global economy—in a knowledge economy world—we should be ramping up our education. That is why I am so proud of Labor's own record with regard to this. We know that accessible higher education changed the nature of opportunity in Australia. We know that accessible higher education has changed the nature of class in Australia, but that is what will be stripped away if this bill passes. We have made incredible strides towards creating a more equal Australia, where your postcode does not affect the opportunities that you can aspire to have in this great country.

Labor believes that no young person or their families should be turned away from education because they do not think they can afford to pay for it. And during our time in government we gave flesh to that belief. We made sure that the doors of universities—which were already partially open—opened further in response to student demand. And that meant that 190,000 Australians—it is not a small number!—got into university because Labor removed the cap on student places. When I was the member for Roberston in the other place, we kept asking the higher education sector, 'We finally let those students in; how are those students going?' I am pleased to report to you that as soon as you open the door to a hard-working student with capacity, they get in there and they do the job. Those students were advancing. There were staying and they were being successful. This government, for a reason that is completely inexplicable to me, wants to shut that door and shut a few more and make it harder and harder for young people to go to university.

I want to go, in my remarks, to one of the most shameful indications of how cynical this government is and how much we should not trust them on this issue. I refer to what they are loosely calling 'Commonwealth scholarships'. 'Commonwealth scholarships' has a lovely ring to it. You could be completely mistaken in your understanding of what the government means by that. When you hear the words 'Commonwealth scholarship' you would think that the scholarship comes from our Commonwealth as a nation, providing scholarships to students. The government have deliberately called this the Commonwealth scholarship program in this piece of legislation because they know that that is what people will think is happening. But this government is so despicably sneaky and arrogant that they think they can get away with this. They are actually introducing a scheme which has no Commonwealth money in it at all. There is not a single cent of Commonwealth money going into the Commonwealth scholarships that they are articulating in this bill.

What is really going on is that instead of the government putting in money, they are going to get money from the students who can afford to go—we know that pool is going to shrink—and then, in some scheme that has not been clearly explicated, they are going to hive off part of the students' money and put into another little fund of scholarships that will be delivered in some way, which is still not clear, to students at that university. That is the plan. How sneaky to pretend that it is Commonwealth money that is supporting the scholarship plan! That is why we cannot trust this government on any legislation. We certainly cannot trust them on this piece of legislation because they are trying to sneak the most disgraceful misrepresentation through in this one area alone.

And that reveals the whole way in which they are going to infect access to the system that is part of this great country's tradition. In terms of this Commonwealth scholarship we have a problem with just how far backwards this government has gone. Even Menzies, back as far as 1950, when he brought in the real Commonwealth scholarship scheme, made sure that money was allocated from the Commonwealth to support students in their education. Here I have an article from the Kalgoorlie Miner from Tuesday, 18 July 1950. It says that they made scholarships available to students throughout Australia who wished to commence a course at a university or a similar institution.

There were two kinds of scholarships with federal money attached—Commonwealth money. One provided fees only; the other provided, in addition, a living allowance to the student. So they were supporting students to go to university in 1950. It was a genuine Commonwealth scholarship scheme. This sneaky, despicable government is trading off the back of that scheme. Back in 1950 they were able to write: 'Under the new scheme there will be no-one in Australia who will be denied a university education because of financial difficulties, providing his matriculation results are sufficiently high to justify selection under the scheme.'

In 1950 the Menzies Liberal government knew that this economic use of brainpower could not but help to improve the Australian economy generally and to make a more highly qualified community. I will admit to often saying in this parliament that the Prime Minister wants to take us back to 1950, to the 'father knows best' days, where we should trust that he is going to look after us all—while he is breaking his word every single day. I cannot put him back in the 1950s anymore; I am going to have to go back further because, frankly, in 1950 it looks like the Liberal Party had a better idea about investing in the education of this country than they do right now with their miserly, despicable, deceptive naming of the Commonwealth scholarship program. There is absolutely no truth in what they are doing.

Senator McKenzie interjecting—

In the Ballarat Courier, in an area where Senator McKenzie comes from—she is supposed to be representing the community in the west and north of Victoria—the Vice-Chancellor of Federation University wrote:

The shallow rhetoric about having more scholarships for regional students, including assistance to help them to attend metropolitan universities, and the availability of more sub-degree courses, ignores the real differences we have in this nation between metropolitan and regional higher education.

The differences are structural and not simply related to student choice and cannot be easily ameliorated by the application of market forces.

We cannot allow this government, which is going to let the market rip, to preside over a yet-to-be-disclosed set of scholarships that amount to one student supporting another.

I want to put on the record what this would look like in a tutorial. I can remember my very first tutorials at Sydney university. I was a girl from the western suburbs and the first in my family to go. I had a wonderful tutor by the name of Alex Soborslay. I want to put on the record today how indebted I am to him for his guidance, care and support in that first year of university and transition. There were students in that tutorial with me who made me feel very uncomfortable and that I did not belong there. Certainly, I had not read the same things that they had read and I had not had the opportunities that they had had to experience the world. I was a girl from the western suburbs. I did not sound the same, I did not look the same and I did not have the same cultural capital that they had when they landed at the doors of Sydney university. But that tutor taught me the same way as he taught all of them. Bit by bit, I was able to become very successful at the university alongside those people.

Under what those opposite are trying to construct, if I were a scholarship student today and that was the only way I could get to university, I would be sitting in that tutorial with students who had paid for my tuition. Firstly, how can we be asking students to pay for the tuition of a fellow student when they are already under so much financial pressure? Secondly, what does it do to the learning dynamics in that room where there are second-rate students who are having their education and their scholarships funded by people who are sharing that class with them? If there was any truth in what these guys had to offer, if there was any truth at all in anything they say around policy, we could perhaps envision some adjusted system. But the reality is that this Commonwealth scholarship scheme that they have put into this legislation is one of the sneakiest and most deceptive elements of a piece of legislation that I have seen come through this place yet. People need to understand exactly what this government is trying to do by ripping apart student equity right down to the very level of the classroom.

One of the things that I wanted to say as we approach the close is that Labor is the party of education, we have always believed in it and we will fight for it every day. (Time expired)