Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Recently we have seen this government execute some pretty impressive backflips. We saw the Prime Minister's paid parental leave disappear. We saw the backflip on the GP tax. We saw the backflip, last week, on the automotive transformation scheme. All of these backflips are designed to keep the Prime Minister in his job.

But this week the award for the most impressive backflip goes to the education minister the member for Sturt, Mr Christopher Pyne. His backflip yesterday would have impressed even the most agile of gymnasts. After claiming on Sunday that the jobs of 1,700 scientists and researchers were inextricably linked to the passage of the higher education legislation, the minister then went and executed a perfect 10 when he made a humiliating retreat from that claim yesterday afternoon. Suddenly, what was inextricably linked to his higher education reforms was now no longer on the table. But no matter how many backflips, hoops or hurdles the minister tries to tackle in his attempt to pass the bill, the fact is that deregulation of Australian universities and the cutting of funding to Australian universities is a very, very bad plan. It is bad for students, it is bad for taxpayers and it is bad for the future of Australia.

The education minister this morning said that he will never ever give up. He will never give up on his plans to introduce $100,000 fees for university degrees for students. When will the members of the coalition opposite realise that these education reforms are not accepted by the people of Australia? And when will they realise that the Australian people are absolutely sick and tired of all the backflips by this government and all the game-playing with such an important piece of Australian policy as our higher education policy.

Minister Pyne's humiliating back down on his threat to take $150 million from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy unless this place passed their higher education deregulation legislation was, for a minister of education, incredibly juvenile and incredibly irresponsible. It was indicative of a minister who is completely out of his depth. And it did not work. The crossbenchers who he was trying to appeal to saw right through it, as did the Australian people.

Then there were the nervous nellies in his own coalition party room, who knew that if he persisted with this ridiculous threat that their jobs would also be at threat at the next election. Presumably, they or the Prime Minister told Mr Pyne to back down. Mr Pyne then went on SkyNews in one of the most embarrassing but, I have to say, entertaining interviews I have every seen. There he was wearing his best Stepford-wife smile and trying to explain the government's backflip on national television. But he quickly became, of course, the laughing stock of the nation. He claimed he was a fixer and that, in dividing the legislation, he had dealt with the issue. But of course what would not divulge in that interview, and has still not divulged, is how. How will the minister fund NCRIS? Where is the $150 million going to come from? Where will the funding for Australia's 27 research facilities come from? According to Mr Pyne, the Minister for Education, in this interview: it is a surprise. It is a surprise, and we will just have to wait and see.

Australia does not need surprises. The university sector does not need surprises. What they need is certainty and a higher education system that is well funded. What the people of Australia need is a higher education system that guarantees affordable, accessible and quality education for all those Australians—particularly our young people who want to go to university and who we need to go to university—who do not need to exit the university system with degrees that have left them with a debt of $100,000 or more.

The answers given in question time today to the questions asked by the opposition gave us no guarantees at all that— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.