Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the government's Higher Education Support Amendment (Job-Ready Graduates and Supporting Regional and Remote Students) Bill 2020, which is, sadly, the latest in a long line of attacks on the university sector from this government. This is a bill that would hike fees and push students into decades of debt right at a time when youth unemployment is at record highs. It will hurt women and First Nations students the most. It will slash billions in funding from teaching, leading to bigger classes, fewer teachers and worse-quality education, including for rural and regional students. It will force universities to do more with far less. It will shift the overall costs of education away from the Commonwealth and onto students' shoulders, it will fail to encourage students to do STEM courses and, of course, it will fail to save a single university worker's job from the COVID crisis—workers who are excluded from the JobKeeper support package, despite multiple occasions where the government could have fixed that.

So here we are again: the government is ripping money out of the tertiary education sector, yet at the same time it's got the audacity to be relying on that same sector to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. It's saying to universities: 'You're going to have to do more with less. Students are going to have to pay more. We're not going to support you to keep your staff on the book. You can just fire thousands of people because we're not giving you enough funding. Oh, but you need to save us from COVID-19 and you need to be the first; you need to get ahead so Australia can do that.' What an absolute farce once again from this anti-intellectual government that sees everything as potential profit making and as the potential to privatise and flog off to the private sector.

With successive cuts to university funding by this government for decades, we have seen universities forced to become more and more corporatised. Thanks to the cuts by this government to university funding, unis have had to go cap in hand to industry, do more research for sale and more research for industry, become more and more like a business and more and more corporatised, with less focus on public interest research and less focus on the interests and the outcomes of students. And this government is continuing that trend. It's excluded universities from JobKeeper, leading to tens of thousands of people in that sector losing their job. It's expecting unis to do more with less. They've already faced so many cuts and now they have to teach even more students with even less money. This government is cost-shifting shamelessly onto students.

I genuinely don't understand why in a recession with record-high youth unemployment you would discourage young people from skilling up, from getting further tertiary education. I just don't understand why the government thinks that that is a bad investment when we all know that education is a boon for us all. It is not only good for the individual but it is good for our prosperity as a society and a community. Naturally, this government wants to defund the sector. They don't value education, they certainly don't value tertiary education and they're ready to continue to see it flogged off and corporatised, while they give yet more subsidies of public dollars to the fossil fuel donors that they are so cosy with.

Well, we here at the Greens think that education should be free. The Prime Minister got his university degree for free. I think there are 15 others in the government ranks that also benefited from free education. We all benefit from free education. That is the point. Education is a universal public good. It should be free, yet these old white guys that got free education when they were at uni now want students to pay even more for a worse-quality education. They are squeezing universities and bleeding them dry. Wrong way. Go back.

We'll be moving a second reading amendment which calls for decent support for universities: for universities and their research programs to be fully funded, for the employees of universities to be properly supported and covered by JobKeeper and for university—and TAFE for that matter—to be free. It is just tragic to watch the progression of increasing fees and increasing corporatisation of the higher education sector. This government has a chance, as always, to rectify that, but it's just doubling down. So I don't have a lot of hope that we'll get much support, in all honesty, when we move that second reading amendment that says higher education should be free. Nonetheless, we will move it, because I believe that the majority of Australians see education as a good thing that should be supported by governments because it's an investment in people and in the prosperity of our shared future. I look forward to seeing where the numbers will fall in that regard.

I want to talk briefly about the impacts on women, because this government's not really known for prioritising women. It hasn't really met many women; it certainly doesn't have many women in cabinet, with a handful of exceptions—