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

I rise to speak briefly on this matter of public urgency about the debt crisis that we are condemning students to. I move to do so because I heard a contribution from the leader of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party that made assertions that education isn't valued unless you pay for it, amidst some other word salad that I won't try to summarise. I was then shocked to hear Senator Payman assert that the Greens were making up this crisis because it suited a political agenda. I was genuinely floored by that assertion, because I would have thought anybody under the age of 30 knows that we are in a genuine cost-of-living crisis and students are at the very front of that. They've just had the indexation increased by seven per cent on debts that were already crippling. They can't afford housing. The rent's gone up by over 20 per cent nationally and 22 per cent in my home state of Queensland's capital city of Brisbane. They are already juggling multiple jobs, generally being ripped off by their wages being stolen by their employers. The minimum wage is already paltry, and we're having a debate now about how a slight increase in that might somehow be problematic on a day when we learn that CEO pay has increased by 15 per cent. This is just farcical. What is it going to take for the people in this place to actually get out there into the community and understand what's going on with students and with the cost of living more broadly. I am flabbergasted that rather than saying, 'Yes, we acknowledge there's a problem, but, oh, we're too poor to fix it,' like they normally say, they're not even acknowledging the problem. This is a new low.

We are standing here today, asserting that students have a right to an education. It should be free. Student debt should be wiped. It certainly shouldn't be increasing year upon year at rates that are astronomical. We've heard so many stories of people saying the amount I was able to pay back on my debt has just been eclipsed by the amount that it was just indexed. People are paying, and they are going backwards. Their debt is increasing. And this is for a public good, something that actually benefits the country. Education should be free at all levels, right from the very start, right to the very end.

The audacity of people in this chamber contributing to this debate, saying that this is not actually a real problem out there, really says more about the lack of engagement by the other political parties with actual human beings who genuinely would like for their cost-of living emergency to be tackled. But, instead, we get tax cuts for the rich, we get nuclear submarines, we get fossil fuel subsidies and we get negative gearing and capital gains tax perks. What a joke!