Senator RYAN (Victoria—Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) (17:28): Amongst all the bluster and all the noise we have just heard from Senator Carr, there is one fact that we did not hear: that these are Labor’s own measures. On three occasions in three documents last year, the Labor Party proposed these very changes. All the fiction, the confected reasons and outrage by Senator Carr cannot hide this fact.
These cuts were announced by Labor in April 2013. They were confirmed by Labor in the last budget they presented in May 2013 and they remained in Labor’s documents in the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook that was taken to the election campaign. Despite all of Senator Carr’s mock outrage, these are the proposals that Labor took.
All we are trying to do is to bring the budget back to a sustainable position and, in this case, the Labor Party is stopping us from implementing their own measures. The problem we have is that, as Senator Carr has said in this place on a number of occasions, it wasn’t when he was minister. To be fair, that is because we all lost track of the concertina business cards and the constant replacement of departmental letterheads, because the previous government was so chaotic. In my old portfolio they went through half-a-dozen small business ministers in four years, and I lost track of how many in higher education, science, research and school education.
The other words we do not hear from the Labor Party when they talk about alleged savings being directed in certain ways to future years—not in the budget estimates for school funding, even though these cuts were in the budget estimates—is a commitment that they will put the money back. This is all empty rhetoric from the Labor Party. It is all empty rhetoric now they are in opposition. It is all empty rhetoric from Senator Carr who is disregarded by his own colleagues whenever they sit on this side of the chamber. Whether it is about the car industry, the Green Car Innovation Fund being stripped, the uncertainty that even the then Managing Director of Holden Mike Devereux referred to under the previous Labor government or whether it is these changes, all we hear from Senator Carr is mock outrage when he is not in a position to actually change the circumstances.
In the confected outrage of his 20-minute address, I heard Senator Carr refer to the great expansion of university access. The truth is the greatest expansion of university access this country came when Robert Menzies expanded the university system. the single greatest expansion of universities from an elite group in our society was through Commonwealth scholarships and a dramatic increase in the number of universities. This side stands proudly by its record in higher education. The problem with Senator Carr is that he mistakes the NTEU position for something in favour of universities. He talks about how important universities are. He talks about how they can be important to creative thought and innovative thought. He talks about their importance as public institutions, being places to nurture our best and our brightest, giving an opportunity for all. Yet the one thing Senator Carr and the Labor Party will not do is set the universities free, because they still must be run, in that famous phrase, by ‘Moscow on the Molonglo’. They still must be regulated in a way that no other sector of this economy is. They must all have bureaucrats overseeing each and everything they do, because they cannot be trusted. Senator Carr’s position is entirely and utterly incoherent and inconsistent. I turn to a number of other points he raised.
Senator Birmingham: He is inconsistent.
Senator RYAN : Senator Birmingham, thank you very much. I have lost my train of thought. Senator Carr also referred to the allegation that somehow saving money over the four years of the forward estimates of the budget was going to magically fund Labor’s mythical Gonski reforms that were never accounted for. If that was the case, Labor would not have stripped out $1.2 billion from the first four years of those reforms in the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook. According to the previous Labor government, the students of Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory did not deserve to be funded on the same basis as other students. That was gutted by the Labor Party before the election. This government then had to find $1.2 billion to put back into schools education. That move alone demonstrates the hypocrisy and emptiness of what Senator Carr refers to and the fiction that Labor has tried to create that somehow these measures were going to be directed towards schools funding—they were not.
Senator Carr says that we have a myopic view—I do not know that was the word he used—that this is about spending, not about investment. That betrays Senator Carr’s factional home in the socialist left, because it is all spending. It must all be accounted for. There is no magical investment budget paper that says somehow we do not have to borrow that money or raise it through taxation. There are three ways to spend money. You get it from somewhere else within government, you increase taxes or you increase borrowings. Increasing borrowings is just deferring an increase in taxation. But Senator Carr tries to create this mythical separation between spending and investment, as if by somehow rebadging it with an NTEU bumper sticker it does not actually have to come out of the taxpayers’ coffers—it all does.
Given Senator Carr brought it up, I cannot resist mentioning the issue of student unionism. Senator Carr referred to how proud he was that the Labor Party and their Green allies had brought back in compulsory student unionism through the student services and amenities fee. I imagine that now in this ski season, and it is a good one I understand, Senator Carr is proud of those students working part-time jobs so that those select few can get into Melbourne University’s and Monash University’s subsidised ski lodge at Mt Buller. Of course, the great majority of students cannot get anywhere near it. You will not see those students who are actually working their way through university, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, in the Range Rovers up at Mt Buller this time of year. I am sure Senator Carr is proud of the fact that those students working part-time jobs, pushing trolleys around supermarkets or waiting tables in Carlton’s Lygon Street or some other cafe near a university are subsidising the clubs’ and societies’ activities, the entertainment or indeed the legal services he referred to of the protestors who usually get themselves in trouble on the steps of the Victorian parliament.
Mr Deputy President, I think I was involved in an inquiry with you on this matter once quite a long time ago. That issue itself portrays Senator Carr’s lack of concern about equity. Consider the idea that there is this poll tax, explicitly unrelated to anything to do with your university education, that you pay regardless of your means that is used to subsidise the activities of those who do have leisure time at the expense of those who might have to work. It is used to build Taj Mahals like ski lodges and subsidise those on the basis that the great majority of students can never access them. I find this a profound challenge to any vision of equity in the university education system.
This measure is made necessary by the fiscal mess the previous government left us in. Senator Carr referred to a concocted or invented fiscal budget emergency. That betrays Senator Carr’s true perspective that there is no problem with government debt. The Greens and other groups run around supporting the Labor Party, saying there is no problem with public debt. They compare Australia to other OECD nations, but they do not compare actual government debt in Australia. They take a very narrow measure of government bonds on issue. They do not take into account unfunded superannuation liabilities that are not yet accounted for by the entirety of the Future Fund. They do not take into account debt that is held at state government and local government levels. The taxpayer is on the hook for all of that. Over the period of the previous coalition government, the strong fiscal position of the Commonwealth is what made sure Australia’s economy was resilient from the external shocks of the Asian financial crisis. It actually provided the capital that Senator Carr claimed credit for spending. The previous coalition government had money in the bank through the Future Fund, the Higher Education Endowment Fund and the Health and Hospitals Fund. Indeed, having a positive balance sheet allowed the Labor government to undertake the most wasteful stimulus program in Australian history.
Senator Carr cannot have it both ways. He cannot claim credit for spending the money that the previous government saved and then say it is not necessary to save money again. The fiscal situation inherited by this government is on a trajectory that is utterly unsustainable. As a country, we have a choice: we can make decisions now, when we are in a position to make them manageable; or we can push them off, as other countries have done, and then they will get much more difficult and much more intergenerationally unfair. The hypocrisy of the Labor Party in proposing this motion is betrayed by that and also by the fact that this was their measure. I will conclude on this point: this measure was announced by the Labor Party in April 2013, it was in the Labor Party’s last budget in May 2013 and it was in the Labor Party’s paperwork—the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook—before the last election. All this government is trying to do is put in place a saving that the Labor Party themselves took to the Australian people, to actually save the money that the Labor Party announced they were going to save. They refused to do that, and the hypocrisy is on display for all to see.