Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am just relating what has happened in the past; these are experiences that we had. I also found it interesting that a member of parliament would admit that virtually all members in this House are university educated, thereby acknowledging that the good old days, when the Labor Party genuinely represented blue-collar workers, are long gone. The corollary of Labor’s relentless drive for more and more young people to consider a university education as their right, no matter what their abilities were, is the implication that blue-collar workers were somehow failures because they were not good enough or chose not to attend university. That is a large part of the reason we are seeing a trade shortage in this country. Young people were brainwashed into thinking that they should all go on to university no matter whether it was suitable for their abilities or whether there was a need for those graduates. The universities were happy to go along with the sentiment because it meant more students and more funding.

If Labor really cared about universities, students and the standard of education, they would be more interested in quality rather than quantity. Members on this side have no hesitation in supporting extra funding for universities when it ensures a better quality of education—better libraries, better staff and better laboratories and other resources. Despite the member for Werriwa’s assertions, university sporting activity is not, as he puts it, essential for university life unless you are doing a sports related degree. Many students that are active in sports never join a university sporting club. That is their choice—and there is that word again: ‘choice’, which presents so many problems for Labor. Getting a Labor member to freely and willingly enunciate the word ‘choice’ in this context is as hard as getting the Fonz from Happy Days to say the word ‘wrong’. The member for Werriwa also said that food and beverage services were essential to university life. I would have thought that anyone with the slightest degree of business acumen having a captive clientele of the order quoted by the member in his speech, many of whom have time between lectures and tutorials to meet and have something to eat or drink, ought to be able to make a profit from a business selling food and drinks. He reaches the apogee of his argument with a startling claim that money creates diversity. It certainly did not create a diversity of opinion, because, as I have already said, in the heyday of forced funding for student organisations, all the political produce of student union magazines et cetera was of the Left, if not the extreme Left.

However, if the government genuinely believes in supporting these services—counselling, employment et cetera—let them specify funding for these purposes as the Howard government did. That would prove the government is genuine in its intentions and not just interested in taxing students to fund left-wing activism. Sadly, I think anyone holding their breath waiting for that burst of honesty would expire long before it eventuated.

The member for Kingston goes even further with the essential services line of argument, stating that, at some regional and rural campuses, students have no alternative place to go for basic services such as health services. If that is truly the case, surely a competent and caring government would ensure the broader community, not just students, had all the services they needed.

In summary, this bill is all about using the mainly peripheral activities adjunct to the universities core raison d’etre as a backdoor way of re-establishing the slush funds to fund left-wing organisations. In doing this, Labor shows that it has no interest in ordinary students, many of whom struggle to meet the cost of educating themselves, especially in this economic climate. Labor claims this bill is to help students. It is funny how help from the Labor Party usually ends up costing everyone so much more money. That has been the track record of Labor over the past several decades. The only difference now is the amount of money Labor policies are costing taxpayers, or, in this case, students.

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