Daniel Hurst, political correspondent
theguardian.com, Tuesday 28 October 2014
Clive Palmer says his party believes in free education as the government struggles to secure numbers to deregulate university fees and increase student loan interest rates
University students in Sydney protest against the proposed reforms to higher education in the 2014 federal budget. Photograph: Nikki Short/AAP Image
Palmer United party (PUP) senators will vote against all the government’s higher education changes, Clive Palmer has said, indicating the Coalition is yet to secure the numbers to pass the legislation.
The Senate is due to begin debating the bill to deregulate university fees, increase student loan interest rates and reduce government subsidies after the publication of a committee inquiry report on Tuesday.
The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said he was launching an advertising campaign against “the Americanisation of our universities” and vowed to ensure the government’s proposal was a major issue at the next election, due in 2016.
Labor and the Greens are firmly opposed to the package, so the government must secure support from six out of eight crossbench senators. The legislation cannot pass if the three PUP senators vote against it, as they have previously indicated they would do.
In an interview on Tuesday, Palmer confirmed the PUP senators would vote against all the changes, and said he was confident the aligned Australian Motoring Enthusiast party senator Ricky Muir would also oppose the package.
Palmer said he had been persuaded by the video that emerged of the treasurer, Joe Hockey, as a student leader in 1987 campaigning for free education. “He’s won me over, so we’ll have to vote against it,” Palmer told the ABC.
He said Australia had low government debt levels by international standards and should invest in its people. He said the government was “just scaring the poor academics” by threatening to cut grant funding.
“A free education’s very important. When you graduate at 22 or 23, you don’t want to graduate with a $100,000 or $200,000 debt, or you’ll become an accountant or something very mundane,” Palmer said.
“You want these sorts of people to take risks, so you get the Googles, the Apples, the Yahoos. They’re not going to take risks if they’ve got $200,000 in debt already and they’ve got a woman that loves them wanting to have children. We become a society with no ideas at all. We need the best and the brightest people to go to university to lead the nation in the future.”
Asked if the education minister, Christopher Pyne, had offered him any compromise, Palmer said: “Well, free means free … that’s what our party policy is, we should have it. We believe that Christopher Pyne’s had the benefit of free education policy otherwise he wouldn’t be where he is now.”
On Monday Pyne attempted to persuade Palmer to support university fee deregulation by arguing that an associated scholarship scheme would ensure thousands of disadvantaged students gained a “free education”.
But Palmer appeared to dismiss the argument. “This extra money will allow [university leaders] to increase their salaries and employ more academics on tenure – that’s what it’s all about,” he said.
Shorten urged Palmer not to be swayed by a “few more morsels of scholarships” linked to higher fees.
He said the government’s plan to deregulate fees would create a “two-tiered Americanised system” in which many students would not be able to afford a tertiary education.
In an address to Labor MPs and senators at a caucus meeting on Tuesday, Shorten reflected on the late Gough Whitlam’s 1970s reforms that gave many Australians – including “many forgetful ministers of the Abbott government” – a free education.
“We will fight the Americanisation of our universities,” Shorten said.
“We will fight the creation of a two-class standard for educational opportunity in this country. We will fight the Liberals’ debt sentence and we will prevail.”
Labor’s higher education spokesman, Kim Carr, said the university bill was “rotten to the core”, violated “the fundamental principles of the Australian fair go”, and was not put to voters at the election last year.
The Greens senator Lee Rhiannon said the bill was “poison to higher education in Australia and should be scrapped when it hits the Senate this week”.
Hockey played down the government’s difficulties in getting the higher education changes and the proposed Medicare co-payment through the Senate.
“Just be patient,” Hockey told the ABC.
“We are working constructively with constructive parties in the Senate. I hope that over the days ahead people will be more sensible, more mature and certainly calmer and instead of putting their political interest first they’ll put the nation’s interest first.”
Pyne has previously signalled his willingness to compromise on aspects of the legislation, such as the proposed increase to student loan interest rates.
