The motion that has been put forward is an insult to our universities and to our university students. The claim that this Morrison government supported universities through the COVID pandemic is just nonsense. I actually don’t know how members opposite can keep a straight face through this level of hypocrisy. The Morrison government has gone out of its way to hurt universities and students at a time when they have needed support the most. There was no JobKeeper for universities, a decision that has forced job losses both last year and now. There was no support for international students, and of course this government has hiked up university fees for students.

This government is jeopardising the future of our universities and jeopardising the future of us all by failing to ensure that we will have the skilled and educated workforce we will need for the future. The Morrison government made a deliberate choice to leave university workers off the JobKeeper support payment, and that had devastating consequences. My community’s local university, La Trobe University, was forced to ask staff for expressions of interest for voluntary redundancies and pre-retirement contract programs. According to La Trobe, access to the JobKeeper scheme would have provided them with $50 million to mitigate the impact of the COVID crisis. But this government deliberately moved the goalposts for eligibility to JobKeeper, deliberately excluding universities from support. Instead of saving jobs, too many staff at La Trobe University, too many people in my community, have been made redundant.

These job losses continue to have a significant impact across our community. La Trobe is a significant employer across the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and these are jobs that have not come back and are not coming back, because this government is not providing the support that is needed. Last year La Trobe experienced a revenue downturn of $90 million. That’s a 10 per cent reduction compared to their pre-COVID forecast. Their final end-of-year operating result was a deficit of $51½ million. In order to break even this year, La Trobe needs to find the financial equivalent of around 250 to 300 jobs, and this is after the two voluntary redundancy rounds they already held last year. This is more jobs to go in my community, and this government has the gall to stand up here to say it supported the higher education system through this pandemic? These job losses are hurting our community, they are hurting our universities and they are hurting all of our futures.

This government is, of course, responsible for trashing one of our largest exports: higher education. Rather than supporting international students through the pandemic, the message from the Morrison government was ‘go home’. The international students who did decide to stay in Australia lost their jobs. They went without meals. Many of them were living in poverty, relying on the goodwill of restaurants that gave them handouts and charities who could help with free meals and accommodation. The people who did decide to return home overseas will likely not return to Australia to complete their education.

In January last year 30,000 international students arrived at Melbourne Airport for the academic year on Victorian campuses. This January there were 70. And this government has no plans for quarantine and has a broken vaccine rollout, so there is no timetable for bringing international students back, no timetable for our universities to know how they look at their future, how they budget for a future and how they get back into this market where they have been incredibly successful.

Of course, it’s not just universities that the government’s been trashing; it’s students and their futures. The government’s job-ready graduates bill passed in a dodgy deal done with the Centre Alliance and One Nation senators—a deal that’s forcing young people who are already coping with the pandemic and recession to pay more for their education. This government decided to make it harder and more expensive for young people to go to university. Young people who want to study the humanities or commerce and communications now pay more for their degree than doctors and dentists. The fees for people studying humanities have more than doubled, jumping from $27,216 to $58,000 for a four-year degree. What a ridiculous level of debt to be saddling young people with. I, like many people in this room, have a humanities degree. It has stood me in good stead. But I certainly would not have been able to cope with being saddled with that level of debt coming out of university.

You can’t trust this government when it comes to our universities. They fail to support them. They have forced job losses. They have made attendance expensive and unattainable for too many young people. This government should be ashamed.

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