Delahunty Catherine: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Delahunty Catherine: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:9090. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to take a call on behalf of the Green Party and also to confess as that seems to be what the House is doing that I did not have a student loan. I went to Victoria University and it cost $100 a year. We did not value our education any less because we were not indebted; we really appreciated the opportunity to see a country where the Government invested in the student. We went to university and took it seriously and got a lot out of it. 
 Then we had the opportunity—my privileged generation had the opportunity—to buy homes and to have children without worrying about whether we could afford it and to value our education without the perverse incentives that are now built into the student loan scheme and that are effected by this Student Loan Scheme Amendment Bill (No 2). My word of the week is “omnishambolic” and it actually describes the student loan scheme which has now become so omnishambolic that many many people cannot understand it let alone interact with it honestly and fairly. Although this bill as others have said changes a couple of things that are not necessarily objectionable we will not be supporting it because yet again it fails. It fails to deal with the substantive issues that make the student loan scheme such a mess and such an albatross around the neck of the next generation from me who were not lucky enough to be born in a time when we got basically a free education. 
So the tinkering the contradictions and the inconsistencies will continue. There will be more bills like this before the House because this omnishambolic mess is going to continue to need changes made as the tax system changes as people’s Working for Families and other mechanisms change and because the Government does keep changing the goalposts on student loans including increasing the amount of repayments. One of the reasons we have a problem with aspects of the redefinition of “income” is that for Working for Families the increase of repayment rate does not take into account the increase of rate from 10 percent to 12 percent of income so Working for Families people are being penalised. As we all know for those who get Working for Families it is hard enough to live without any more additional debt and complication. So the real solution to the incapacity confusion and inequity that affects the student loan scheme is not here. I believe this will be back before this House having to be modified again—there will be more student loan scheme amendments No. 2 and No. 3 as we continue to try to fix up the mess without dealing with what is in fact system failure. System failure is not addressed in this bill. 
The $12 billion albatross is around the neck of so many families—including my own for members of my family—and it gets heavier and heavier as the cost of living goes up. It gets harder and harder for people to say: “I can afford to have an education.” What was once something that everyone in this country thought they were entitled to is now something that they are entitled to only if they are prepared to live in debt. One of the really perverse incentives behind the student loan scheme is the normalising of debt. Call me old-fashioned but I grew up in a generation where you did not borrow and you did not live in debt. Now the Government says it is the right thing to do: “Indebt yourself at an early age. Get a credit card to pay for your food because we’re saying that you’re not worth investing in for a proper public education and that will be fine.” What that has done to a generation of younger people is to normalise debt. So living in debt having credit cards having to borrow a great deal and living in that false universe where you are never quite keeping up you do not really know what you have got maybe you cannot afford to take the next steps in your life and you are not really in control of your finances—that is now normal. 
When we were young we did not have credit cards but we usually knew what we had in our pockets. Now the Government says that being in debt is a good thing and you have got to pay it back otherwise you are reneging. There is no sense of a social contract between young people and the Government. That is why the Green Party is popular on campus. That is why people come and talk to us because they know that we appreciate that actually as a generation they have a right to exist without debt. Debt is actually something that you may take on in later life when you have got a job and may take on in later life when you are paying off a mortgage but when you are 18 to 22 you should not live in debt. So there are perverse incentives. On the one hand there is a philosophy that says there is no common good; on the other hand there is the perverse incentive of creating generational debt. So we cannot support this bill because it does nothing to fix that.