Mr KEENAN (8:00 PM) —It is a great pleasure for me to rise in support of the Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union Fees) Bill 2005. It is longstanding coalition policy, and I will be very pleased when it finally passes though parliament.

 Since the resumption of this debate, I have been reminded by colleagues that similar legislation aimed at ensuring that freedom of association principles apply to all Australian students has, in fact, been introduced in every parliamentary term since the first coalition victory in 1996. It is about time this legislation was passed by the parliament so that Australian students, including those living in the electorate of Stirling, are able to choose how to spend their money and the organisations they want to be members of.

This bill will amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to prohibit all higher education providers, both public and private, from requiring a person to become a member of a student association, such as a union or guild. It will also prohibit all higher education providers from requiring that students pay fees for non-academic student services.

As a Western Australian and former university student, the debate about voluntary student unionism is one that I have followed closely. As a student, I was forced to pay guild fees, regardless of whether or not I utilised the services on offer. It is a situation that all Australian students currently face. As somebody who believes that in our democracy nobody should be forced to join an organisation, I am passionately opposed to compulsory student unionism. I will always defend the right to free association and freedom of choice, just as I will the right to freedom of speech.

I have been amazed by some of the comments that have been made in this place prior to this debate being resumed tonight. The Labor Party have spent a lot of time lately talking about freedom of association, yet they plainly want to deny Australian students this basic right. The arguments that have been put by some on the other side of the House have, in some cases, been plainly ridiculous. Members opposite have stood in this chamber time after time and tried to make out that this is some sort of ideological debate designed to crush student guilds and the student union movement. But nothing could be further from the truth. This bill is about choice and giving university students the freedom to exercise that basic democratic right.

In the arguments put, those on the other side of the House have claimed some extraordinary things. They have tried to claim that this bill will do everything from jeopardising Australia’s proud sporting identity to suppressing freedom of speech, even to undermining the values of Australian mateship. Listening to those on the other side, I am reminded of one of the sad realities of modern day politics, which is that those on the Left no longer value freedom and are always ready to use coercion to get what they want. It is part of an intellectual snobbery that people on the left of politics always believe they know what is best for other people. They think that, if we allow people to exercise their own free will, it will result in terrible things, which the smarter people in the Australian Labor Party know are not good for them.

Listening to previous opposition speakers, you would think that this bill abolished student unions—you would think that the government were pursuing a vendetta against their ideological opponents to wipe these organisations from the face of university campuses. That is simply not the case. All we are doing is providing students with the freedom to choose whether or not they wish to join these organisations.

The higher education support amendment is about the right of students to choose whether or not they will pay for a service or product that they do or do not require. It is about the right of people to complete their education and receive their results without being forced to join a particular organisation or pay for a service that they do not want or need. It is about the right of students to spend their money on textbooks or sporting activities that they enjoy, not on those that they do not, and the right of students to support a political party that they believe in instead of the one that the student association likes most.

The National Union of Students, an organisation that receives $5 per full-time student from every affiliated organisation, spent almost a quarter of a million dollars at the last election campaign playing politics. Considering where this money ended up, it is no wonder that the Australian Labor Party want to defend the privileged status of these organisations on Australian campuses. I have no doubt that much of the membership of the organisations from which the money had been compulsorily acquired would have preferred to have seen the money spent on services.

I cannot think of any other area of life where people are forced to join a specific organisation, and I cannot think of any rational argument about why Australian students should be exempted from these fundamental rights. In all the political posturing and scaremongering that we have seen about this bill, I am yet to find one person who has answered either of these questions satisfactorily. Instead, the ALP have argued in this place that we must have compulsory student unionism because if we do not student unions will collapse.

It is a telling argument that speaks volumes about the Labor Party’s belief that no-one would want to be part of a student guild or union unless they are forced to be. Can there be any clearer indication that even the opposition know that students do not value the frolics of their current unions in their present state? And why should they? Woeful unions around the country waste the forcefully acquired money they get on such things as stickers that urge students to bomb the White House, which was done in appalling taste after the attacks of September 11. As I detailed earlier, they have also used other people’s money to campaign for a Labor victory during last year’s election.

As we are resuming this debate—and it has been some time since this matter was last debated in this place—I would like to remind those present about some of the other contributions that have been made, because I think that they bear repeating. The member for Boothby pointed out in his speech that last year, during the six-week period of the federal election campaign, the National Union of Students spent over $75,000 on broadcasting electoral advertisements, over $40,000 publishing such electoral advertisements, nearly $50,000 on producing campaign material like how-to-vote cards, posters and pamphlets, and almost $90,000 on direct mailing. That is over a quarter of a million dollars of students’ money being used to campaign during the last federal election. To emphasise the point about which party this advertising favoured, the mailing address on the NUS return mail to the Australian Electoral Commission is ‘care of Trades Hall, Victoria’.

This would be quite a different proposition if the funding to student unions had been given voluntarily by people who shared the political views of the NUS. But that is not the case. We need to be reminded that this money was compulsorily acquired. Given that, I am not surprised that the ALP wants to defend its mates. I would venture to say that much of the money spent funding this electioneering previously belonged to students who would rather have seen that money spent on services on campus.

Claims from the other side of this House that allowing students to choose what services they use at the university or whether to join a student union or association will destroy sport in this great nation are equally ludicrous. Ensuring that someone who does not play sport does not have to pay for the upkeep of university soccer ovals and squash courts will not reduce participation when the student was never involved to start with.

It may come as a surprise to some members of this House that voluntary student unionism does not spell the end of student unionism and student guilds. We only need to look at the experience of Western Australian universities when the Court government introduced voluntary student unionism in 1995 to see that democracy and student representative bodies can actually coexist.

Between 1995 and 2002, student unionism was voluntary at Western Australian universities. The practice of voluntary student unionism in WA did not decimate sport in Western Australian universities. It did not silence student guilds and indeed it did not remove or damage the concept of Australian mateship. What it did do—and I think this is very important—was force the various student organisations and bodies to focus on providing services that were of value to students. Funnily enough, I always assumed that this was what a representative organisation was supposed to do—provide services that were valued by its members.

In 1998 a study was commissioned to report on voluntary student unionism in Western Australia. The review studied the impact of voluntary student unionism on Western Australian universities. A quick flick through the pages of the report shows that, rather than services reducing during this period, they actually improved. The report concludes:

It goes on to say:

In short, when VSU was implemented, student guilds and associations in Western Australia became better and more responsive organisations. They provided services that responded to their members’ needs. And all this happened despite a smaller membership base and less income.

Far from demonstrating the need for compulsory student unionism, the Western Australian experience demonstrates the very reason that we need to have voluntary student unionism Australia wide. We need to do it not only to ensure that students enjoy the same freedom of association as all others in our community but to ensure that student organisations are accountable and responsive to their members.

It is unfortunate that this promising start to voluntary student unionism in Western Australia was summarily dismantled when the current Gallop Labor administration was elected. Labor has turned the clock back in WA and made students pay compulsory up-front fees unrelated to academic study for purely ideological reasons. It was a costly and retrograde decision for university students.

The decision to reinstate compulsory up-front fees was made despite overwhelming evidence that the voluntary system was working. As a result, students in my electorate of Stirling—and those in your electorate of Swan, Mr Deputy Speaker Wilkie—are now forced to spend their hard-earned cash on amenities fees that fund services that they do not use, that they have no intention of using and that they will not use in the future—essentially to fund services that they simply do not want.

Some of the services that they do not want have already been mentioned by the member for Indi. I want to repeat some of them here, simply because of their outrageousness. In the year ending December 2004, Monash University collected over $8½ million of compulsorily acquired fees. These fees supposedly went to essential services, but, extraordinarily, 56 per cent of the money was spent on administration. At the University of Melbourne, things were even worse. An extraordinary 72 per cent of compulsorily acquired money went into administrative costs.

I am more than happy for any Australian to pursue issues that they believe are of concern to them. But when you see that this compulsorily acquired money has been used for political campaigning that does not necessarily reflect the views of all students, you realise that this is not part of our democracy. I am perfectly happy for people, including students, to campaign, but for goodness sake do it with your own money and not somebody else’s.

As I have stated before, this bill is not about ideology or petty politics, as the Labor Party would have us believe. It is not about preventing students from expressing their views. It is not about stopping student protests. It is not about destroying student activism. This debate is about a fundamental and most basic right that every member of our democratic society should expect to have and to enjoy. Education is one of the important protectors of democracy, but the fact that almost every Australian student at university is currently being forced to pay between $100 and $600 in up-front student union fees in order to get their education defies reason. It is not a proud symbol of our democratic country.

This debate is about the fact that everyone in our community has the right to make their own choices, based on their own personal circumstances and their own individual needs. This bill will do some very important things. Firstly, it will ensure that students are no longer forced to belong to any form of student association. Secondly, it will ensure students are not forced to pay for services they do not value or utilise. Finally, it will ensure that universities cannot penalise, either through expulsion or by withholding results, any student who chooses not to pay up-front student union or service fees. This gives students the same rights that everyone else in our community enjoys. This bill will allow students to actually get some accountability from their union. They will be able to pay for the services that they value and to pass judgment on the services that they do not value. Do Australian students really need to be treated as second-class citizens and denied fundamental freedoms?

I have listened closely to the debate on this bill and it has exposed some of the more unpalatable beliefs held by some members of this House. The belief that any Australian citizen should be forced to join a particular organisation should be abhorrent to anybody who values freedom. Yet speaker after speaker has risen to defend this untenable position and accused the government of trying to abolish student unions as part of some wider ideological crusade. Well, I have some news for those members: voluntary organisations can exist, based on people’s desire to join and fund them. Tens of thousands of these organisations exist across Australia, including chambers of commerce, art clubs, Rotary clubs and Lions clubs. Even political parties manage to exist on the basis of people’s voluntary preference to join them. All of these organisations manage to exist and to contribute to our community, without forcing people to join them against their will. In fact, under this bill, students can pay for services that they value and, as I said, pass judgment on the services that they do not value. I would like to challenge any member speaking after me to come into this House and provide us with an example of any other organisation within Australia where people are actually forced to join.

We have heard a lot of talk about how we oppose free speech because we do not believe that students should be forced to subsidise particular organisations. I hate to break it to you, but that is not free speech. So do not come in to talk against this bill and cite freedom as your fundamental reason for not supporting it. That is just an insult, because what this bill is about is freedom and a fundamental freedom of association.

One of the other larger problems to do with the up-front fees that are forcefully acquired from students around Australia is that they take absolutely no account of a student’s ability to pay. The fees force students to pay, regardless of how difficult that might be at any given time. I am surprised that the Labor Party believe that students are not to be trusted with basic rights of freedom of choice, and I am really astonished by the energetic opposition that has been shown to this bill. Nobody who genuinely believes in freedom and fairness could realistically oppose these measures to allow students to associate or not to associate with the student union on their campus. I congratulate the Minister for Education, Science and Training for bringing this legislation before the parliament and I, along with tens of thousands of Australian students, will welcome its passage.