Senator LEES (2:58 PM) —My question is to Senator Alston, the Minister representing the Minister for Education, Science and Training. Minister, given that voluntary student unionism introduced in Western Australia in 1995 led to a drop in membership down to just 30 per cent of students and that many services then closed down completely, and given that all universities across Western Australia have recognised the complete failure of this move and have now reintroduced compulsory fees in order to restore important services such as career counselling, provision of legal services, child care and a raft of sporting facilities, how does this government intend to fund all these services nationally if membership of student unions and the paying of fees is made optional?

Senator ALSTON (Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) —The basic proposition is that if people value a service they will pay for it. They do not need to be forced to hand over the money. There was a story in the Age this morning about the president of the Melbourne University Students Union and his deputy heading off overseas on a trip from funds accumulated by these sorts of schemes. If you compel students to pay money into a fund over which a small group has control, you get nothing like the quality outcomes that you get if people actually value the service and are prepared to pay for it. If membership declined, that tells you they were not getting value for money, and if they were not prepared to make voluntary contributions for the service then presumably they did not think it was good enough value.

Students should have the right to unhindered freedom of association and to choose the goods and services they want and the causes and organisations they support. Qualified individuals should be able to access higher education in publicly funded institutions without up-front fees. Australian students currently pay between $100 and $559 a year as a condition of enrolment. So it is a fairly simple proposition: if you are offering something that people want, they will pay for it; if you are not, they won't. I do not understand why you somehow think that you have got to—

Senator ALSTON —I know it is a condition of applying for preselection for the Labor Party that you have to pay your membership fee to a trade union. That is slightly different, because you could never compete on the open market and, understandably, it becomes quite a good value proposition. Coughing up a couple of hundred bucks a year for a lifetime ticket to do nothing—to sit over there and criticise governments without drawing up your own policies—is a very good deal indeed, and I can well understand that that represents value for money for those who could not get a job in the real world. For students who do have a number of choices to make, I would have thought it was only sensible that they should be allowed to decide what they want and how much they are prepared to pay for it.

Senator LEES —Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. Is the minister basically saying that only students who are wealthy, who have the ability to pay—indeed pay, I would imagine, quite a bit of money for some of these services that are provided—have a right to them? Is the minister's real problem here, and the government's real problem, the word `union'? If we renamed the organisations to read student `association' and perhaps took a leaf out of the book of some 16 universities that already allow an exemption from the membership of a union but do insist that the fees are paid so that all students are contributing to services, would that find some acceptability from the government?

Senator ALSTON (Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) —No, it is not as simple as that. It is not a question of unionism. We do not mind voluntary unionism, but compulsory unionism is a very different proposition.

Senator Forshaw —What about the bar association or the law society?

Senator ALSTON —The ACCC is quite rightly looking at injecting greater competition into a number of professional associations. They are not afraid of withstanding competition and nor should you be. But we know that that is your ideological commitment. I want to assure Senator Lees that this has nothing to do with unionism; it has everything to do with whether people are prepared to pay for the service they get and whether it represents value for money. You cannot just run off and say that you imagine that fees are too high. If the service they are being asked to pay for is too expensive, then it ought to be reduced and the students understand that they will get lesser services as a result. But you cannot have someone determining what fee is paid and how that money is spent without the students having a meaningful input. (Time expired)

Senator Hill —Mr President, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.