The Long March Back: Carrying the light of liberalism for the next generation
Friends, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you tonight.
Let me acknowledge your leadership
- ALSF President Cooper Bates;
- ALSF Council Convenor Chelsea Burgess Hannon,
- Federal and NSW Young Liberal President Cooper Gannon
and the other members of the executive and organisers of this event – thank you for what you do for Liberalism in this country.
Fellow Liberals
I also want to acknowledge my great friend Matt Cross the Member for Davidson. I have known him since he was a Liberal student, we have been part of each other’s political journey. His leadership on men’s health issues has been nation leading. He is like a dog with a bone going after government waste and it was great to see him elevated to shadow cabinet. His political success gives me great joy. He is making a fantastic contribution to the Liberal Party in NSW and will obviously be part of the election campaign and the next Liberal Government
It is good to be among the only student organisation in Australia where a group assignment means everybody actually does some work!
I have three messages I want to deliver tonight.
The first is about your history – your inheritance – and its importance today.
The second is about our campuses.
And the third is about the political fight to come.
Before I do that, though, let me start by saying something about my own background.
My background
I am a lifelong Liberal. I joined when I turned 16 and was old enough to join the party. I have campaigned in every election since 1992.
I have stood where you stand now.
I know the work of political campaigning.
When I was a 19-year-old uni student I decided to run for local council.
The clique which had dominated the council for 40 years – campaigned against me, claiming I was too young and too inexperienced.
So, I built my campaign team, put on my shoes and doorknocked every house in my ward twice – and went from being an unknown teenager to the youngest ever councillor elected in New South Wales.
I was not too young, nor too inexperienced.
I was a student – who believed in Liberal philosophies, Liberal ideals and the Liberal party.
I was a student – who was sick of a local government plagued by incompetence, debt, and bad management.
I was a student – who wanted to get out there and do something about it.
My friends, situations have a way of repeating themselves.
You are the next generation of Liberal thinkers and leaders who understand our values and our party.
You are not too young.
You are not too inexperienced.
And right now, we have a government in Canberra that is plagued by incompetence, debt and bad management.
This country needs you to build your campaign team put on your shoes and do something about it.
The History of the ALSF
Let me turn and say something about the Australian Liberal Students Federation.
This Federation was born in 1948, when students came together from Liberal university clubs across Australia.
They did not have social media reach.
They did not have professional campaign staff.
They did not have an algorithm to promote their content.
They had ideas, arguments and the willingness to organise.
Your founding character was a federation:
a place for debate about ideas
a place to learn and hone campaign skills
a place to put the factionalism of the Liberal Party aside and come together to challenge and beat the organised campus Left.
The ALSF has been essential for the Liberal Party, and it is essential for the country
The Liberal Party is for serious people.
The government of this country needs serious people.
Not social media charlatans.
Not the lazy or self-interested.
We need people with discipline.
We need people of character
We need people who can win the debate, think first of the public good and earn the privilege of leadership.
Those are the traditions and cultural legacy of the ALSF.
When John Howard came to office in 1996, having spent 13 years in Opposition, he addressed the Annual Federal Council Meeting and said this:
Over the years that we were in Opposition one of the things that characterised Liberal students was their willingness to engage in the battle of ideas on campuses around Australia. Theirs was not simply an attitude that saw politics as a transient preoccupation sometimes to be indulged in, but rather as it is, an ongoing battle of ideas, a battle for legitimacy, a battle for the ownership of your own interpretation of the history of this country and a battle to ensure that one’s political opponents did not through the authority of the office they then had write outwardly the history of this country…
He went on to say this:
But it is very important that as political warriors so to speak, on campuses of Australia, it is very important that all of you understand that winning back of ideas, that winning back of history is tremendously important. And over the years different politicians have used their own interpretations of the history of their country and indeed the history of the world, those who’ve established a particular view of political legitimacy. And it’s our responsibility to ensure that Australians of future generations have a comprehensive, factually based, objective view of the history of this country, not coloured unduly by one or other interpretation, but reflecting an emphatically positive view of what this country has achieved and particularly since the Federation in 1901.
My first message to you is simple.
Embrace the battle of ideas. Win back our history.
Do not get distracted by internal politics.
One of the great strengths of the ALSF is that most Liberal Clubs are not formally part of the Liberal Party. For the most part, membership of the ALSF does not confer rights to vote on preselections or internal party matters. This provides a tremendous independence for the organisation, leaves you time to work on ideas; on principles that will influence future Liberal governments and fighting the Left at its most extreme on our university campuses.
There are examples of where ALSF has been ahead of the greater Liberal Party in policy ideas. Its support for user pays education in the 1980’s came well before it was advocated by the senior party and certainly before the Hawke Government introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme in 1989.
In this tradition, let this organisation continue to be one of conviction and leadership.
Embrace the best of your traditions and let this be a place of debate but one that focuses outwards – on the public good and what is right for our country. On Australians, our society and our culture.
Embrace the battle of ideas. Win back our history.
We have a tremendous amount to be proud of in this country.
I want Australians into the future to learn about and feel that pride too. As Shadow Education Minister I want to see that happen in our classrooms and on our campuses too.
The Australian Liberal Students’ Federation has a unique capacity to make that happen.
Campuses
Let me turn now and say something about campuses in this country.
Because it is clear to me that we have a problem.
And that problem has grown in the last 4 years.
I think that in too many cases our universities have forgotten to put the student at the centre of all they do. Their mission, the reason they receive public funding is to educate students. At the same time universities should be accountable to students who are paying for a significant proportion of their education. In my view, universities are failing on both counts.
In too many areas the data shows that the situation on our campuses has deteriorated significantly since Labor came to office.
Take, for example, information held by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency or “TEQSA”. They have data about the number of complaints made to TEQSA directly by students or staff. They have provided it to the Senate in response to questions Liberal Senators have asked on notice.
In 2022, there were 237 complaints about universities that were made directly to TEQSA by staff or students.
By 2024 – the last year for which that data has been provided to the committee – that number had more than tripled to 942 complaints.
That looks bad.
And when you dive into it, it looks worse.
Between 2022 and 2024 complaints about the teaching and delivery of courses increased by 71%.
In 2022, if you look at complaints by students and staff about academic governance and corporate governance, there were 17 complaints.
By 2024, there were 258.
And the safety data is alarming.
In 2022, there were 16 complaints about gender-based violence and other wellbeing. By 2024, that number had climbed to 76.
And that does not include the 1,711 complaints made to the new National Student Ombudsman in its first 6 months.
Let’s turn to rankings.
Last month the Centre for World University Rankings published its latest league tables.
More than half of Australia’s universities slipped.
The President of the Centre for World University Rankings president Nadim Mahassen, said this:
Australian universities are struggling to deliver high-quality education, attract and retain talent, and produce quality research at scale.
This comes just a week after an opinion piece by academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who warned her own teenage stepdaughter to think twice about going to uni, saying this:
…right now kids are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have a terrible campus experience while being graded on who can write the best AI prompts.
Meanwhile, even the universities themselves are complaining. In a submission to a senate inquiry, Western Sydney University said that universities:
…face a thicket of both state and federal regulation. They operate under more than 300 pieces of legislation and regulation.
I have had Vice Chancellors in my office complaining that the situation is now so bad that they no longer think about how to innovate or improve their teaching or research – they’re instead focused on compliance.
Extraordinarily, TEQSA itself made a submission to an inquiry into university governance that listed 14 different regulators, governance or oversight bodies that universities answer to.
The answer to all of these warning signs about the state of the sector from this Labor government was not to listen.
It was not to focus on students.
It was not to reduce regulation.
It was not to make things better.
Instead, they established a 15th regulator. The Australian Tertiary Education Commission, which operates alongside, but distinct from:
- the Department of Education – which oversees general education policy;
- the Department of Home Affairs – which governs international student intakes;
- the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations – which has responsibility for Skills and the VET portfolio;
- the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency– which is the specific higher education regulator;
- the Australian Skills and Quality Authority – which regulates dual-sector providers and the remainder of the tertiary sector;
- the National Student Ombudsman;
- the Australian Research Council;
- the National Health and Medical Research Council;
- Jobs and Skills Australia;
- State and territory regulators and designated state authorities;
- Professional accreditation bodies; and
- all of the other bodies which exercise oversight, influence, control or otherwise shape the tertiary education environment.
If you want to see the best example of Labor’s out of control government spending and red tape, you can do no better than look to Labor’s $54 million ATEC – a bureaucracy that duplicates a bureaucracy – the ultimate Kafkaesque institution.
But it gets worse. It was the ATEC legislation that defined, in law, a so-called “national tertiary education objective”. That is to say – the objective of the education you are receiving right now.
If you can believe it, this is what it said:
The National Tertiary Education Objective is the objective for tertiary education in Australia to:
(a) promote a strong, equitable and resilient democracy; and
(b) drive national, economic and social development and environmental sustainability.
It is extraordinary.
You can’t make this stuff up
The words ‘teaching’, ‘learning’ and ‘research’ simply do not appear.
There is nothing in there about the quality of your institutions.
There is no consideration given to the way our tertiary system can align with or support our national interest.
There is no reference to student experience.
There is nothing about fostering dynamism, competition, innovation or efficiency.
In fact, there is nothing at all which sets out the things you would ordinarily expect in a statement setting expectations of an educational institution, or a critical sector of our economy.
It is not the objective written by a government that cares about you or your experience as individual students.
Instead, according to this Labor government, the objective of the tertiary education you are receiving right now is defined by social development and environmental sustainability.
This is not a government that cares about your experience on campus.
This is a government that is not listening.
This is a government that thinks about systems, about architecture, about institutions, about frameworks, about compacts, about regulatory bodies, about oversight and about providers – but forgets the student.
That is not the future I want for our higher education sector and it’s not the campus I want for you.
That’s why I talk about simple things that reflect your experiences on campus.
Like group assignments.
This is an issue that is raised with me again and again, all around the country.
I understand the need for employers to have graduates who can collaborate in the workplace.
And let me be clear – there’s nothing wrong with group work. Collaboration in study is fine, just like collaboration in the workplace.
What I am talking about is the experience where your mark, your performance, your readiness for the workforce is measured based on someone else’s output.
This is not a small thing.
It is your real-life experience as students.
There is always that student who does the work, and that student who reaps the benefit.
It diminishes the role of the individual.
Group assignments are the purest expression of modern university administration.
The institution reduces its marking load.
One student does the work.
Three students receive the mark.
And everybody is told they have developed their collaboration skills.
It cheapens your degree and removes your reward for your effort.
It is deeply unfair.
I want them gone.
I have said it before and I will reissue the call tonight: unless there are compelling reasons or exceptional circumstances, I am calling on every university in Australia to get rid of group assignments
Let me turn to another aspect of your experience as students.
That is the compulsory payment of fees to student representative bodies.
And let me say upfront: the ALSF has a stellar history on voluntary student unionism.
Before your successful advocacy on VSU, students were compelled to pay a tax – an upfront fee to join a student representative organisation which was and remains essentially a non-representative political body.
Student unions railed against liberal philosophies and ideas.
Student union money went to even more extreme bodies like the AUS and NUS, who in turn criticised the foreign policy of our country, our traditional alliances and advocated for radical Islamist terrorism.
The moral centre of the argument against compulsion should be very clear.
It should be a basic application of the principle of freedom of association.
A student should never be forced to finance their own denunciation.
No student should be told: “You must pay this organisation, and that organisation may then use your money to campaign against everything you believe.”
That is the position the ALSF took.
It was an idea that was mocked as fringe.
You kept it alive, motivated thousands of students to sign petitions against compulsion, initiated legal action in state tribunals and demonstrated that, properly managed, student unions could operate without compulsory subsidies. Eventually the issue moved from campus clubs into the parliamentary party at the state and federal level.
As patron of ALSF then Opposition Leader John Howard promised in December of 1988 to implement nationwide VSU laws. True to his word in Government he tried time and again to get his VSU Bill through Parliament, until he and then Education Minister Brendan Nelson were about to secure the numbers in the Senate in late 2005.
Of course, not everybody supported it. Labor opposed it as did backbencher Barnaby Joyce who crossed the floor to vote against it.
Voting to maintain compulsory student unionism he described VSU as:
“the detritus of a former political campaign that’s been carted like some apocryphal dead pet into the Parliament and then paraded round.”
He criticised what he called “a cabal of people” seeking a “political nirvana”.
As we know VSU was not the last thing Barnaby Joyce has been wrong about.
Subsequent Labor governments sought ways around it. It goes to show: victories are not permanent.
A new generation must be prepared to defend them. That is your job.
Let me talk about one of the ways governments have tried to find ways around it.
Every year, without fail, you are charged a compulsory Student Services and Amenities Fee – or SSAF – of almost $400.
We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars across Australia’s roughly 1.1 million domestic students.
This is money you are required to pay but which cannot be used for academic teaching.
It cannot be used for your education.
It funds non-academic student services, including sporting and recreational activities, welfare services, career advice, food services, and independent student representation.
Since 2024, under legislation passed by this government, the law has required that at least 40% of the SSAF go to student-led organisations.
Why?
In an age when fewer students are spending much time on campus how does this benefit older and graduate students who are rarely on campus?
How does it benefit the thousands of students who do their courses remotely and simply don’t go to campus but are forced to fund these bodies?
Why should students have paid almost $400 million for campus services over the Covid years when they weren’t even allowed on campus?
Why did Labor vote against Coalition amendments that would have removed the 40% requirement?
Why did Labor explicitly vote against laws that would prohibit these funds from being used for student elections, student protests or protest related activities?
It is your money. Are you happy with how it is being spent?
Let me then turn to the elephant in the room when it comes to student experience: the antisemitism on our campuses.
And I want to acknowledge what Jewish students have told me; that the only students who consistently stand with them are Liberal students.
At their best, universities are life-changing places where people get an education and improve their opportunities in life.
It’s the place where the next generation of leaders is formed.
That’s why it’s so important that antisemitism which has now taken hold is pushed back into the dark fringes.
What happens on campus today sets the tone for the Australia of tomorrow.
We have never seen it so bad.
Over the last few years we have seen encampments and protests where Jewish students have been targeted – blocked from buildings, harassed in tutorials, spat on, and taunted with Nazi symbols, blocked and challenged walking across quadrangles, made to feel unsafe in their own dorm rooms.
It is not just students – Jewish staff have also been intimidated and their workplaces defaced, occupied, blockaded, even urinated on.
The message many Jewish Australians have heard is simple: you are not welcome here.
It’s not just students and outside activists who have been propagating this stuff – it’s professors and PhDs.
The Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism found that antisemitism has become “ingrained and normalised” within academia.
We’ve seen academics say that Jews don’t deserve cultural safety.
We’ve seen academics take children onto campuses and lead them in chants of “intifada”.
We have seen academics deny that the rapes on 7 October even occurred.
Hamas deniers are no different than Holocaust deniers.
Just yesterday, my office was contacted by student representatives – representing not just Jewish students, but Hindu and Persian and other students too – who say they cannot speak up and cannot say what they think on campus.
I am fighting against this.
It is corrosive to campus life and culture.
I am asking for your help.
On antisemitism.
But on other aspects of campus life too.
Too much of the narrative on these issues is dominated by Labor and its crony organisations.
I am asking you to speak up and tell the other side of the story.
If you think things should change, I am asking you to rail loudly and publicly against the failures in quality, competence and safety on our universities that are a feature of life under the Albanese Labor government.
To challenge the lazy, unfair collectivism that rewards lazy students and removes reward for effort in group assignments.
To argue the point when your money is taken from you and used for advocacy you don’t believe in and representation that doesn’t reflect your beliefs.
To criticise the bureaucratic and regulatory morass that is slowly suffocating your institutions with compliance and robbing you of the opportunities to do the leading research
To slam the ingrained antisemitism that has been left to fester, and which turns student against student, professor against professor, and allows extremists and apologists for terrorism to have a place in our academic life, supported by the money we all pay as taxpayers.
My second message to you is simple: keep pushing for changes on our campuses. Our country needs them to be better, and they won’t be better without you.
A call to arms: Politics is not a spectator sport
My friends, my third message to you tonight is a broader call to arms. Because politics is not a spectator sport.
The Australian Liberal Students’ Federation has carried the torch for our ideals on our campuses since 1948. The Adelaide Advertiser published a short article about the foundation of the ALSF on the 27th of August that year – so short in fact that it is worth reading in full.
Under the heading “Universities’ Liberal Federation Formed – Melbourne, August 26”, it reads as follows:
The Australian Universities Liberal Federation was formed today after a three-day conference in Melbourne between representatives of Liberal Clubs from all Australian Universities except Brisbane. Two immediate aims decided by the Federation were the improvement of employer-employee relationships and the encouragement of free enterprise. It was decided also to campaign actively against Socialism and Communism in Australian universities.
What a brilliant, concise statement of principles and objectives.
The contest between collectivism and liberal democracy in 1948 was immediate, not academic, and the first act of this student body was to stand clearly what you believe in and carry the fight to the enemy.
We should do the same today.
Stand for what you believe in.
And take the fight to the enemy.
Australia needs strong university clubs committed to the ideas and principles of liberalism.
We need you.
Liberal democratic principles do not survive because they are self-evidently correct.
They survive because people fight for them.
The political Left understands organisation and recruitment.
They understand the Long March through our institutions. Their intent remains to capture the “commanding heights” of culture – schools, churches, arts, corporations and yes, universities too – to change public consciousness and ultimately reshape our society in their own interests.
Equality. Freedom. Rule of Law. Private property. Personal responsibility. Enterprise. Competition. Reward for effort. Celebration of individual success. Smaller government that encourages citizens, rather than interfering in their lives. A just and humane society. Individual freedom and free enterprise.
These values are the very foundation of our success.
They are Liberal values.
And they are threatened by the Long March.
Our challenge – your challenge – is to make the Long March Back.
That is my third message to you today.
Like the generation who stood up to fight in the depths of the Cold War almost 80 years ago, stand up for our values on our campuses, and take the fight to the political enemy: the modern incarnation of the socialists and communists who threaten Australia’s campuses now as in the past.
The extremists.
The radicals.
The Woke Left.
And the Woke Right.
This is how we fight.
Campaign.
Persuade.
Debate.
Recruit.
Train.
Organise.
Hold events.
Be involved and bring others with you.
And do it all while having fun.
Because make no mistake – in standing for your values you are fighting for a better Australia.
Let there be no area where you vacate the field.
Economics. Politics. Education. Health. Art. Music. Sport. Religious Freedom. Employment. Workplace Relations. Defence, Foreign Policy and National Sovereignty. And the myriad other issues which have roots in our campuses.
Do not cede ground to those who would establish encampments.
Do not yield to the Socialist Alternative or Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
Our universities do not belong to them. Nor do they belong to the careerists in university Labor Clubs who see their campus political involvement as merely part of their passage into the union movement and parliamentary Labor caucuses.
Let us fight them in the quadrangles.
Let us fight them in the refectories.
Let us fight them in the Marxist action collectives.
Yours is a history that extends back before the first Liberal Federal Government. Our cause needs you as much as at any time since then.
So let us fight like we’ve never fought before.
And let us never surrender our values.