I remember Jason Clare defending the 7.1% indexation to Hecs debts in 2023 because a tertiary degree “makes you money”. I also recall the education minister’s praise of Australia’s student loan system at question time in February, lauding it for blowing “open the doors of university for more young Australians”, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Given Australia’s economic environment and the crushing burden of Hecs debts today, I find this all rather amusing.
Students and graduates are feeling the pinch. We’ve been battered by an unrelenting cost-of-living crisis, with rents, grocery prices and energy bills all climbing faster than our wages and student welfare payments. The financial stress and anxiety of today is compounded by the worries of tomorrow as we students stare at the swelling mass that is our Hecs-Help debt.
Sure, there have been some minor adjustments here or there – $3bn of Hecs debt wiped and indexation pegged to CPI or WPI – but none of it has been substantial enough to put students at ease. Every effort made to hack away at our Hecs debts through personal contributions feels utterly meaningless as the number inflates year after year. With the advent of the $50,000 arts degree, a mark of the Morrison government from the grave, Hecs today is no longer the “manageable” payment plan it was supposed to be – but has become a massive liability, strangling any hopes of home ownership or a comfortable life after graduation.
So when students woke up on Saturday to the Albanese government’s pledge to cut 20% off of all Hecs-Help debts, many of us were surprised. I was shocked to see Clare’s $16bn commitment to reducing the Hecs debt of all current and former students and the proposed increase of the minimum income repayment threshold. But there’s a catch – all of this will only happen with the re-election of a Labor government in 2025.
Sobering up from that brief moment of relief at the thought of owing the government less, I don’t quite buy that wiping 20% off of our Hecs debts is all that good a deal for students.
For many of us, especially those studying arts, law or business, Labor’s proposal barely moves the needle. The destructive reforms of the Morrison government’s job-ready graduates package make this gesture negligible for a large swath of students. Lambasted in the Australian Universities Accords report, JRG was implemented in 2021 and saw student contributions for humanities degrees hiked by 113% while law and business followed at 28%. Meanwhile, the fees of all science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees saw a steep decline in student contribution costs. Under Labor’s proposal, 20% off of my debt ($8,000) will be replaced by another $16,000 in the final two years of my undergraduate arts degree. Labor has made no announcement to repeal JRG, despite being widely recognised as a failure of a policy.
The Labor government is spending billions of public money on nuclear-powered submarines, fossil fuel subsidies and defence. Meanwhile, the federal government is losing about $165bn over the next decade in negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions. A $16bn commitment to wipe 20% off our student debts looks laughable in comparison.
Labor’s commitment to Hecs may be unshakable but their pledge to wipe 20% of all Hecs-Help debts is a clear admission that student loans are, in fact, screwing over students and graduates with a lifetime of debt.
Yet, a slightly larger Band-Aid won’t address the real issue: the pay-to-learn model of higher education. In countries such as Germany, Norway, Sweden and Argentina a tertiary education is free for domestic students, while in others, such as France and Spain, the yearly costs are nominal. Fee-free education isn’t some utopian, far-flung ideal, and it’s not uncharted territory for Australia either, given it was policy from 1974 until 1989. So, if Labor wants to spew platitudes about young people being the future of Australia and aspire to have half of Australia equipped with a bachelor’s degree, perhaps they should start listening to young people. Perhaps the politicians, like Anthony Albanese, who went to university for free, shouldn’t be kicking away the ladder and tossing us the crumbs in the form of half-baked debt relief measures. Students deserve a long-term and structural alternative to lifelong debt – fee-free tertiary education – and given the current woeful economic climate, I believe we are more than ready to fight for it.
• Harrison Brennan is the president of the University of Sydney student representative council and is studying an arts degree
