Thanks to a cheeky drop of data from the Parliamentary Library, the electorates with the highest amount of HELP debt in Australia have been revealed. Some seats accumulated over a BILLION dollars in student debt all by themselves, which has politicians calling for more to be done.
Many of the seats with the highest debt are held by extremely high-profile politicians — including the Prime Minister himself — which have been conveniently listed for you.
As well as the amount of unpaid student debt in each of the top 13 electorates, I am also going to use my stupid brain to teach you a (somewhat) fun fact about each seat or its MP, because I spent my primary school lunchtimes learning about politics. Please, I need this. Cheers.
Also I’m not gonna lie, some of these numbers are pretty bloody huge. So if you’re the type of person who no longer opens the HELP debt tab on your ATO account because of how anxiety-inducing it is… strap in for a bad time!
Which electorates have the highest student debt in Australia?
13. Grayndler, NSW
Total HELP debt: $801,963,299
You may recognise the seat of Grayndler because it is currently held by Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Totally unrelated, but he completed an economics degree in 1984 at the University of Sydney and paid diddly squat for it.
He got it for free because Gough Whitlam‘s Labor Government made university free in the 1970s. Isn’t that nifty? Maybe consider doing that again Albo. Cheers.
12. Adelaide, SA
Total HELP Debt: $818,025,626
Held by Labor ever since 2004, the seat of Adelaide is currently represented by Steve Georganas.
Hmmm… what’s something interesting about Adelaide? They have Rundle Mall? With the balls?
Gosh, for some reason I don’t have any fun facts about Adelaide. Oh well.
11. Ryan, QLD
Total HELP Debt: $819,234,491
The Greens’ MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown currently holds the seat of Ryan, winning it from the LNP in the 2022 Federal Election — a story you will see gets repeated throughout this list.
Watson-Brown is the first woman to represent the Greens in the lower house of Parliament. That’s the House Of Representatives, where all the MPs go and hang out/shout at each other/eat their own ear wax if you’re Kevin Rudd.
10. Moreton, QLD
Total HELP Debt: $822,613,146
The division of Moreton is one of Queensland’s key seats. This basically means it gets to feel important because whenever it’s called, both the election and Antony Green are closer to climaxing.
Labor’s Graham Perrett has represented the seat since 2007, and he currently holds it by a thick margin of 7.2 per cent. For a key seat, this is huge. Anything above seven is a lot. (The bigger ones scare me.)
9. Kooyong, Vic
Total HELP Debt: $839,518,288
In the 2022 Federal Election, when the Liberal Party looked like it was going to lose and the position of Party Leader was up for grabs, Kooyong’s MP Josh Frydenberg was a shoe-in for the top job.
And then Teal independent Monique Ryan smashed him in the polls with a 9.3% swing away from the Libs, and replaced him. Good thing he said he wanted more women in Parliament I guess?
This seat has historically been one of the safest Liberal seats in the country. It was held by Australia’s longest-serving PM, Sir Robert Menzies, for almost 32 years — 18 of which he was PM for.
8. Macnamara, Vic
Total HELP debt: $842,364,005
Macnamara’s incumbent MP is Labor’s Josh Burns, who is the only member to hold the seat. This is not because politicians are ancient, but because the seat was only created in 2019 after the seat of Melbourne Ports was killed.
Just kidding. Seats don’t die. They get redistributed and boundaries get redrawn to better reflect the population density of that location. Quite literally democracy manifest.
7. Higgins, Vic
Total HELP debt: $844,399,838
The key seat of Higgins is held by Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah, making her the first Labor member to ever hold the seat. She won it in 2022 in one of the biggest “Ohhhhhhh shitttttt, we are so screwed” moments for the Liberal Party that election.
This seat was first held by Harold Holt in 1949, up until he went swimming with the fishes in 1967. They did not rename this electorate after him, but instead gave that honour to the division containing the beach he disappeared at. A pool was also named after him, because we are a deeply unserious country.
6. Cooper, Vic
Total HELP debt: $887,013,942
As true fans of Australian politics will know, we once had an electorate called Batman. Unfortunately, Batman was redistributed in 2018 and replaced by the division of Cooper.
This seat is represented by Labor’s Ged Kearney, who also held the seat of Batman prior to the redistribution. RIP Batman, and RIP the almost $900 million in student debt.
5. Wills, Vic
Total HELP debt: $929,253,392
Another safe Labor seat, Peter Khalil is currently the MP for Wills. Mostly it’s a battle for who owns it between the Greens and Labor, with the latter holding by a margin of 8.2 per cent.
Wills was once held by former PM Bob Hawke, and any boss who sacks me for not putting more effort into this fact is a bum. (That’s a riff on an iconic Bob Hawke quote. Did you know that? It’s important to me that you know that.)
4. Sydney, NSW
Total HELP debt: $971,619,022
The seat of Sydney is found in Sydney, and has been held since 1998 by Tanya Plibersek. A fun fact about Plibersek is that she is currently Minister for the Environment, and keeps opening coal mines.
A fun fact about Sydney is that nothing is affordable here. We have almost a billion dollars of HELP debt shared between 28K people here, and that much money could afford half a week’s rent.
A fun fact about those two fun facts is neither of them were fun. Welcome to the show.
3. Griffith, QLD
Total HELP Debt: $1,025,721,405
We have finally reached the BILLION dollar mark. Griffith is the only electorate in the country run by an MP who is renting, AKA Max Chandler-Mather. It is also home to 33,238 individuals who have an average HELP debt of $30,860.
Chandler-Mather has consistently made the point in Parliament that high student debts are locking young people out of the housing market, as the high-student loans mean people are not being granted home-loans by banks.
2. Brisbane, QLD
Total HELP debt: $1,130,535,277
The division of Brisbane is home to 125K voters, and they love to swing… their votes. Won by the Greens’ Stephen Bate in the 2022 Election based on preferential votes.
And now, time to reveal the final electorate who will take out the top spot…
1. Melbourne, Vic
Total HELP debt: $1,314,003,447
Ta-da! The electorate of Melbourne (which includes the city of Melbourne) is the seat in Australia with the highest total amount of student debt! Finally, something that Melbourne has beaten Sydney in that the winner won’t want to brag about.
Held by Greens’ leader Adam Bandt since 2010, Bandt is one of the few politicians on this list who is actively calling for Parliament to entirely wipe all student debt in Australia.
What’s being done about student debt in Australia?
In the 2024 Federal Budget, Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced that HELP loans would no longer be indexed along with the inflation rate (CPI), or by the rising of wages (WPI, but by whatever of the two rates is lower.
This meant that a huge $3 billion of student debts were wiped from the ATO accounts of desperate Australians trying to pay off the loans. However, politicians have quickly pointed out that more needs to be done.
“The Government is squeezing billions out of students to balance their budget while handing over billions to subsidize coal and gas companies,” stated Senator Mehreen Faruqi.
She pointed out that many politicians in Parliament at the moment all received free degrees, including Albanese, and have made calls for the same opportunity to be given to the current generation of students.
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