It's a Morrison slug so awful that Dr Evil would be proud. Labor won't touch it

Sydney Morning Herald

30-04-2025

Its stated intent was that by doubling the student fees for arts, communications and social science degrees, hiking by 28 per cent the cost of law and business degrees and halving the fees for science and engineering, it would provide a price signal to shift prospective students into courses whose graduates were in higher job-market demand.
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University records show declining arts enrolments and increasing science and engineering enrolments were trends occurring before the changes were introduced. The review found the policy barely shifted a soul. While providing no discernible benefit to the national economy or higher education funding, it saddled arts students with debt disproportionate to their likely future earnings.
'The review finds that this deterrent approach did not work and is in fundamental conflict with the need to grow the number of people with higher education qualifications significantly to meet the nation's future skills needs,' the accord review concluded.
Despite this, Labor is not promising to immediately scrap the changes if re-elected.
Instead, the Albanese government is offering to wipe 20 per cent off all HECS debts, regardless of when you finished your degree, what you studied and how much you owe.
The federal opposition, for reasons that would take a Jerry Springer episode to interrogate, is having none of it. It insists that reducing the debt of people with university degrees, even those working in relatively low-paying jobs, is elitist.
Monash Business School professor of higher education policy Andrew Norton says unwinding the impact of the changes, both on the cost to students and funding for universities, requires complex, politically sensitive surgery. He notes that the structure of the policy, which he describes as 'conceptually, a very untidy package' makes it difficult to remove without unintended consequences.
If Labor is re-elected, this future task will fall to the Albanese government's proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Norton is cautious about what to expect from a government commission but says it is only fair for students and graduates at the sharp end of the fee hikes to get some relief in the meantime.
Labor's approach to this fraught area of public policy is typically incremental and risk-averse. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see how a once-off offer to slice 20 per cent off government student loans can hurt its re-election prospects.
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At the start of this week, this masthead's elegantly understated chief political correspondent David Crowe reported a series of figures that should make Tehan and his fellow Morrison-era survivors blanch. They show that a clutch of seats the Coalition must win to have any chance of forming government – Kooyong, Chisholm, Menzies and Goldstein in Victoria, Ryan in Queensland and Werriwa in NSW – are in the top dozen electorates nationally for people with HECS debts.
In Kooyong, where Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer is trying to dislodge teal MP Monique Ryan, there are nearly 22,000 people under the age of 35 with HECS debts averaging $31,299. When you add parents or grandparents living in the electorate who don't want their kids lumbered with big debts at the start of their working lives, that is a sizeable chunk of voters.
In Tehan's seat of Wannon, an electorate that stretches from the western edge of Greater Geelong all the way to the South Australian border, there are 13,920 voters with a combined HECS debt of $324 million. In a local contest where independent candidate Alex Dyson is pushing the Liberals to the brink, Tehan is opposing a policy that would instantly wipe $64 million off the debts of his electors.