Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Australians are paying too much for their tertiary education. The recent changes to HECS by the Albanese government were welcome, but they were inadequate. We cannot condemn Australians to a lifetime of working off debt in the face of ongoing significant skills shortages. We need to be a clever country, and that has to include the foresight to support our citizens to gain the skills that our society needs.

In the 47th Parliament, I pushed hard on the cost of tertiary education. My petition signed by 290,000 Australians demonstrated the significance of this issue to so many students, graduates and concerned parents. We achieved a response from the government in the form of a change to the way that HELP indexation is calculated and a reduction in existing student debt of 20 per cent, backdated to 1 June 2025. Now, many constituents have told me that it was the first time that they have felt heard by the government in a way that had a meaningful and positive effect on their lives, but how we index HECS is still unfair. The cost of degrees is still far too high. We are not supporting enough young people in their practical placements—the most important time in their studies, when they get the hands-on experience which is vital for competence and quality in the care specialities in particular.

We have to put a stop to back-to-front priorities, where we tax education but we subsidise pollution. For the last three years Australia has collected three times more revenue from student loan repayments than it has from the petroleum resource rent tax. At the same time, we've subsidised polluting industries to the tune of over $30 billion. At the same time, cost-of-living pressures are leaving many students in poverty. One in seven full-time students has to work full time to support themselves. That is too much of a burden for many, and it's no surprise that non-completion rates are rising. At the same time, arts students are still being forced to pay $55,000 for their degrees. Many of them will never earn enough to pay this off, because of their low salaries and the ongoing indexation of their debt. They are effectively incurring a debt for life.

This is not the policy of a clever country. A clever country is not one where 40 per cent of year 12 students say that the cost of HECS is putting them off university. Almost half of Australians surveyed by YouGov recently believed that a worker on an average income should be able to pay off the debt for a standard three-year degree within five years; 58 per cent believed that a student should pay $5,000 or less per year, which is less than a third of what arts students are now paying; and just under one in five Australians believed that a standard degree should be free—listen to Gough Whitlam.

But this government has resiled on its position. When in opposition, it said it said it would reverse the Job-ready Graduates scheme. The Universities Accord said that continuation of current arrangements risks causing 'long-term, entrenched damage' to the Australian higher education system and that if we do not institute change then the higher education system will 'rapidly become unfit for purpose'.

That change has not been instituted by the Albanese government. This government's one-off decision to wipe 20 per cent off student debt will make a meaningful difference for graduates who are yet to pay off their debt, but it does nothing to address the problem with the level of fees in the first place. In particular, this policy offers no benefit to new students. Universities should not be sources of revenue. They should be centres where we invest in people, in skills, in nation building and in the pursuit of knowledge. This government is overseeing ongoing damage to our education system, the hollowing out of arts faculties, the loss of language schools, the defunding of science and education, and the progressive underfunding of medical research. I call on the Albanese government to act—with purpose, with courage and with generosity—to fix our broken tertiary education system and to fix it now.

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