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

In 1974, Gough Whitlam made university in Australia free. In 1989, when Bob Hawke introduced our HECS-HELP system, Australia's higher education sector remained, even then, among the most accessible in the world. It produced generations of Australians with the skills to strengthen our economy, to enrich our communities and to deepen our democracy. Effectively, those who aspired to go to university to study tertiary education could do so affordably. Today, the promise of fair and accessible higher education in Australia has become a mirage. Australians are being priced out of opportunity. Our higher education system that once opened doors is closing them.

The bill before us today takes some commendable steps towards reforming our higher education sector and implementing recommendations of the 2024 universities accord. Establishing an Australian Tertiary Education Commission is a welcome reform and a step towards coherence and independent stewardship. Setting a national tertiary education objective will provide much needed clarity for our universities. Those reforms hold a promise, a promise to improve our higher education sector, and I support them.

But I'm disappointed that this legislation fails to recognise and act on the structural failures that have created the current HECS crisis. Right now, three million Australians carry, on average, more than $27,000 in HECS debts. Student contributions for courses like commerce and law are nine times higher than they were when Hawke introduced the HECS system in 1989—a time when many members of this parliament were graduating. Graduate salaries have increased by about 2½ times since 1996. In that time, student contributions have increased sixfold. The average HECS debt for someone in their 20s is more than double what it was in 2006.

How did this happen? Well, much of it can be traced back to the disastrous job-ready graduates scheme, which the Morrison government introduced in 2021. What was sold then as a way to channel students into priority fields instead delivered a HECS debt crisis—a crisis for a generation of many young Australians. Under the job-ready graduates scheme, students in disciplines like law, accounting, business, banking, finance, economics, communications and politics are contributing up to $17,000 a year in 2026. That means that those young Australians are graduating with $50,000 of debt for basic three-year degree and more than $80,000 if they undertake postgraduate study. They're then taking at least 10 years to pay it off. In popular disciplines like communications, humanities, society and culture, and human movement, student fees have more than doubled as a result of the job-ready graduates scheme.

Two in three MPs in this parliament hold degrees in arts, humanities, law or business. These are not fringe pursuits. They're foundational pursuits, disciplines that we need for our economy, our public institutions and our civil life. In a world as fragile as today's, skills from those degrees matter more than ever. But the students who pursue those disciplines are being punished with often insurmountable student loan debts. The number of students affected is enormous. As of 2024, management, commerce, society and culture degrees accounted for nearly half of all enrolments at Australian universities. Right now, there are nearly 700,000 students enrolled in those courses, Nearly half of all university students in Australia, and a large proportion of them are women, First Nations students and students living with a disability. These are the Australians who are being unfairly and disproportionately penalised by the job-ready graduates scheme and who are bearing the burden of serial government policy failures, like those from my friend from the Right.

Unfortunately, the effect of the job-ready graduates scheme has been magnified by the means of indexation of HECS. Repayments on HECS aren't deducted until after the loan has been indexed for the financial year, which means that the debt on already expensive degrees can grow further, while people are waiting for the impact of those payments to be reflected in their HECS accounts.

Increasing student debt is a drag. It's a drag on the lives of graduates. It's contributing to our record-low birth rate and to the 20 per cent fall in rates of homeownership in 20- to 35-year-old Australians over the last 30 years. Young Australians who are struggling already with their increasing cost of rent and of groceries are finding themselves unable to buy a home, unable to start a family. In a country with an ageing population and a decreasing tax base, this is a demographic time bomb. It's not just an educational equity issue, it's a cost-of-living and a societal wellbeing issue.

The universities accord report, which was received by this government two years ago, found that the job-ready graduates scheme and the expensive degrees it creates does not work. The accord recommended 'urgent remediation'—that's its words—to ease the rising and punitive student contributions. The government has publicly, on many occasions, conceded these issues with the job-ready graduates scheme. In 2023, the education minister said that job-ready graduates scheme needs to be redesigned before it causes long-term and entrenched damage to the Australian higher education system. I couldn't agree more. Professor Bruce Chapman, the architect of HECS, has said on many occasions that the job-ready graduates scheme is the No. 1 issue with our HECS system. But, two years on from the accord, students are paying more than ever before.

This is no longer just a Morrison era issue. This bad policy was introduced under the previous government, but the job-ready graduate scheme has now been in place for longer under Labor than it was under the coalition. The government could have fixed this problem at any time in the last four years. Instead, it has delayed. It tasked the universities accord with looking into student contributions back in 2022. By February 2024 the accord's final report called for urgent action, and the minister said then that ATEC would look at the scheme and what change can happen. Now, we have legislation for the ATEC before us, but there is nothing in this bill that recognises the urgent need to ease student fees. Student contributions are not mentioned in this bill, not once.

In 2025, I was pleased to successfully advocate for a 20 per cent reduction in existing student HECS debts, and I also supported the government's measures to reduce indexation and to increase the payment thresholds on student loans. Those measures have helped to decrease student debt, but they've only reduced debts back to pre-COVID levels, which, following an unprecedented inflationary surge, has done nothing to help those students who are now at university.

The legislation does grant the Tertiary Education Commission the function of advising on Commonwealth contributions to the cost of degrees, but Commonwealth contributions represent only a part of the higher education pricing equation. It's alarming that the Commission has not been tasked with considering student contributions or even just considering the impacts of HECS debts on young Australians. It's important that the commission has the power to provide the government with independent and impartial advice on whether the current maximum student contributions are too high. A note to the commission: they are! This function, which is absent in the legislation, is important. It will help begin to reverse the damage that the job-ready graduates scheme has inflicted. The reality is that the government could act today. It could reduce the maximum student contribution amount under the Higher Education Support Act 2003 today, but the government has not put that legislation on the table in Canberra this week.

What we can do is ensure that the independent statutory commission can give and will give impartial advice on the biggest cost-of-living factor affecting young Australians. The final report of the Universities Accord called for the ATEC to be an independent statutory authority 'to enable it to provide robust advice and support evidence based decision-making and planning'. It said the ATEC 'needs to be agile and responsive to immediate issues, while remaining future focused overall'. This was echoed in the minister's explanatory memorandum, which states that formal independence is a foundational element of the ATEC's design. However, there have been concerns from stakeholders and from experts about the ATEC's proximity to the minister. Many of the commission's advisory functions can only be performed at the request of the minister. This limits any policy agenda that the commission might want to promote independently of the minister's wishes, including, for example, escalating the question of the job-ready graduates scheme. So, while I support the establishment of an independent higher education commission to steward the sector, I would suggest very strongly that we need to ensure that the commission is sufficiently independent to be able to promote meaningful reform of our higher education sector.

If we are serious about securing the future of Australian tertiary education, then we have to ensure that the systems that we build are coherent, transparent and generally capable of restoring public trust. Establishing an Australian Tertiary Education Commission is a step towards that goal. It offers the possibility of a sector guided by evidence rather than short-term policies by careful long-term planning, not piecemeal fixes. This bill will move us towards the implementation of the Universities Accord, but I urge the House and the minister to ensure that the commission is fully equipped to reform the higher education sector and to better tackle the cost-of-education crisis which faces Australian students.

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