Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I seek leave to table an explanatory memorandum relating to the bill.

Leave granted.

I seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

I am honoured to introduce the Greens' Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025.

This bill does something very simple but very meaningful—and long overdue.

It undoes the Morrison Government's cruel, unfair, and downright absurd Job-Ready Graduates package fee hikes.

This bill will reverse the punitive fee hikes that have left hundreds of thousands of students saddled with higher and higher debts for simply wanting to study what they love.

It repeals the fee hikes from Job-Ready Graduates. It provides that the maximum student contribution amounts for a place in a unit of study in Law, Accounting, Administration, Economics, Commerce, Society and Culture and Communications are reverted to what those amounts would have been on 1 January 2026, accounting for indexation, if the amendments made by the job-ready graduates bill had not commenced.

Right now, in 2025, we still live with the ideological wrecking ball Scott Morrison's Coalition government took to our universities in 2020—and Labor has had more than three years to fix it, but hasn't.

When the Morrison Government rammed through this bill in 2020, it was an act of breathtaking cruelty and short-sightedness. It came at a time when universities were already reeling from 35,000 pandemic job losses, brutal funding cuts, and years of neglect.

Rather than support higher education, the Coalition used the crisis to further its ideological war against public universities and the arts.

This was about punishing students. It was about punishing universities. And it was about punishing critical thinking.

It was about making education serve the market, not the public. It was about turning universities into profit-driven corporations rather than places of learning and discovery.

Under the Job-Ready Graduates scheme, fees for humanities, arts, law and social science degrees exploded—with students now paying over $50,000 for an arts degree.

More than fifty thousand dollars to study literature, politics, philosophy, or history. These are the disciplines that help us understand who we are, why the world is as it is, and how to make it better. But the Morrison Government decided they weren't "job-ready" enough.

The damage from JRG has been so devastating that the cost of an arts degree has doubled. This Bill brings down the cost of an arts degree from over $50,000 to just $24,500.

This was an ideological attack on education itself—on the idea that universities should exist to expand knowledge, not serve the market.

And the damage has been devastating.

Universities are teaching more with less. Students are paying more for less. Casualisation is rampant, research is gutted, and staff morale is on the floor.

This is not a system built for learning—it's a system built for profit.

Labor, when they were in opposition, called Job-Ready Graduates "inequitable, perverse, and punitive."

They were right then. But where are they now?

They've been in power for more than three years. They've overseen multiple budgets.

They even commissioned a Universities Accord that concluded, very clearly, that the Job-Ready Graduates fee hikes require "urgent remediation."

Urgent remediation. Not in a few years. Not after another roundtable or consultation.

And yet, nothing.

Literally everyone in higher education is calling for a reversal of JRG, urgently, but Labor has kicked the can down the road.

No more excuses. Labor can support this bill right here and remove some of the burden of debt on struggling students.

Labor is able to find hundreds of billions for nuclear submarines, for tax cuts for the rich, for fossil fuel subsidies—but not to undo a Coalition policy that is actively punishing students every single day.

The hypocrisy doesn't end there.

Last year, while students were drowning in debt, the Government spent months trying to push through awful legislation scapegoating international students in a bid to deflect from their own policy failures on housing.

Instead of focusing on the so-called "problem" of international students—who contribute billions to our economy and enrich our campuses and our communities—Labor should have been focused on fixing the actual problem: the outrageous fees facing domestic students because of Job-Ready Graduates.

All that time in Parliament wasted blaming migrants, when they could have used it to make higher education fair again.

And Labor knows it. Their own MPs are begging them to act.

Just in August, The Guardian reported that a group of Labor MPs—including Louise Miller-Frost and Carina Garland—urged the government to prioritise reform of the "failed" Job-Ready Graduates scheme. They said it had created "perverse incentives," damaged equity, and urgently needed fixing.

When your own backbench is calling your policy a failure—when even your internal reports admit it's broken—what are you waiting for?

It's not just MPs saying it.

At the end of July, more than 100 well-known Australians—authors, academics, historians, and public figures—signed an open letter calling on Labor to abolish Job-Ready Graduates.

They said we need a funding system that doesn't punish students for choosing the humanities or social sciences.

Tim Winton, one of our most prominent writers, said:

"Earning a humanities degree was life-changing. My little arts degree has created jobs and cultural value for over forty years."

And yet, if he were studying today, that same arts degree would cost him more than $50,000.

What kind of country does that? A country that has forgotten what education is for.

When I was an academic, I saw firsthand how corporatisation hollowed out our universities.

Universities have become obsessed with branding, rankings and "revenue diversification." Vice-chancellor and senior executive salaries have exploded while staff are underpaid, overworked and pushed into insecure work. Students are treated as numbers and teachers treated as expendable.

Job-Ready Graduates supercharged that shift. It decoupled teaching from research, slashed public funding, and locked in a model where students—not the government—pay the price.

This bill is our chance to start reversing that.

Because education should never be about profit.

It should never be about producing "job-ready" cogs for a market economy.

It should be about producing informed, creative, critical citizens—people who can think for themselves and shape a better world.

Universities should be life-making, not profit-making.

The idea that an arts degree is somehow less valuable than an engineering or business degree is absurd. And I say that as a proud civil engineer.

Humanities graduates work in public service, community organising, journalism, education, research, politics, and countless other areas that hold our democracy together.

We need more of them, not less.

Labor's one-off student debt cut may have made for good headlines and election ads, but it did nothing for new students starting today. Nothing for high school graduates who look at those fee tables and think, I just can't afford university.

That's the quiet tragedy of Job-Ready Graduates—not just the people crushed by debt, but the people who never enrol at all.

The young woman in regional NSW who dreams of studying sociology but can't take on $50,000 of debt. The mature-age student in Western Sydney who wants to retrain in teaching or social work but just can't afford the fees.

Education should open doors, not close them.

Notably, this Bill halves the cost of an arts degree. That is how severe the damage of job-ready graduates has been. Had it not been for this cruel and disastrous plan, students starting today would be paying half of the fees they face today. And they can, if the Parliament supports this Bill.

This Bill recommits this Parliament to the principle that higher education is a public good—something we gladly invest in because it benefits all of us.

Because when we invest in students, we invest in our future.

When we invest in universities, we invest in research, innovation, arts, science, culture, and progress.

When we make education free and accessible, we build a more equal, creative, and democratic society.

President, I've said it before and I'll say it again—education is a right, not a privilege.

Growing up in Pakistan, I saw how transformative that right can be—and how easily it can be denied.

We can't sit by while this government keeps a broken, punitive system in place.

Labor's own words, their own reports, their own backbenchers, their own voters are saying the same thing: Job-Ready Graduates has failed. It's time to fix it.

The Greens will keep fighting for a fully funded, free higher education system—for the abolition of student debt, for secure work for university staff, and for real democracy in how universities are run.

Our vision is clear: education is a public good. It should be free, fully funded, and accessible to all. Universities should focus on changing lives, not earning profits.

Governance failure after governance failure has revealed universities as places where staff and students are afraid to speak out, those who do are silenced and punished. This system must be overhauled. Elected staff and students must run unis not corporate appointees.

We need a higher education system that values knowledge for its own sake—that nurtures curiosity, creativity and critical thought. One that pays and respects its staff. One that is governed democratically, with students and workers determining their futures—not vice-chancellors and corporate boards.

We will keep pushing until every student, regardless of background or postcode, can study without a lifelong debt.

And that starts right here—by undoing the damage of Job-Ready Graduates.

I urge all senators—especially those on the government benches—to remember what they, and their party, said when this policy was first introduced.

You know it is unjust. You know it is unsustainable. And you know it can be fixed.

You have the power to make $50,000 arts degrees are a thing of the past.

You have the power to ensure that education in this country is once again a right, not a privilege.

Let's reverse the Job-Ready Graduates fee hikes and then let's make university and TAFE fully funded and free.

I commend the bill to the Senate.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.