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

I rise to speak to the Greens Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025. This bill does something very meaningful and long overdue: it scraps the JRG fee hikes.

In 2020, the Morrison government took a wrecking ball to universities, draining funding and implementing cruel, unfair and completely unjustified hikes. And yes, these fee hikes were brought to students by the coalition government almost six years ago, but they have been kept in place by the Albanese Labor government for the past four years. In that time, the cost of humanities degrees has skyrocketed to $56,000.

This bill takes a significant step towards reversing the worst of Job-ready Graduates by reversing punitive fee hikes that have seen the cost of degrees and the burden of student debt skyrocket for students in law, accounting, administration, economics, commerce, society and culture, communications, medicine, dentistry and veterinary science. This bill reverts the cost of these units to pre-JRG levels. The impact of this would be to halve the cost of an arts degree.

It is really difficult to overstate just how widely JRG has been condemned as a flawed and failed policy. In the Senate inquiry into this bill recently, it was called one of the five worst policy mistakes made by the Commonwealth this century. All but one of the 74 submissions to the Senate inquiry into this bill supported this bill itself or supported the intent to reverse the JRG fee hikes urgently. Students, staff, their unions, universities and VCs all want to see the back of JRG, and they want to see it scrapped urgently.

Even the Liberal Party, which is responsible for this train wreck of a policy, is now embarrassed about it and made the point that it has been in place under this current government longer than it was under the Liberal government who actually introduced it. I'm glad that the Liberals are taking some talking points from the Greens now.

Labor has been in power for more than four years, and yet they continue to kick the can down the road when it comes to job-ready graduate fee hikes. When JRG was introduced, Labor in opposition called it 'inequitable, perverse and punitive'. Labor MPs labelled the policy 'economic and cultural vandalism' and described the new fee schedule as fundamentally inequitable. I couldn't agree more. But now, in government, Labor doesn't have the courage or desire to rectify a policy that has done so much harm—the desire to rectify it urgently. Under Labor, fees for humanities, arts, law and social science degrees have exploded. A student starting an arts degree today will accrue a debt of $56,000 for their degree, and it's a figure that will increase each year with indexation. That is a lifetime of debt that is stopping people from going to uni.

When the Morrison government rammed through this bill in 2020, it was an act of breathtaking 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. This was an attack on education itself, on the idea that universities should exist to expand knowledge, not serve in a market. The damage has been devastating. Universities are teaching more with less; students are paying more for less; casualisation is rampant; research is gutted; and jobs are being cut left, right and centre.

It is more than $50,000 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. People who study these degrees go into the Public Service, into our classrooms and into our parliaments. But the Liberals decided they weren't 'job ready' enough, or they decided that only the wealthy should be afforded these opportunities.

That is the history of JRG, but the present reality is that JRG belongs to Labor—squarely belongs to Labor. They should have scrapped it the minute they came into government, yet they still haven't done it. The quiet tragedy of JRG is not just the students and graduates crushed by debt; it is the people who will never enrol at all. Between 2020 and 2024, low-socioeconomic student commencements decreased by 9.8 per cent. In courses with the highest student contributions, which are humanities, social sciences, law and commerce, low-SES commencements decreased by almost 20 per cent over this period. As was rightly pointed out by a witness to the Senate inquiry, this is making 'the professions that shape our services and institutions even less representative of the communities they serve'.

This Labor government talks a big game on intergenerational equality. They talk a big game on educational equity. But they continue to preside over the most egregious and inequitable policy in higher education. Labor want to pat themselves on the back for a one-off student debt cut that does nothing—absolutely nothing!—for students that start their degrees this year or the year after. In opposition, Labor talked a big game. Once in government, they said, 'Wait for the accord.' The accord said JRG required 'urgent remediation'. So then they said: 'The accord implementation is in process. Wait for ATEC.' And now, over four years later, we have an ATEC and we're no closer to seeing the back of these punitive and damaging fee hikes and funding cuts.

The Labor government could pass this bill today, deliver desperately needed relief to students and fund universities properly. The government say that they want to reform JRG but that it's too expensive. Since 2021, nearly $4 billion has been taken out of the higher education system. Passing this bill and reversing the funding cuts would require the government to make just a shortfall of about $1 billion in funding. This is a government that is willing to spend $385 billion on nuclear submarines that will probably never materialise—they don't even exist—and a government that says no to a 25 per cent tax on gas exports, despite the potential for it to bring approximately $17 billion annually. They just need $1 billion to fund universities and get rid of JRG. The Albanese government still collects more in student debt repayments than it raises from the petroleum resources rent tax. Scrapping the JRG is not a matter of financial feasibility; it is a matter of political priorities.

In a sector that is able to spend almost $2 billion of public money a year on consultants, you would think there might be some available to ease the massive burden on students. Students are now paying 93 per cent of their arts degrees cost, with the Albanese government contributing only seven per cent of the funding. JRG has overseen a 113 per cent increase in the price of humanities courses. In 2024, Labor's failure to remove JRG resulted in students paying up to $386 million more than they would have under pre-JRG rates. Some who want JRG gone argue that it will leave a shortfall in uni funding.

Well, my friends, Labor is in government. They have the means to fund universities properly, and they can choose universities and students over fossil fuel corporations and war. While the focus of this bill is student fees, the issues at the heart of JRG, and, at the heart of our higher education system, run so much deeper. When I was an academic, I saw firsthand how corporatisation hollowed out our universities. Universities have become corporate machines obsessed with branding, rankings and revenue diversification. Vice-chancellor and senior executive salaries have exploded, while academic and services 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 of education. Universities should be life making, not profit making. Teaching should be about producing informed, creative, critical thinkers—people who are motivated and equipped to shape a better world. 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 so many professions and hold our democracy together. We need more of them, not less. 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. It benefits society. It benefits the world. When we invest in students, we invest in our future. When we invest in universities, we invest in research, innovation, arts, science, engineering, culture and progress. When we make education free, and support students and staff, we build more equal, creative and democratic societies.

Education is a right, not a privilege, and we can't sit by while this government keeps a broken, punitive system in place and says education is only for some of you. 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; for investment in research; and for democratically run universities by staff and students, not by corporate shills. We need a higher education system that values knowledge for its own sake, that nurtures curiosity, creativity and critical thought, and one that pays and respects its staff. This vote today is not going to be the end. We will keep pushing until every student, regardless of background or postcode, can study without a lifelong debt.

While their student debt grows, so too does the cost of rent, groceries, transport and bills. We know that students and young people are being hit the hardest by cascading cost-of-living and housing crises. Just last week, a report found that student-living costs have increased by 29 per cent since the introduction of the JRG scheme—29 per cent! That is not a squeeze; that is crushing. Students are skipping meals. They're sleeping in cars. They're living in tents while completing placements. They're working exhausting hours and balancing class between multiple jobs.

This is what happens when education is treated as a market and not as a public good. This is what happens when a government wants to talk about equity in education but refuses to raise youth allowance and doesn't see the urgency of scrapping high fees or wiping student debt—or indeed making uni free for all. Education should be a pathway out of poverty. Instead, this government has allowed it to become another driver of it. When brilliant young people are forced to abandon their studies because they cannot afford to eat, it is not an individual failure. It is a political failure, and Australia will be poorer for it.

Scrapping JRG is the bare minimum, and it should only be the start. Everyone here knows that JG is completely cooked. Everyone knows it. Everyone out there knows it. Everyone wants it gone, and they want it gone now—everyone except perhaps the Labor government, who don't see the urgency. Labor could support our bill, fund universities and make this happen today. You know it is unjust, you know it is unsustainable and you know it can be fixed. Art students have watched in horror as the cost of their debt soars past $50,000. Students are doing it tough. Don't look the other way. Don't look away. Don't team up with this parliament's right wing to oppose cheaper degrees.

The time to close the JRG chapter is now, not in 18 months, not in two years. The only thing stopping the Albanese government from doing so is themselves, and that shows a real lack of care for students. We should be making uni free, just like it was for the Prime Minister. We should be getting on with abolishing student debt and supporting students living below the poverty line. Instead, we've got Labor dragging their heels on the easiest of reforms. Well, today you have the power to make $56,000 arts degrees history. I'm proud to commend this Greens bill to the Senate.

Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Early Childhood Education) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025. The Albanese government is building a better and fairer education system where no-one is held back and no-one is left behind. That's why we're taking action to help with the cost of living and cost of degrees through our changes to the Higher Education Loan Program. In our first term, we made indexation on HELP debts fairer, and we wiped $3 billion of student debt for more than three million Australians. We capped indexation to the lower of the CPI and the WPI so that student debt can't grow faster than wages. In our second term, our 20 per cent HELP reduction has cut a further $16 billion in student debt, and we've raised the minimum repayment thresholds for when people need to start repaying their HELP debt, so people only pay when they start to get the benefit of having a degree.

We promised it before the 2025 election, and we've delivered. That legislation passed in mid-2025, and the ATO has applied the 20 per cent reduction to over three million student accounts. An individual with an average HECS debt of $27,600 saw around $5½ thousand dollars wiped from their debt. Our changes to the way the student debt repayment system works provides real cost-of-living help. It means that repayments are lower when people are on lower incomes. For example, for someone on an income of $70,000, it means they will have around $1,300 per year back in their pocket.

The Treasurer has also made it easier for people with a student debt to get into the housing market by asking the banking regulators to review their rules, and the banks are starting to provide more flexibility in the treatment of student loans. These commitments build on other significant reforms the Albanese government is delivering for uni students.

From 1 July 2025, the government established a Commonwealth paid prac scheme for the first time. This will support around 68,000 eligible teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students completing their compulsory prac training at university. We've massively increased funding for Fee-Free Uni Ready courses. These are the bridging courses that help to get students ready to take on a degree. We've committed an extra billion dollars over the next 10 years to help thousands of Australians do one of these courses for free.

The National Student Ombudsman started work from 1 February 2025, and a national code to prevent and respond to gender based violence started in January 2026, which will give the ombudsman's recommendations real teeth. We have doubled the number of university study hubs across the country, including 20 new Regional University Study Hubs and, for the first time, 15 new Suburban University Study Hubs in our major cities' outer suburbs. We've introduced a demand-driven system for all Indigenous students from 2024, meaning, if you are an Indigenous student and you get the marks for the course you want to do, you will get a Commonwealth supported place at university. We have quadrupled the higher education disability support fund for more programs and services that empower students with disability to participate and succeed at university.

We've also established the ATEC, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, as an independent national steward to oversee, coordinate and reform Australia's tertiary sector. The ATEC will help us steer future reforms, including by providing advice on the cost of teaching and learning and by driving diversity across the sector to deliver for students. It will also have a lead role in delivering a joined-up tertiary education sector to make it easier for students to get the qualifications they need. It's going to drive the big structural reforms needed to break down the invisible barrier stopping a lot of Australians from disadvantaged backgrounds, the suburbs and the regions from getting a crack at university.

The bill in front of us today purports to reverse Job-ready Graduates and end 50K arts degrees. As the Senate committee heard, the evidence suggests that this bill would reduce university funding and could adversely affect course offerings, staffing, research capacity and the sustainability of regional and smaller providers. Fixing the former coalition government's Job-Ready Graduates scheme was a recommendation of the Australian Universities Accord, alongside a number of other recommendations to reduce student contributions and reform HECS repayment arrangements. As I've already outlined, we've implemented many of those recommendations, including fixing indexation, making the repayment system fairer and reviewing bank lending practices for those with student loans.

On 25 June 2026, the Minister for Education introduced legislation in the House to change the way that university places are funded in Australia, to open the doors of opportunity for all Australians. This legislation introduces a new managed growth-funding system and demand-driven needs based funding for students from low socioeconomic areas, the regions and the bush. This will support an extra $3.6 billion over 10 years to help more students from disadvantaged backgrounds access and succeed at university.

The government notes the additional recommendations made by the Australian Greens, including making tertiary education free, wiping student debt, fully funding all public universities and increasing Commonwealth contributions to Commonwealth supported places. Our government's ongoing response to the universities accord reflects the range of actions the Albanese government has taken to deliver cost-of-living relief to Australians and to help more students from underrepresented backgrounds to access, participate and succeed in tertiary education. As the Minister for Education has said, the accord is not a plan for one budget but a blueprint for the next decade and beyond. The government will keep working through the accord's recommendations and will take advice from the ATEC as we do our work to build a better and fairer education system.

Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Choice in Childcare and Early Learning) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025. While I appreciate Senator Faruqi bringing this important discussion to the chamber, I indicate that the coalition will not be supporting this bill. This bill, frankly, is about grandstanding rather than just reform. The evidence is clear that it will strip $1.3 billion out of the university sector every single year, and there is simply no mechanism to replace that. The Greens made the decision to introduce the bill in this place; they decided as a party not to introduce the legislation in the House, where they would have been constitutionally permitted to appropriate the consolidated revenue and restore to the sector the money that this bill would strip out. They decided not to do so. They were not prevented from doing so by the Constitution. What that tells you is that the Greens' approach to this bill was not about reform; it was simply about virtue signalling and messaging. It says that the Greens were not serious about this piece of reform, because they knew it would have been incredibly destructive for the sector and that the Senate simply would not pass it.

So what does this bill do? This bill is not a coherent redesign of higher education funding. It's also not accompanied by an appropriation to make universities whole. It does not restore the pre-2021 system. It does not move to a simple, uniform student contribution model. It does not resolve the problems of governments picking winners between disciplines; it merely picks a different set of winners, while leaving universities to carry that financial burden and cost.

The purpose of the bill, as the explanatory memorandum makes clear, is to reverse the Job-ready Graduates fee increases in selected fields, including law, accounting, administration, economics, commerce, communications and society and culture, and to end what its proponents call $50,000 arts degrees. This bill amends section 93-10 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 by replacing the table of maximum student contribution amounts. Those amended rates would apply to units of study with census dates on or after commencement, whether the course began before or, indeed, after commencement.

This bill is replete with problems. The first and most fundamental problem, which I alluded to just a second ago, is that this bill would massively cut university revenue. That is not a small technical flaw; it is an absolute, fatal flaw of this bill. As Professor Andrew Norton explained to the committee, the Senate may reduce student contributions, but a bill originating in the Senate cannot appropriate money from the consolidated revenue fund to replace that funding with increased Commonwealth contributions. The Greens think that there's this magic pudding that you can draw on or that there's some little tree that you can pluck revenue from. We don't live in fairyland. We live in reality. We live in the real world, and that means that you've actually got to make ends meet; you've actually got to pay your way. If you take that revenue out, what's going to happen? How do you replace it? This bill, of course, as I've said, does not deal with this issue.

The evidence before the committee—the good work that Senator Maria Kovacic, as the deputy chair of the committee, was able to prosecute—revealed this very problem. Universities Australia estimated the loss to the sector to be around $1.3 billion each year. That's not a small sum of money. Where are you going to find that? Where's that money? What magic tree or pudding are we going to draw that from? The University of Melbourne adopted the same figure. Innovative Research Universities estimated the loss at around $1.38 billion a year as well and warned that up to 8,400 full-time-equivalent jobs would be placed at risk. Is that what we want to see? Of course not. No responsible government—no responsible opposition—would support a measure that claims to help students while imposing an unfunded billion-dollar cut on the institutions that are to teach them. A university funding cut of that scale would not be abstract; it would affect courses, staffing, student support, regional provision, research capacity and the quality of student experience.

That is not enough to oppose the bill. There is another problem. The second problem is that this bill gives a partial and selective account of Job-ready Graduates. The scheme not only increased student contributions; it also reduced student contributions in a number of areas. Nursing, teaching, agriculture, mathematics, English and the sciences were among the fields where student contributions were actually reduced. These are occupations and professions greatly needed within our economy, our country and our society. Without nurses, without teachers—without that sort of support in our community—we wouldn't have the kind of workforce that we absolutely, desperately need for our economy to thrive.

The Regional Universities Network acknowledged that the scheme had a favourable cost impact for students in fields such as agriculture, teaching, nursing, health, IT and engineering—fields which, as I've said, are in acute demand in many regional communities. The community evidence also recorded that, for teaching, nursing and agriculture, the maximum annual student contribution actually fell by 42 per cent.

A complete review of Job-ready Graduates must consider both sides of the ledger. It must consider the disciplines where contributions increased and those where contributions decreased. It must consider whether lower contributions in teaching and nursing help students entering areas of workforce shortages. That should always be the consideration when it comes to funding for higher ed, whether it's in our university sector or, indeed, in VET. We should be putting the money and support into courses where there are job demands. Simply funding someone's educational fantasy is not actually helping, assisting, our country to move further or nudging it closer to being a more productive community and society. So we shouldn't be afraid of actually looking at that and having that as a goal within the funding envelope that we have.

A complete review must also consider whether regional communities benefited from cheaper pathways into priority professions. It must consider the overall coherence of the system, not simply the parts that support a preferred political conclusion.

Our position, on review, has been consistent. We've said, since before the 2022 election, that the job-ready graduates scheme should be reviewed. It's not set-and-forget. Just because we put it in place doesn't mean that we don't acknowledge that it could be improved or amended.

In opposition, Labor complained about it; in fact, they even campaigned against it at elections. In government, they have included it now in five budgets. So they acknowledge that it's actually a good thing—that it has its place, and that, designed right, it can have a real, positive impact.

The third problem that I want to address here is that the reasoning advanced for the bill is internally unstable. The committee report records evidence that only a very small portion of students changed their field of study in response to fee changes. If that is right, then the price signal did not substantially redirect student choice. But proponents of this bill also argue that reducing fees in selected disciplines will improve access, reduce barriers and change student behaviour. But let's face it: both claims simply cannot be true at the same time. It's internally unstable. If students' contributions do not materially influence choices—as was the central criticism of Job-ready Graduates—then lowering them in selected fields is unlikely to have a transformative participation impact. The argument needs much more rigour than this overly simplistic, dangerous bill provides.

The fourth problem is the design of the proposed fee structure. The bill does not simply repeal Job-ready Graduates and restore the old arrangements; it reverses the increases for some fields while retaining the reductions for many others. The result is a fee structure that has not previously existed. It keeps cheaper contributions for some disciplines, introduced under Job-ready Graduates, while lowering contributions in other disciplines to levels derived from pre Job-Ready Graduates system levels. It's a selective rollback which entrenches a new set of arbitrary distinctions.

The fifth issue is responsibility. And this is something that—let's face it—the Greens political party simply can't match, nor are they interested in taking that principle of responsibility. Like others in this chamber, they like to just say things as a statement and appeal to their base, but the reality is that you've got to actually deliver cohesive policy that's actually going to impact.

This bill criticises the scheme. It promises reform. The government criticised this scheme as well. They've promised reform, yet they've actually retained the scheme across five successive budgets. It is Labor policy. The government points vaguely to the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, another excessive bureaucratic body that's been put in by this government. The committee report identifies ATEC as the future vehicle for comprehensive reform, yet this government over here has brought no legislation in to actually fulfil their vision of what they want to see happen. There's no legislation before the parliament that makes it clear. The coalition's position is, however, clear. We support a higher education system that is accessible to students, sustainable for universities and defensible to taxpayers. We support reviewing Job-ready Graduates across the board. We support serious reform that considers the whole funding system, not only selected disciplines. We support reform that deals honestly with both student contributions and Commonwealth contributions, and we support reform that is properly funded, properly designed and constitutionally capable of implementation.

This bill that we're dealing with here today, that we're discussing and debating here today, fails those simple tests. It would reduce university revenue by around $1.3 billion a year. It would leave universities worse off. It would create a fee structure that has never previously existed. It would preserve some elements of Job-ready Graduates while repealing others, and it would replace one set of distortions with another. It would give the appearance of relief to maybe some disciplines and some students. I'm sure those students might like to get these really cheap courses. Yet, in areas of demand within our economy, maybe they're not the sort of occupations that the Greens like to espouse or want to see develop in the country. I don't know. I'm not sure why they would be wanting to attack some of these key occupations and want to see those fees rise yet see arts degrees plummet in their fee structure. So it would give the appearance of relief while failing to provide a sustainable answer.

For all these reasons that I've laid out here in my contribution to this discussion here today, the coalition will oppose this bill. We don't think it should pass. While it's worthy of discussion here—and thank you again, Senator Faruqi, for bringing this before us—it's simply not something that we can support. It's unsustainable. It doesn't meet the test. It simply cannot be supported, because it just wouldn't work, frankly.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Faruqi for bringing forward the Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025 and her continued advocacy to reform the failed job-ready graduates scheme. While I don't agree with everything in this bill, I do agree with its core premise—that JRG urgently needs reform. As has been pointed out by previous speakers, the Albanese government rightly criticised JRG reforms when they were in opposition. Over four years later, they've done exactly nothing to change this program. It isn't working. The Australian Universities Accord found that it's not working. Yet JRG has now been in place for longer under Anthony Albanese than under Scott Morrison. Maybe as a Senate we should just start calling it the Albanese government's job-ready graduates scheme. They've had over four years to fix it, and yet we've seen nothing. We've seen them kick it down the road to ATEC. We now know that ATEC, as yet, doesn't have a directive to look at this as a matter of urgency.

Yesterday I hosted students here at Parliament House to talk about the impacts that JRG is having. Charlie, a humanities student at the ANU, said: 'As a student, it's hard enough logging into myGov and seeing the mountain of debt that I'll need to pay off, and it's that little bit more disheartening knowing that, on 1 June each year, indexation adds to that debt. My brother graduated only three years ago with a HECS debt of around $30,000. We studied the same degree. Mine will cost $70,000.' Chip told us:

I expect to graduate with a HECS debt of around $90,000 because of this harmful Job Ready Graduates Scheme. And for me and others like me, the additional cost is frustrating because it adds so much to the cost of living the young people already face in a great country that promises the next generation a fair go.

A Treasury working paper from May 2025 found: 'In both creative arts and humanities, we expect it to take more than 25 years for three-quarters of students in each field to repay their bachelor's debt.' The paper said:

Many students in these disciplines may continue to make repayments toward their debt in their late 30's, 40's, and beyond.

The government talks about the fertility crisis, about young people not having children—and they wonder why! When you look at carrying a massive HECS debt, the cost of rent, the cost of housing, just the general cost of living in this country—you cannot talk about intergenerational inequality without actually addressing something as fundamental as the job-ready graduates scheme.

Innovative Research Universities found that it is segregating our higher education sector, putting degrees like law out of reach for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They found that total domestic bachelor's degree commencements declined by 3.5 per cent between 2020 and 2024. They said:

… but low SES student commencements were down 9.8%—

almost 10 per cent down—

… with a 2.2% decline for non low SES students.

So, clearly, when we talk about intergenerational inequality, this is a matter of urgency for this government and for this parliament. IRU goes on to say:

For courses with the highest student contribution rates—

under the JRG policy—

(including Humanities, Commerce and Law), low SES commencements declined 19.7%.

That's a long way from leaving no-one behind, when you have a 20 per cent decline in low-SES commencements for those degrees.

PBO modelling I commissioned in 2025 found JRG has jacked up student debt by $10.26 billion. New research from Universities Australia shows that, since 2021, the cost of maintaining a basic student standard of living has increased by 29 per cent, well above economy-wide inflation.

We've got students in Australia now paying over $50,000 for an undergraduate degree. And these changes, as young people point out, were made by some people who had free university education and others who had very affordable university education that they could pay off once they got into the workforce, yet both sides of politics here seem very happy to be saddling young Australians with $50,000-plus of debt that they're going to be paying off into their 30s, into their 40s.

Surely we don't want a two-tier higher education system in this country. The whole idea behind HECS, or HELP, is that, regardless of your background, regardless of the balance of your parents' bank account, you can pursue your dreams. If you want to go to university, you can go to university and study what you love.

This business of trying to incentivise students into certain degrees based on the cost clearly doesn't work. Young people are not making their life decisions based on what they think their HECS debt is—unless you're from a low-SES background; then you certainly are because $50,000 worth of debt is not something that you want. Young people are making and should be able to make their decision based on what they love, what interests them and how they want to contribute to our society. There's wide recognition amongst the major parties, from what I've heard in their contributions, that it's a failed scheme. Let's get on with changing this scheme and let's get on with making it fairer for young Australians who are studying.

One of the related issues has been raised by the crossbench. I thank the member for Kooyong for her work on this. She introduced a private member's bill on Monday that goes to the timing of HECS indexation. As a country, we are happy to charge indexation—essentially interest—on money that graduates have already repaid to the ATO. We wouldn't allow that anywhere else. Why does the Commonwealth government think that it's acceptable to charge indexation on money that has already been repaid? You can see why young people are getting cynical about some of the decisions made in here. You wouldn't accept the bank charging you interest on money you'd already repaid to them. Why do we do this to students?

We've heard some contributions slamming the bill rather than putting forward amendments. I would hope that we would be able to engage on an issue like this and actually make a bill better.

We've also heard about the need to get more young people into STEM. I think that's something that people across the parliament agree with, but the major parties need to understand that you can't do that unless you fund research in this country. I speak to so many academics and researchers about the lack of funding for research and just how hard it is to recommend to their students that they go into research. For one, it's so damn hard to get research money. If you can, you're spending 30 to 40 per cent of your time filling out paperwork for grants. I've spoken to researchers who say they can't, hand on heart, say to young Australians, 'Yes, go into research; it's a great career,' because we are at record low spending on R&D as a percentage of GDP in this country. We are so far below the OECD average.

Labor, again, had big promises, coming into government with a target of three per cent for spending on R&D. It hasn't shifted at all. We've got the SERD review sitting there now but no action. No doubt the minister will say, 'We're taking a very calculated and methodical approach,' but I hear from researchers that this is desperate. For one, we're losing people here in Australia, as we've seen with CSIRO. There have been more cuts at CSIRO under the Labor government than we saw under the Abbott government. We're seeing a talent drain—young, talented Australians who are going overseas. I met with a professor who had just had his hundredth PhD student graduate with a doctorate, and 96 of the hundred were working overseas—had gone to Europe, had gone to the US. It just shows how tragically shortsighted our approach is when it comes to R&D in this country.

You have to assume that the real reason that we haven't seen reform to Job-ready Graduates is that it costs money. As was pointed out by Senator O'Sullivan, part of JRG lowered the cost of a whole range of courses and jacked up other courses. So there is a cost to undoing that. There is a cost to having a system where, regardless of what you study, you have a manageable debt that you can pay off. But surely we have to start viewing this as an investment in our future. This is something that surely the Treasury should be looking at and saying: 'Yes, it's going to cost us money, but we're investing in our future. We're investing in education. We're investing in young people in this country.'

I won't tolerate that excuse from the government when they won't bring in something like a gas export tax, which the ACTU put forward, that would raise us $17 billion every single year, which is us basically getting paid for our own resources—for the export of our gas. They won't touch something like the fuel tax credits for the biggest, most profitable miners in this country. That's another $3 or $4 billion. That's $20 billion a year. How is that fiscally responsible? How is that fair to Australians who have a HECS debt and have been slugged until recently? I think there were welcome changes to the rate of indexation, but they are still being charged indexation on money they've already paid back to the ATO. Why are we a country that raises revenue by charging indexation on amounts that have already been repaid to the ATO and raises revenue by having one of the most expensive passports in the world?

If we go to 2030, we're going to get almost as much from Australian citizens paying their passport fees as we'll get from the petroleum resource rent tax. That should embarrass every one of us in this place. That is not the country we should aspire to be. There is money there if we want to invest in young Australians. There is money there if we want to make our higher education system truly accessible to the point where we have first-in-family students taking that opportunity, graduating, moving into the workforce and serving Australians; where research is seen as an exciting career; where we have more funding for research and development in this country; where we have a government that doesn't just keep kicking the can down the road rather than making the hard decisions to change things and to actually take on hard reform.

On the one hand, we're happy to slug Australians. As I said, we charge them indexation on money already repaid to the ATO. We slug them. It'll be $1 billion next year to get passports in this country. For an Australian passport, we charge double what the Canadians are paying, what the British are paying, what the Americans are paying and what the Kiwis are paying. That's flat out revenue raising. But we won't even take on the multinationals. We won't lay down the law for these big hyperscalers who want to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data centres here. We won't put a mechanism in place to say, 'We want a fair return so we can invest in things like education.' We're going to be in the same situation we're in with gas if we continue with the major parties. We're going to look back and we say, 'What have we done?'

There was a great little sugar hit to GDP during construction, but now we're not actually getting a good return from this AI boom and all these data centres that are owned by multinationals because they don't pay much tax here, and we have to pay international prices to access compute in our own data centres. I thank Senator Faruqi for this bill. I really think this is a matter of urgency for this parliament.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the question be now put.

Question agreed to.

Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the second reading be agreed to.