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

Students and graduates are being crushed by the ballooning burden of student debt, placement poverty and a cost-of-living crisis that is disproportionately affecting young people and women. Seventy-one per cent of student debt is owed by people under 35, and 59 per cent of student debt is owed by women. They are bearing the burden of this cruel and cooked higher education system. Following years of campaigning and pressure from the Greens, the community, the activists, Students Against Placement Poverty and the National Union of Students, amongst many others, the Labor government is finally taking some tiny steps forward.

Let's be clear that the proposals in the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024 fall woefully short of the changes that are actually required to address the scale of the crisis in higher education. This bill is a tepid response to the nature and extent of the problems of ballooning student debt and placement poverty. It does not provide any substantive cost-of-living relief for students and offers only bandaid solutions that do not match the scale of the problem that people are facing, especially at this time in the cost-of-living crisis. Nearly three million people currently owe over $81 billion in student debt. Student debt repayments are eating into people's weekly pay packets, they are locking people out of getting their first home and they are disproportionately impacting young people and women.

The Albanese Labor government has sold this bill as wiping student debt. While it's nice to see them taking the Greens' lines, this is not what they are doing. This bill is not wiping student debt. Their rhetoric doesn't match the reality. Firstly, shaving some indexation off the top of student debt is just tinkering around the edges, and it is not a cost-of-living relief measure, as the government purports. It does not put money back in the pockets of the vast majority of people with student debt who are struggling to make ends meet. Under this term of the Labor government, student debt has gone up by a whopping 16 per cent, and this tokenistic plan for student debt indexation still means that debts will rise by 11½ per cent by the end of their first term of government. Indexation shouldn't really exist. HECS debt shouldn't really exist. Uni and TAFE fees shouldn't really exist. Unless that happens, more and more graduates will spend their entire lives repaying their student debt. Education should never be a debt sentence.

Labor's bill does nothing to tackle the root cause of mounting student debt. Student debt can't be fixed, because student debt shouldn't exist. That's why last week I announced the Greens' plan to wipe all student debt. The Greens plan will be paid for by taking on price-gouging corporations and coal and gas giants to make them pay their fair share of tax so people can have more in their pay cheque. Our plan, for someone who has an average student debt and who owns an average income, would result in a debt of $27,600 being wiped and a saving of $5½ thousand a year. That is enough to cover more than six months worth of groceries.

In the Prime Minister's home city of Sydney—my home city as well—more than 615,000 people owe almost $19 billion in student debt. If Prime Minister Anthony Albanese could go to uni for free, so should everyone else. Under pressure from the Greens, Labor has recently made some pledges to increase the minimum repayment income and to wipe 20 per cent of student debt. Obviously, it's nowhere near enough, but still it's inching forward under pressure from the Greens and the community. But wait! Even with this pledge, there's a catch. They will make these changes only if they are elected and only in July next year. It is, frankly, irresponsible and cruel to be dangling student debt relief to win votes for an election when Labor is in government right now. We have the opportunity right now. We have the numbers right now to make these changes. It is no wonder that people are sick and tired of being treated as pawns in this political game that Labor is playing. Pledges are not enough. Pledges are not going to pay the bill. Pledges are not going to reduce the burden, the heavy load of student debt. Spiralling student debt must be addressed immediately. There is no reason to wait until July to legislate these changes.

If Labor can bring in a bill to give free TAFE places, then surely we can also bring in a bill right now to legislate this promise that Labor has made to reduce student debt by 20 per cent. In the absence of Labor doing this, I will be bringing in amendments to this bill to legislate the Albanese government's own pledge and policy, wiping 20 per cent of student debt, raising the repayment threshold and making the repayment structure fairer for all. Let's do this. Let's do this right now. Let's do this today so that people have some faith in their governments and their politicians. These Greens amendments will be a chance for Labor to show that they actually care about those struggling under the weight of student debt right now.

Let me now come to one of the most egregious higher education policies that we have seen in a long time in this country and which the government is ignoring. That is the Morrison government's Job-ready Graduates scheme. It's all well and good for the Liberal politicians to stand up here and cry about the rising student debt, completely forgetting that one of the causes of us now having $50,000 degrees is something that they implemented. This bill that we're debating today is an extraordinary missed opportunity to rectify the punitive fee hikes and funding cuts of the Morrison government's Job-ready Graduates scheme. The Labor government's own accord found that this scheme was a failure and that it required urgent remediation, so where is this urgent remediation? Students who have been condemned to $50,000 arts degrees can't afford to wait a day longer for Labor to scrap these fee hikes and stop student debt from spiralling even further.

Absurdly high university fees and shifting the cost of education increasingly onto students shows how broken the HECS system is, and the only way to fix that—and I keep saying it again and again because it is the only way to fix it—is to wipe student debt and to have degrees cost zero dollars. Till the Labor government introduced their reckless international student caps plan, the coalition's disastrous Job-ready Graduates scheme was the most universally disliked and opposed higher education policy in recent times. Everyone, from universities to NTEU and NUS, want it to be scrapped and replaced, yet the government have refused to do so. The intention of the Job-ready Graduates scheme was objectionable to start with. It was a complete furphy that the scheme would encourage students into so-called priority degrees, as defined by the coalition. Four years on, there is now proof that the scheme has utterly and miserably failed, so just get rid of it, Labor. The JRG has condemned generations of people to decades of debt and pushed universities into further strife. Even Labor admitted the policy is deeply flawed, is irrational and is economic and cultural vandalism. So why haven't you scrapped it? Do it immediately; do it now.

As if the burden of student debt and the cost-of-living crisis weren't enough, so many students are further crushed by placement poverty when they have to do hundreds of hours of unpaid placements to get their qualifications. I do welcome the government's decision to establish Commonwealth prac payments for students studying nursing, teaching and social work. It is a move in the right direction, yet it reflects a real lack of understanding of the severity of placement poverty and its impacts on students. The proposal in this bill, again, is inadequate. Why are these such small measures? We need some transformative change.

The government has the opportunity to deliver genuine relief to students and graduates; instead, the measures in this bill merely scratch the surface, and this view is supported by many who gave evidence to the inquiry into this bill. Ngaire Bogemann, the President of the National Union of Students, told the committee about the increasingly common stories of young people skipping meals, sleeping in cars and going without necessities to make it through their studies. Unpaid placements are just unfair and unjust, and they exacerbate existing inequalities. Students have to cut back on paid work, give up paid work or work around the clock to make ends meet. They have had to take up loans to survive or receive financial assistance from friends and families to cover living expenses.

Placements should benefit student learning, not exploit their unpaid labour. The government's proposal also leaves out hundreds of thousands of students who are required to undertake mandatory placement as part of their degrees. The decision excludes students studying courses such as medicine, vet studies, psychology, allied health and youth work, which are just some that require hundreds of hours of mandatory placement work. It is deeply disappointing that we continue to put students under immense financial and mental health stress. Many of these professionals are desperately required in the workforce, including in regional and remote areas. All students required to undertake mandatory placement should be paid. That means every student should be paid for every hour of work that they are required to do, otherwise this is just plain exploitation.

Labor's proposal for Commonwealth prac placements amounts to $8 an hour for those who are lucky enough to receive this payment, which is obviously going to be means tested—and we don't even know what that means. It will still be more than $16 an hour below the national minimum wage. How does that make any sense? All mandatory placements should be paid, should be universal, and students should be paid at least minimum wage for their work on placement, not a lesser supplementary amount.

This bill also only provides an avenue for grants to be made for placement payments; it does not guarantee that a single student actually receives that payment. Payments for mandatory practical placements should be enshrined in legislation as a legal entitlement. Placement poverty is taking a huge toll on students and is pushing them to the absolute brink, yet Labor's limited policy, even with the limitations that it has, won't even start until July next year. Students need help right now. They cannot afford to wait for another nine months.

While the Job-ready Graduate scheme drastically increased the burden of students completing higher education, the burden on students, rather than the government, it also represented just one further step in what has been a long-term trend of successive governments from both of the old parties increasingly shifting the cost of delivering a university education away from the government and onto students. When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese completed his economics degree at the University of Sydney, Commonwealth contributions amounted to almost 90 per cent of the total revenue of universities. By 2022, this had fallen to only 38 per cent, and this dramatic decrease in the proportion of government funding to our public universities not only has placed the burden on students faced with ever increasing student loans but has led to the broader crisis of corporatisation of our public higher education institutions.

Today we are seeing rampant wage theft, casualisation of staff and job cuts left, right and centre, while university vice-chancellors walk away with million-dollar pay packets. The result is a poorer education, poorer research outcomes and a burden for both staff and students. The abandonment of the higher education sector over the decades by both Labor and the coalition has transformed it from a public good and a cornerstone of societal development to a corporatised enterprise that is fuelling inequality. We used to have a model that worked and was fully funded by the Commonwealth.

I foreshadow I will be moving a second reading amendment and substantive amendments to fix this bill.