Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024. At the outset, I should say this bill is better than no bill at all. I'll be supporting the bill, more out of desperation than joy. We need action in this space, and some action is better than none. But, I have to tell you, I'm disappointed we haven't done more to fix the real problems facing our students.

Take student placement units. These are units that the student completes externally. They don't go to university to do it; they go somewhere else, with no classes, no tutorials, no workshops. They are not taught by any university employees; no university facilities are used. The cost to the student with this bill and without it is the same as a unit delivered fully within the university campus by university employees. We're still charging students the same fees for their placement units as we do for their regular classes. How can that be right? These are our future nurses, teachers and social workers we're talking about.

Yes, the new Commonwealth prac payment is a step forward. As someone without a degree, as someone who's experienced what it's like to go without, I get what it feels like to wonder whether your rent money is coming in, so I'm all in favour of helping you out. But we're still asking these students to pay full university fees while they're basically working for free. This problem is particularly concerning when I think about placement overseas. We have students doing placements in places like New Zealand or Singapore, and they're still paying full Australian university fees, even when the overseas hospital or school is doing most of the teaching. That's not right. It's not fair.

Think about what we're asking of these students. They're often having to cut back their paid work hours. Some are having to move away from home. For students studying things like clinical psychology or occupational therapy, we're talking about more than 1,000 hours of placements. That's an awful lot to ask of anyone, let alone young people who are just starting out. While I appreciate the government's trying to help with this new payment, I have to say I'm worried about how it's all going to work. How will they decide who gets what? How will the universities manage it? We need much clearer answers.

The bill does some good things. Changes to HELP debt and the FEE-FREE Uni Ready courses are steps in the right direction. But we need to be honest about this placement fee issue. We're asking students to pay full price for something that isn't a full service. Whether they're studying here, at home, or gaining valuable experience overseas, they deserve better than this.

The argument about students dropping out during placements often focuses on money. People say students can't afford to work for free, that the financial pressure causes them to quit, but when we look closer it's not that simple. Take medical students—they do some of the longest unpaid placements you can imagine, yet they're the most likely to stick with their studies. These are students who got very high marks in school. They could have chosen any course that they wanted. They're in medicine because that's exactly where they want to be. Compare that to courses with lower entry requirements like social work. Goodness knows we desperately need more social workers in our regional communities. Some of these students might be there because it's what they could get into, not necessarily what they dreamed of doing. Their connection to their studies might not be as strong, so when the going gets tough, when they're facing unpaid placements and financial pressure, they might be more likely to question if it's worth it.

This isn't about ability—I've known brilliant social workers who didn't get high marks in school. It's about how committed students feel to their chosen path. If you've worked your whole life to get into medicine, you're probably going to push through the hard times. If you're in a course because it was available and seemed okay, those unpaid placements might be the thing that makes you wonder if there is something else you'd rather do. This bill helps with affordability, and that's important, but if we really want to help our students succeed, we need to do more. We need proper support for all students during placements, yes, but we also need to help young people find the right path for them, not just the path that their ATAR happened to match. When a student drops out, we all lose. That young person loses precious time and money and our communities lose what they could have contributed. We can do better than that—we must do better than that.

I want to talk about these student services and amenities fees, because there are two things that really don't sit right with me. First, we're making distance students pay these fees even though they can't use any of the services—think about that for a moment. We're asking students, many of them parents or working full-time or living in remote parts of Tasmania, to pay for campus gyms and cafeterias they will never see. It's like asking someone in Smithton to pay membership fees for a gym in Hobart; it just doesn't make any sense. This isn't an abstract concern, either. We have many Tasmanian students who are required to either travel long distances or study remotely. For mature-age students who work full-time and study after hours, how many times are they going to the uni pub? Do they really benefit from cheaper parties? There are not as many students using these services—full stop—because there are not as many students spending hours a day on campus.

The world of university has changed so much in the last 30 years. When I talk to students in my community, many of them are studying online. They're juggling family responsibilities, they're working to make ends meet, they're fitting their education around their lives—and that's wonderful. It's giving more people the chance to learn and grow. But our thinking about the fees is stuck in the past. This bill does try to do something about student fees. It says universities have to give 40 per cent of this money to student led organisations. That sounds good on paper. Our students should have a say in how their money is spent. But this brings me to my second concern: why 40 per cent? Why not 50? Or 60? No-one seems to be able to explain this figure. I have read through everything, and I can't find any justification. Think about it—this is money our students are paying. Many of them are from families who count every single dollar. Why shouldn't students have an even bigger say in how it's spent? Why not half? Why not more than half? I've heard some people say that giving more money to student organisations might mean universities can't provide important services like mental health support, but that doesn't quite add up. Universities already fund these vital services through other channels—that's not what this fee is about. So we have two problems here: we're charging fees to students who can't use the services, and we're not giving students enough say in how their money is spent. Our thinking needs to catch up with reality.

University today is not just about sitting in lecture halls and hanging out in the student union. For many of our students, it's about logging in from their kitchen table after their kids are in bed. We need to fix both these things. Our distance students should haven't to pay for services they can't use. If we truly believe in giving students a voice—and I do—then we need to explain this 40 per cent figure and ask ourselves honestly: are we giving students enough say in how their money is spent?

The bill shifts the calculation of HELP debt indexation to using the lower of CPI or WPI, instead of just using CPI. This will rarely make a difference. Maybe every seven or eight years it will matter, but it won't matter for most students. Something that would make a meaningful and fair change to the HELP debt indexation system would be to change the timing of the indexation. Imagine you have a HELP debt of 40 grand. You're doing the right thing: working hard and making your repayments through the tax system all year long. Let's say you've paid off four grand over the year. You'd think your debt would be $36,000 when they calculate the interest, wouldn't you? That would be fair. That would make sense. But that's not what happens. Instead, on 1 June, they pretend you haven't made any of these payments. They add the interest to your full 40 grand. Only after that do they take off your $4,000 in payments. It's as if they're charging you interest on money you've already paid back.

Here's what makes this even worse. Remember that we're charging students full fees for their placement units, so a nursing student doing their placement is racking up HELP debt at the same time at the same rate as if they were in lectures every single day. They're working full time and unpaid in a hospital, and we're charging them thousands in fees. Then we're charging them interest on those fees before we count their repayments.

The member for Goldstein and the member for Warringah support the same change I do: change when we add the interest and do it after we've taken off the repayments people have made. It's not complicated; it's just fair. But are the government fixing this? No. They're patting themselves on the back for using a lower interest rate, but they're leaving this fundamental unfairness in place. They're leaving our nurses, our teachers and our social workers stuck in this cycle. Think about what this means. A student nurse doing their placement is earning nothing, being charged full fees and building up HELP debt. Then, when they start working and making repayments, we don't even calculate the interest fairly. It's as if we are making it as hard as possible for them to get ahead.

This isn't some technical detail; this is about basic fairness. These students take on these debts to get an education, to build better lives and to serve our communities. The least we can do is make sure the system treats them fairly when they're paying it back. The government needs to fix this, not next year or in some future reform but now. With the unfairness of placement fees and this interest calculation, it's too much. Our students deserve better than a system that feels like it's designed to keep them in debt. Take it from someone who never went to university, I see the value in university education. I believe in university education. I think it's hugely important. I believe it should be open to everyone who wants to learn and who wants to build a better life. That's why it breaks my heart to see what's happening in our universities today.

Look at where we are now. Our universities spend more time and money marketing themselves in South-East Asia than they do looking after students from places like northern Tasmania. I don't blame the universities for this. They're just trying to keep their doors open. They're doing what they have to do to pay their bills. The sad truth is that teaching Australian students isn't profitable anymore. Think about that for a moment. Our own universities can't make ends meet by educating our own people. That's how broken this system has become. They have to rely on international students to keep the lights on. So what happens? Our domestic students become an afterthought. Universities charge them as much as they can and spend as little as they can get away with, not because they want to but because they have to. We've created a system where you can't run a university in Australia unless you have an office in Singapore, Jakarta or Shanghai.

This bill makes some small improvements. It helps around the edges, but it's not addressing the real problem. It's not fixing the fact that our universities see Australian students as a secondary concern compared to what actually pays the bills. One day I hope we see a bill that really tackles this problem, a bill that makes teaching Australian students sustainable again. That is the bill I'm waiting for. That's the bill I will be truly excited to support. This isn't that bill. It's something, and something is better than nothing, but let's not pretend it's more than it is.