Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024, and I associate myself with the comments of my Greens colleagues, including Senator McKim's confident prediction made just now that Labor will vote against our amendments to take action today, voting against their own policy proposition.

Let's be clear: this student debt relief bill is nothing more than a PR stunt and will not deliver genuine cost-of-living relief in a timely way, which Australia's students and graduates need right now. Labor uses Greens' lines about wiping student because they know it's what people want and they know we can do it, but they are really just tinkering here with indexation. The Greens are the only party with a genuine commitment to wiping student debt and making university and TAFE free. Labor want people to wait until after the election to extort young people's concerns and their cost-of-living crisis and to defer action which could be taken today.

This bill amends the Higher Education Support Act 2003 and other legislation to give effect to some of the Universities Accord recommendations, including changes to student debt indexation. Firstly, it retrospectively ties the student debt indexation rate to the lower of either the CPI or the WPI and provides an indexation credit to reduce the 2023 and 2024 student debt indexation rates from 7.1 per cent and 4.7 per cent to four per cent respectively. Someone with an average student debt of $26,500 will see a reduction of around $1,200 in their outstanding debt as a result. Secondly, it will allow for grants to be paid to higher education providers for a new Commonwealth prac payment.

Thirdly, university enabling courses will be renamed FEE-FREE Uni Ready courses, and a new Commonwealth grants scheme funding cluster will be provided for them. This funding is expected to increase the number of students enrolling in these courses by 40 per cent by 2030. Fourthly, it will require higher education providers to ensure that 40 per cent of the student services and amenities fees revenue they collect from students is provided to student led organisations. Finally, it also makes amendments to the act to allow for the merger of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia.

Some of these are positive steps, but they go nowhere near far enough in fixing the structural crisis within the tertiary education sector. The first and foremost problem is the crushing impact of student debt on too many Australians. Soaring student debt is making the cost-of-living crisis worse. It's locking people out of the housing market, causing people to delay having families and crushing the dream of going to university for too many. However, the Labor government's plan to provide student debt relief will see student debts rise by 11.5 per cent in their first term. This is simply not good enough.

Labor says they're wiping $3 billion in student debt, but don't fall for it. All they're doing is shaving a tiny bit of indexation off the top of a giant swelling pile of student debt. Taking $3 billion off around $80 billion is peanuts. Setting indexation to the lower of CPI or WPI is akin to rearranging very expensive deck chairs on the Titanic. The WPI is usually higher than the CPI, so this change will make very little difference. In fact, in the last 25 years, the WPI has been lower than CPI indexation only four times, including 2022 and 2023.

Labor's little tweaks to student debt won't provide real cost-of-living relief to the millions of people struggling under the weight of ballooning debts in a cost-of-living crisis. The root of the student debt crisis remains totally untouched by this bill. People are graduating with bigger and bigger debts that grow every year and take longer and longer to pay off. This is largely due to the Morrison government's disgraceful punitive fee hikes, which Labor is backing, against the advice of their own Universities Accord panel, which says the scheme needs urgent, immediate remediation. Next year, for the first time, arts degrees will cost more than $50,000. We've got Labor to thank for that.

There is a simple truth here: the student debt system cannot be fixed, because student debt should not exist. Higher education, like education at every level, is an essential public good that should be free, universal and provided by the government.

Many of us in this place, including the Prime Minister and many in the cabinet, are beneficiaries of free higher education. I am, certainly. I was the beneficiary of a free undergraduate economics degree, a free honours year and three years of a free PhD. That's seven years for free. And, better than that, as a kid who came from the country, I had help with living costs. At the end of the month, my household—with my sister who was studying to be a nurse—could afford a slab of beer and, as a consequence, we were the party house. So I didn't just start with free education; I actually had a livable income, which meant I could be a student who didn't spend 30 hours a week trying to earn an income to finance my living while I was studying, and I didn't start my working life with thousands of dollars in uni debt—an average now of $26,000—and facing a cost-of-living crisis, a housing market out of control and, now, $50,000 arts degrees.

Well, shame on us. Shame on us as a parliament to say to the next generation or the current generation, 'You walk out of your university with thousands of dollars in debt around your neck, into a housing market that's impossible to meet, with insecure jobs in too many of our industries.' We are a wealthy country. Why are those of previous generations who enjoyed free uni education passing on an obscenely expensive set of debts that will hobble future generations, hobble productivity and hobble our economy? It's all wrong and, in this wealthy country, we can and should be doing better.

Then there is the problem of placement poverty. We've got a widespread issue of poverty for those who must do placements within their qualifications. Hundreds of thousands of students are required to complete work placements as part of their study, many of which are unpaid. Work placements are especially common in feminised fields of study, which further entrenches gender inequality. A teaching bachelor degree mandates four months of unpaid full-time hours to qualify. Nursing takes five months and social work more than six months.

This bill creates the power for grants to be paid to higher education providers for a new Commonwealth prac payment but provides zero detail as to the payment and how it will work. The detail of the payments will come in disallowable regulations, meaning that it'll be up to the minister to decide the eligibility criteria and the payment level. There is no guarantee that any student will actually receive it, and that's totally unacceptable. We need that detail now. According to the government's announcement, the payments intended for eligible teaching, nursing and social work will be at a rate of $319.50 a week, or $8 an hour for anyone doing a full-time placement. This amount is woefully low. And so many will miss out—dentistry students, vet students, physio students, psychology students and medical students, for example.

During this cost-of-living crisis, unpaid placements are forcing students to choose between putting fuel in their car to get to their placement and putting food on the table every day. Mandatory unpaid placements are causing students to forgo paid work or drop out of uni, and this is taking an intense toll on students' wellbeing and their health. Students are being pushed to the limit, going months without a day off, finishing their placements at 5 pm and going straight off to paid shifts at the pub or grocery store. Students are being burnt out before they even begin their careers and are left with absolutely no time to have a social life, enjoy their youth or enjoy all of the activities, excitement and expansion of being in a university environment.

How on earth are students expected to live when they have to give up hundreds of hours of paid employment to do unpaid work placements? How on earth are students expected to support themselves for weeks or months just living off their savings—if they have them, of course—during a time when the cost of living is soaring and we're seeing huge increases in rents across the country? This is pure exploitation. Students should not be forced to provide their labour for free, and they definitely should not be forced to juggle work and placement both at the same time just to scrape by.

Students experiencing placement poverty need urgent relief. Labor has said that this policy will only commence on 1 July 2025. What are people supposed to do until then, and what about all of those who are left out? Every student should be paid for every hour of work they're required to do as part of their degree, and yet government is excluding so many, including those vet students who undertake a mandatory 52 weeks of unpaid placement to complete their vet qualifications. Students should be paid at least a minimum wage for their work on placement, not a lesser supplementary amount.

This bill also adds the new Adelaide University as a table A provider and removes the University of South Australia and the University of Adelaide from the list following their merger, in view of the expected commencement of Adelaide University in 2026. The Greens have previously expressed concern about this merger. University mergers can result in negative outcomes, including things like program restructures and elimination, staff lay-offs, course cuts, decreased competition and reduced student satisfaction. The Greens share the concerns of the National Tertiary Education Union and the anxieties that staff have expressed around this specific merger. A June 2023 NTEU survey of 1,100 university staff found that only 25 per cent supported the establishment of the new university. Many are feeling concern. Additionally, 75 per cent indicated that they had not been appropriately consulted by the South Australian government. Some uni students and staff found out about this plan via the Advertiser, not through consultation. This is not good enough.

The South Australian Greens did not support the Adelaide University Bill in the state legislative council. They did, however, move 23 amendments to try to secure better outcomes for staff and students. These amendments included requiring the uni to be an exemplary employer, various transparency measures and a requirement to divest the new university of fossil fuel and its assets in the defence industry. Sadly, only one of those amendments passed. These contracts—and some of them were with Deloitte and other big consulting firms—have not been made available and transparent to the South Australian public. They should be. We want the university merger to publicly reveal those details and to be clear about the business case. The Greens will always stand for robust universities and for accountability and transparency. We wish the university staff and students well as they transition through this phase.

Overall, while this bill in all its parts makes some positive changes, the entrenched issues within our tertiary sector require urgent, widespread and structural reforms. We call on the government to wipe all student debt, to make university and TAFE free and to pay all students doing mandatory placements no less than the minimum wage. We have relentlessly pushed the Albanese government to deliver desperately needed student debt relief since they came to power. This pressure has worked. It's worked in securing changes to indexation, as well as recent commitments to raise the minimum repayment income and to cut student debt by 20 per cent—but after the election, in Labor's notion. There is no reason to wait. Student debt relief shouldn't be dangled like a carrot on a stick and held ransom to the next election results. We can act now. We have the numbers in this parliament to lock in these changes now. Labor could move a bill to do it right now.

The Greens are going to keep up the pressure through amendments and changes in this bill to wipe all student debt. We want to see TAFE and uni free. We want to work with Labor to deliver the changes, like wiping all student debt and making TAFE and uni free, that will make life better for millions of people so that the next generation, the current people coming through our universities and those who have gone through university in recent times can enjoy the same opportunities and the same benefits of higher education that I did, that the Prime Minister did and that so many in this place and in the parliament enjoyed. The next generation should have the same privilege.