Comment

Ashlyn Horton
How the student debt cut still fails students

As promised, Labor’s first act in the 48th parliament was to cut 20 per cent off all student debt. It’s a long-overdue move and undeniably welcome. Students have spent years shouting into the void about the rising cost of degrees, and this announcement suggests that some people in Canberra might finally be listening. Or, at the very least, want to look as if they are.

But if this is the government’s headline act – the big proof that they’re listening to students – then we’ve got a serious problem. The 20 per cent cut will help, as will the higher threshold and tweaked rates for repayment, but these steps don’t come close to fixing the structural mess that got us here. The core problem remains: students are still paying some of the highest fees in the OECD under a system that punishes them for choosing the “wrong” degree. That system has a name – the Job-ready Graduates (JRG) package – and Labor has left it virtually untouched.

JRG more than doubled fees for key degrees in the arts, humanities, communications and law. Future English and history teachers saw their fees spike by 117 per cent. Social work students – people training to care for the most vulnerable – are now paying upwards of $30,000 for a degree that leads to an underpaid, overworked profession.

The scheme was the Morrison government’s biggest legacy in higher education policy and it marked a critical point in the hollowing out of public universities. It pushed the system even further towards commodification – where value is measured by “return on investment” rather than public good – and entrenched the idea that students should foot the bill for national workforce planning failures. The JRG also reduced government contributions from 58 per cent to 52 per cent, further decreasing the government’s relatively low contribution to the sector.

The policy was based on a flimsy premise: that students could be nudged into “job-ready” fields by jacking up the cost of everything else. But students don’t pick degrees based on price tags, and the data proves it. Between 2020 and 2022, applications for society and culture courses actually rose by 9 per cent. What JRG really did was punish students for studying what they love. It devalued critical disciplines – the ones that shape our democracy, our culture and our social fabric – and sent a clear message: some knowledge doesn’t matter, and some students matter less.

When the new Labor government launched the Universities Accord process in 2022, it was seen by students and staff alike as a long-overdue opportunity to undo the damage of the Job-ready Graduates package, to finally lift the financial burden it had placed on hundreds of thousands of students. The accord’s final report didn’t mince words: JRG needs to go. While the government has walked back some of the worst elements – such as the punitive rule denying financial assistance to students who couldn’t complete more than 50 per cent of their subjects – the core of the policy remains untouched. Labor’s decision to leave JRG in place doesn’t just amount to political convenience, it leaves in place a dangerous ideological legacy.

That shift is visible in university governance. In the two decades since voluntary student unionism gutted student representation, students have been systematically excluded from decision-making processes on their own campuses. Where student unions once had a meaningful voice in shaping university policy, strategy and spending, they’re now sidelined – replaced by private consultants on six-figure contracts. These are people with no connection to campus life, no accountability to staff or students and no incentive beyond delivering whatever spin the executive wants.

Nowhere is this more obvious than at the Australian National University. Power has been increasingly centralised to a small, opaque executive, while course and staff cuts continue to mount. Students are crammed into overcrowded classes, while academic staff – many of them casuals – are left to run entire subjects without proper support. It’s a system running on burnout. Entire disciplines that once defined the university’s reputation – such as geography, for which ANU ranked 20th in the world this year – have been scrapped. Under the banner of the so-called “Renew ANU” scheme, the specialist degrees in politics and international relations that once drew students to ANU will be collapsed into a single politics, public policy and international relations degree, eliminating the opportunity to study these disciplines in depth. The School of Music will be dismantled.

Staff and students have been organising against the cuts for months through rallies, petitions and direct engagement. The response from university leadership has been silence, surveillance and spin. This is what led to a puff piece in The Canberra Times discussing Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell’s shoe collection. Meanwhile, the university has found the money to rename buildings after trailblazing women. Symbolic recognition is all well and good, but when entire faculties are being gutted, it rings hollow. The gesture reads less like feminism and more like corporate rebranding.

The ANU’s $1 million spend on consultants – widely believed on campus to be a conservative estimate – is just one part of the problem. When consultants are being heard more than students and staff, is it any wonder that trust in our institutions is collapsing?

That this is happening at our national university, established by federal legislation to serve the public good, is a national shame. It’s not just a failure of university governance; it’s an indictment of a system that has allowed public institutions to drift so far from public purpose. If even the ANU can’t uphold basic standards of transparency, accountability and academic integrity, what hope do students elsewhere have?

The erosion of the university experience isn’t isolated to the ANU. University of Technology Sydney has spent about $5 million for consultants to tell them to cut more than 400 jobs and $100 million from courses. At the University of Wollongong, the current proposed model will force students to take eight broad, generic subjects at the degree level, with no choice beyond eight subjects for each major. And in a grim echo of Renew ANU, Western Sydney University has unveiled its own restructure, “Reset Western”: a plan to merge 12 schools into just three and eliminate non-vocational courses. That both universities are branding the gutting of education as a “renewal” or “reset” says everything about how out of touch the sector’s leadership has become.

It’s not only that students are being shut out of decisions, however.

Across the country, students are being crushed by rising costs, shrinking support and a welfare system that barely acknowledges their existence. Hardship is no longer the exception – it’s the rule. A recent University of Tasmania study found more than half of all students now report being food insecure. Many are skipping meals, rationing medication or relying on food banks just to make it through the week.

Mutual aid networks and student unions are doing what they can, but the financial safety net that’s meant to support students, Youth Allowance, has been eroded to the point of dysfunction. The outdated “age of independence” test locks students out of support until they’re 22, based on the assumption they can rely on their families. For countless young people, though, especially those from low-income, regional or unsafe home environments, that assumption simply isn’t true. The result is that fewer students receive income support now than did a decade ago – even as rent, transport and textbook prices have skyrocketed.

When students do qualify, the support they receive is far from adequate. The maximum rate of Youth Allowance is well below the poverty line, forcing many to work long hours in insecure jobs just to stay afloat. The idea that students can thrive academically, or even attend classes consistently under these conditions, is delusional.

For many students, this isn’t just financial pressure. It’s a daily question of survival. While the 20 per cent HECS-HELP cut might provide temporary relief, it does nothing to address the chronic underfunding and neglect that’s led us here.

Labor has been keen to market the policy as a bold, progressive step. Education Minister Jason Clare described it as “a game changer” for students – a way to make student debt “fairer”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the press the cut was proof the government was “opening the doors of opportunity” for young Australians. It was a centrepiece of the government’s budget messaging, backed by targeted social media campaigns and a coordinated media blitz. In the wake of the Universities Accord, the 20 per cent cut seems to be presented not as a partial fix but as a full response – closing the chapter on student anger without addressing its causes.

Students don’t buy it. Not because they’re ungrateful but because they’ve seen this pattern before: a government gestures at reform without touching the structures underlying the harm. They know a one-off cut won’t fix skyrocketing rents, collapsing student support services or a degree that still costs $50,000. They know the same system that pushed them into debt in the first place is still fully intact.

If the government is serious about earning the trust of students – if it wants to fix the system it’s inherited – it must go much further. Reverse the Job-ready Graduates package. Properly fund our universities. Start treating students not as economic units or political talking points but as the future of this country.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 26, 2025 as "How the student debt cut still fails students".

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