David Penberthy: Get a grip, uni students. It’s really not that bad
EVEN with the latest increases, uni students will still have the lion’s share of their education costs picked up by taxpayers, writes David Penberthy. So why the outrage?
“TAX the Rich Not the Poor” remains the preferred chant of the disaffected uni student when it comes to the apparent cruelty of a user-pays education.
As a callow and short-lived student radical, I remember chanting it a bit myself, charging down Adelaide’s King William Street on anti-HECS protests in the late 1980s, while passers-by busied themselves being gainfully employed or trying to eat their lunch in peace.
There was one particularly stupid protest which culminated with an occupation of the old Adelaide Stock Exchange, even though it had actually closed down, and another where we ended up running through that black heart of capitalism, the David Jones Food Hall, chanting our silly chant in the exact type of store where we would all end up doing our shopping after we graduated and became paid-up members of the Adelaide bourgeois.
The truth is, Tax the Rich Not the Poor was always an assertion that made more logical sense when you turned it on its head. The argument in favour of free education is an impertinent middle-class one. It insists that it should be the job of blue-collar workers and lowly-paid retail and hospitality staff to underwrite every cent of the cushy future existence of doctors, lawyers, journos, and bankers.
The argument against a user-pays education is an argument in favour of a provider-pays education, the provider being the rest of the taxpayers.
In hindsight I reckon those people eating their lunch on King William Street would have been well in their rights to throw their pasties at us, selfish bastards that we were.
It was during my first year at university when something called the HEAC was canvassed by the Hawke Labor Government, with John Dawkins as Education Minister. Dawkins was reviled on campus as a class enemy, but with the benefit of hindsight, and hopefully some maturity, I’d argue that Dawkins’ work in designing HEAC and then HECS makes him a working-class hero.
The old system was the opposite of socialism. It was an impost on the working class. And unless you have graduated from the Jim Cairns school of economics and believe in magic money trees, the cost of providing free education to anyone who wanted it was unsustainable. While in an ideal (and non-existent) world, every government service would be free, economic reality suggests otherwise.
The Higher Education Administration Charge was laughably meagre, a $250-a-year fee which every university student had to pay in the 1987 academic year. This minuscule amount covered the tiniest portion of tuition, obviously, but was the warm-up act for HECS a year later, the tiered system of fees that vary in amount from course to course.
As far as any fee system goes, HECS is the least unfair of all the options, with the student only ever paying back (some) of the cost of their course once they had graduated and entered the workforce and started earning reasonable money.
To that end, the increases announced by Education Minister Simon Birmingham this week represent a fairly mundane and wholly defensible continuation of the HECS system. There is one element of the Birmingham plan, however, which is a regrettable corruption of HECS.
Jacking up the actual cost of courses does not strike me as an issue at all. HECS has been in place for 30 years. It was jacked up aggressively by the Howard Government in its first budget in 1996 but since then has remained steady. Even with the latest increases, students will still have the lion’s share of the cost of their education picked up by the generosity of the taxpayers.
However, by pushing down the threshold so dramatically at which graduates start repaying their HECS debt, the Federal Government risks making that old student chant come true. Currently graduates start repaying their debts when their salary hits $54,000, but that figure will plummet to $42,000. This means that people who are barely earning the minimum wage will be forced to eat into their take-home pay to start repaying the debt. This seems unfair.
If all this is about bolstering the budget bottom line, it would be fairer to increase the cost of the HECS charge more but keep the repayment schedule the same, rather than hitting people with a tax bill when they are still struggling to make ends meet.
As for the 2.5 per cent saving the Government is seeking from our universities, I reckon if the unis were honest they could identify these savings in about half an hour. As the proud holder of a Bachelor of Arts I would never disparage the value of a classical education, and the benefits of studying old-style disciplines such as history or philosophy that at first blush have no application to modern day-to-day working life.
There is a lot to be said for teaching people how to analyse and recall information, even if the information itself might seem arcane in the modern world. But there appears to have been a something of an explosion in frivolous and flimsy areas of inquiry, where pop culture or politically correct notions have muscled their way into what was once a narrow and classical curriculum.
The existence of La Trobe University’s crazy think-tank into whether gender is something you’re born with, or learned, would strike me as a good place to start when it comes to saving us all some dough.
David Penberthy is a columnist for The Advertiser.