It’s a Morrison slug so awful that Dr Evil would be proud. Labor won’t touch it

Deep within his government’s secret underground lair, Scott Morrison leant forward in his wing-backed leather chair, stroked the white Persian cat on his lap and turned to his trusted henchman Dan Tehan, who had come to the meeting in his customary fez and dark sunglasses.

It was June 2020, Australia’s COVID restrictions had momentarily eased and beyond the thick walls of Morrison’s futuristic bunker beneath the sand hills of Cronulla, young people were out partying hard.

Credit: The Age

The idea of so many people who didn’t vote Liberal having fun was distressing to Morrison, who was still grumpy at having to cut short his Hawaii holiday. He’d asked his education minister to bring some ideas about how to wipe the smile off their faces. “Come on, Dan – throw me a frickin’ bone here.”

Tehan looked nervously across the glossy boardroom table towards his boss, who had stopped stroking his cat and now had an index finger delicately poised above an ominous-looking black button. The health minister, finance minister and treasurer had already disappeared from around the table, with Morrison cryptically saying they were redundant to requirements.

Tehan gulped hard, opened a Deloitte Access Economic report titled Transparency in Higher Education Expenditure and said in a low voice: “Well, we could double student fees for arts degrees.”

The room was silent. Morrison and his cat stared fixedly at Tehan. No.2, Michael McCormack, fiddled with his eye patch. Barnaby Joyce sat mute, glowing a vibrant shade of fuchsia. Then, the boss laughed. It began as a chortle, followed by a guffaw and cascaded into a full belly laugh. Before long, every cabinet minister was laughing like a drain.

A relieved Tehan laughed with them, even as the beaded sweat turned cold beneath his fez. The Jobs-Ready Graduates package was mean-spirited, ill conceived and brimming with class warfare. In other words, just perfect. He wouldn’t need the laser beams after all.

Now, nearly five years after the previous federal government doubled the debt burden on a generation of young people studying humanities and social science courses at university, that package stands as a testament to the Coalition’s disdain of higher learning and Labor’s timid approach towards reform.

In December 2023, the government-commissioned Australian Universities Accord review found this was an awful piece of public policy.

Its stated intent was that by doubling the student fees for arts, communications and social science degrees, hiking by 28 per cent the cost of law and business degrees and halving the fees for science and engineering, it would provide a price signal to shift prospective students into courses whose graduates were in higher job-market demand.

University records show declining arts enrolments and increasing science and engineering enrolments were trends occurring before the changes were introduced. The review found the policy barely shifted a soul. While providing no discernible benefit to the national economy or higher education funding, it saddled arts students with debt disproportionate to their likely future earnings.

“The review finds that this deterrent approach did not work and is in fundamental conflict with the need to grow the number of people with higher education qualifications significantly to meet the nation’s future skills needs,” the accord review concluded.

Despite this, Labor is not promising to immediately scrap the changes if re-elected.

Instead, the Albanese government is offering to wipe 20 per cent off all HECS debts, regardless of when you finished your degree, what you studied and how much you owe.

The federal opposition, for reasons that would take a Jerry Springer episode to interrogate, is having none of it. It insists that reducing the debt of people with university degrees, even those working in relatively low-paying jobs, is elitist.

Liberal MP Dan Tehan is clinging to his seat of Wannon against a challenge from independent candidate Alex Dyson.Credit: Joanne O’Keefe

Monash Business School professor of higher education policy Andrew Norton says unwinding the impact of the changes, both on the cost to students and funding for universities, requires complex, politically sensitive surgery. He notes that the structure of the policy, which he describes as “conceptually, a very untidy package”, makes it difficult to remove without unintended consequences.

If Labor is re-elected, this future task will fall to the Albanese government’s proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Norton is cautious about what to expect from a government commission but says it is only fair for students and graduates at the sharp end of the fee hikes to get some relief in the meantime.

Labor’s approach to this fraught area of public policy is typically incremental and risk-averse. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see how a once-off offer to slice 20 per cent off government student loans can hurt its re-election prospects.

At the start of this week, this masthead’s elegantly understated chief political correspondent David Crowe reported a series of figures that should make Tehan and his fellow Morrison-era survivors blanch. They show that a clutch of seats the Coalition must win to have any chance of forming government – Kooyong, Chisholm, Menzies and Goldstein in Victoria, Ryan in Queensland and Werriwa in NSW – are in the top dozen electorates nationally for people with HECS debts.

In Kooyong, where Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer is trying to dislodge teal MP Monique Ryan, there are nearly 22,000 people under the age of 35 with HECS debts averaging $31,299. When you add parents or grandparents living in the electorate who don’t want their kids lumbered with big debts at the start of their working lives, that is a sizeable chunk of voters.

In Tehan’s seat of Wannon, an electorate that stretches from the western edge of Greater Geelong all the way to the South Australian border, there are 13,920 voters with a combined HECS debt of $324 million. In a local contest where independent candidate Alex Dyson is pushing the Liberals to the brink, Tehan is opposing a policy that would instantly wipe $64 million off the debts of his electors.

If Tehan is booted, few recent university graduates will shed a tear for the architect of these changes. With apologies to Austin Powers, people never think about the feelings of a henchman.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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