Only statisticians, mathematicians and Australian Tax Office mandarins can see beauty in numbers.
However, there comes a time in the life of every creative or literary soul when close attention to numbers is vital.
Many students of the arts will be paying unusually close attention to next month’s budget, and not just because of the rising cost of living or crushing rent increases.
However, dreamy arts graduates are not the only ones who are nervous. Graduates from every discipline who have reached a certain salary threshold will be watching as Treasurer Jim Chalmers announces whether or not to help students tethered to the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, known as HECS.
Ever since the government linked the HECS debt to indexation in 1989, student loan payments have risen according to the rate of inflation.
Today, there are nearly three million people living with an average student debt of $26,294. More than 47,000 former students live with debts of more than $100,000.
Many of them finished university years ago, but because of high inflation, their repayments are not keeping up with their growing debt.
In 2022, HECS repayments rose by 3.9 per cent; last year, the rise was 7.1 per cent; this year, the rise is predicted to be 4.8 per cent. That’s an increase of nearly 17 per cent in three years.
Many are now drowning in debt because of the growing pound of flesh that is HECS.
My daughter finished four years of university study with a $35,000 HECS debt. Today, it’s still $35,000 despite four years of repayments. If the situation remains the same, she will never repay her HECS debt and could possibly die still owing the government money.
There are millions of Australians in her position.
This is an iniquitous situation for a developed country like Australia and deserves to be remedied with some progressive, severe thinking.
The Universities Accord final report released earlier this year recommended setting the index to whatever was lower out of the consumer price or wage price index.
This is just tinkering at the edge and will do nothing to alleviate the impossible government-imposed debt burden on working Australians.
Adjusting the repayment scheme does not address the fundamentally unethical problem of making people pay for their education.
For Australian citizens, education should be free from early childhood through school to TAFE and university.
This will upset the user-pays advocates who believe education is a commodity to be bought and sold like anything else. Obviously, we can’t afford to make education free, can we?
But we’ve done it once, and we can do it again. Many Australians enjoyed free tertiary education under the Whitlam government in the 1970s. Predictions were made that the sky would fall in and the country would go bust. But nothing happened until the Dismissal fiasco. Until then, millions of young Australians gained university qualifications or trade skills, which opened doors to employment, life skills and, most importantly of all human necessities – hope.
In the UK, I was able to enter university in 1975 through a similar government-supported scheme. If not for free tertiary education, I would never have been able to gain a Bachelor of Arts, which changed my life. Things shifted in the 1980s when education became a market-driven commodity.
In a fair society, financial costs should never be a barrier to education, and student debt repayment schemes should not be tinkered with because they should not exist.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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