Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025
Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (09:01): I rise to speak to the Greens Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025. This bill does something very meaningful and long overdue: it scraps the JRG fee hikes. In 2020, the Morrison government took a wrecking ball to universities, draining funding and implementing cruel, unfair and completely unjustified hikes.
And yes, these fee hikes were brought to students by the coalition government almost six years ago, but they have been kept in place by the Albanese Labor government for the past four years. In that time, the cost of humanities degrees has skyrocketed to $56,000. This bill takes a significant step towards reversing the worst of Job-ready Graduates by reversing punitive fee hikes that have seen the cost of degrees and the burden of student debt skyrocket for students in law, accounting, administration, economics, commerce, society and culture, communications, medicine, dentistry and veterinary science.
This bill reverts the cost of these units to pre-JRG levels. The impact of this would be to halve the cost of an arts degree. It is really difficult to overstate just how widely JRG has been condemned as a flawed and failed policy.
In the Senate inquiry into this bill recently, it was called one of the five worst policy mistakes made by the Commonwealth this century. All but one of the 74 submissions to the Senate inquiry into this bill supported this bill itself or supported the intent to reverse the JRG fee hikes urgently. Students, staff, their unions, universities and VCs all want to see the back of JRG, and they want to see it scrapped urgently.
Even the Liberal Party, which is responsible for this train wreck of a policy, is now embarrassed about it and made the point that it has been in place under this current government longer than it was under the Liberal government who actually introduced it. I'm glad that the Liberals are taking some talking points from the Greens now. Labor has been in power for more than four years, and yet they continue to kick the can down the road when it comes to job-ready graduate fee hikes.
When JRG was introduced, Labor in opposition called it 'inequitable, perverse and punitive'. Labor MPs labelled the policy 'economic and cultural vandalism' and described the new fee schedule as fundamentally inequitable. I couldn't agree more.
But now, in government, Labor doesn't have the courage or desire to rectify a policy that has done so much harm—the desire to rectify it urgently. Under Labor, fees for humanities, arts, law and social science degrees have exploded. A student starting an arts degree today will accrue a debt of $56,000 for their degree, and it's a figure that will increase each year with indexation.
That is a lifetime of debt that is stopping people from going to uni. When the Morrison government rammed through this bill in 2020, it was an act of breathtaking short-sightedness. It came at a time when universities were already reeling from 35,000 pandemic job losses, brutal funding cuts and years of neglect.
Rather than support higher education, the coalition used the crisis to further its ideological war against public universities and the arts. This was about punishing students, it was about punishing universities and it was about punishing critical thinking. It was about making education serve the market, not the public.
It was about turning universities into profit driven corporations, rather than places of learning and discovery. This was an attack on education itself, on the idea that universities should exist to expand knowledge, not serve in a market. The damage has been devastating.
Universities are teaching more with less; students are paying more for less; casualisation is rampant; research is gutted; and jobs are being cut left, right and centre. It is more than $50,000 to study literature, politics, philosophy or history. These are the disciplines that help us understand who we are, why the world is as it is and how to make it better.
People who study these degrees go into the Public Service, into our classrooms and into our parliaments. But the Liberals decided they weren't 'job ready' enough, or they decided that only the wealthy should be afforded these opportunities. That is the history of JRG, but the present reality is that JRG belongs to Labor—squarely belongs to Labor.
They should have scrapped it the minute they came into government, yet they still haven't done it. The quiet tragedy of JRG is not just the students and graduates crushed by debt; it is the people who will never enrol at all. Between 2020 and 2024, low-socioeconomic student commencements decreased by 9.8 per cent.
In courses with the highest student contributions, which are humanities, social sciences, law and commerce, low-SES commencements decreased by almost 20 per cent over this period. As was rightly pointed out by a witness to the Senate inquiry, this is making 'the professions that shape our services and institutions even less representative of the communities they serve'.
This Labor government talks a big game on intergenerational equality. They talk a big game on educational equity. But they continue to preside over the most egregious and inequitable policy in higher education.
Labor want to pat themselves on the back for a one-off student debt cut that does nothing—absolutely nothing!—for students that start their degrees this year or the year after. In opposition, Labor talked a big game. Once in government, they said, 'Wait for the accord.' The accord said JRG required 'urgent remediation'.
So then they said: 'The accord implementation is in process. Wait for ATEC.' And now, over four years later, we have an ATEC and we're no closer to seeing the back of these punitive and damaging fee hikes and funding cuts. The Labor government could pass this bill today, deliver desperately needed relief to students and fund universities properly.
The government say that they want to reform JRG but that it's too expensive. Since 2021, nearly $4 billion has been taken out of the higher education system. Passing this bill and reversing the funding cuts would require the government to make just a shortfall of about $1 billion in funding.
This is a government that is willing to spend $385 billion on nuclear submarines that will probably never materialise—they don't even exist—and a government that says no to a 25 per cent tax on gas exports, despite the potential for it to bring approximately $17 billion annually. They just need $1 billion to fund universities and get rid of JRG. The Albanese government still collects more in student debt repayments than it raises from the petroleum resources rent tax.
Scrapping the JRG is not a matter of financial feasibility; it is a matter of political priorities. In a sector that is able to spend almost $2 billion of public money a year on consultants, you would think there might be some available to ease the massive burden on students. Students are now paying 93 per cent of their arts degrees cost, with the Albanese government contributing only seven per cent of the funding.
JRG has overseen a 113 per cent increase in the price of humanities courses. In 2024, Labor's failure to remove JRG resulted in students paying up to $386 million more than they would have under pre-JRG rates. Some who want JRG gone argue that it will leave a shortfall in uni funding.
Well, my friends, Labor is in government. They have the means to fund universities properly, and they can choose universities and students over fossil fuel corporations and war. While the focus of this bill is student fees, the issues at the heart of JRG, and, at the heart of our higher education system, run so much deeper.
When I was an academic, I saw firsthand how corporatisation hollowed out our universities. Universities have become corporate machines obsessed with branding, rankings and revenue diversification. Vice-chancellor and senior executive salaries have exploded, while academic and services staff are underpaid, overworked and pushed into insecure work.
Students are treated as numbers and teachers treated as expendable. Job-ready graduates supercharged that shift. It decoupled teaching from research, slashed public funding and locked in a model where students, not the government, pay the price of education.
Universities should be life making, not profit making. Teaching should be about producing informed, creative, critical thinkers—people who are motivated and equipped to shape a better world. The idea that an arts degree is somehow less valuable than an engineering or business degree is absurd, and I say that as a proud civil engineer.
Humanities graduates work in so many professions and hold our democracy together. We need more of them, not less. This bill recommits this parliament to the principle that higher education is a public good—something we gladly invest in because it benefits all of us.
It benefits society. It benefits the world. When we invest in students, we invest in our future.
When we invest in universities, we invest in research, innovation, arts, science, engineering, culture and progress. When we make education free, and support students and staff, we build more equal, creative and democratic societies. Education is a right, not a privilege, and we can't sit by while this government keeps a broken, punitive system in place and says education is only for some of you.
The Greens will keep fighting for a fully funded, free higher education system; for the abolition of student debt; for secure work for university staff; for investment in research; and for democratically run universities by staff and students, not by corporate shills. We need a higher education system that values knowledge for its own sake, that nurtures curiosity, creativity and critical thought, and one that pays and respects its staff.
This vote today is not going to be the end. We will keep pushing until every student, regardless of background or postcode, can study without a lifelong debt. While their student debt grows, so too does the cost of rent, groceries, transport and bills.
We know that students and young people are being hit the hardest by cascading cost-of-living and housing crises. Just last week, a report found that student-living costs have increased by 29 per cent since the introduction of the JRG scheme—29 per cent! That is not a squeeze; that is crushing.
Students are skipping meals. They're sleeping in cars. They're living in tents while completing placements.
They're working exhausting hours and balancing class between multiple jobs. This is what happens when education is treated as a market and not as a public good. This is what happens when a government wants to talk about equity in education but refuses to raise youth allowance and doesn't see the urgency of scrapping high fees or wiping student debt—or indeed making uni free for all.
Education should be a pathway out of poverty. Instead, this government has allowed it to become another driver of it. When brilliant young people are forced to abandon their studies because they cannot afford to eat, it is not an individual failure.
It is a political failure, and Australia will be poorer for it. Scrapping JRG is the bare minimum, and it should only be the start. Everyone here knows that JG is completely cooked.
Everyone knows it. Everyone out there knows it. Everyone wants it gone, and they want it gone now—everyone except perhaps the Labor government, who don't see the urgency.
Labor could support our bill, fund universities and make this happen today. You know it is unjust, you know it is unsustainable and you know it can be fixed. Art students have watched in horror as the cost of their debt soars past $50,000.
Students are doing it tough. Don't look the other way. Don't look away.
Don't team up with this parliament's right wing to oppose cheaper degrees. The time to close the JRG chapter is now, not in 18 months, not in two years. The only thing stopping the Albanese government from doing so is themselves, and that shows a real lack of care for students.
We should be making uni free, just like it was for the Prime Minister. We should be getting on with abolishing student debt and supporting students living below the poverty line. Instead, we've got Labor dragging their heels on the easiest of reforms.
Well, today you have the power to make $56,000 arts degrees history. I'm proud to commend this Greens bill to the Senate.