Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025

Senator DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory—Independent ACT Whip) (09:38): I thank Senator Faruqi for bringing forward the Higher Education Support Amendment (Reverse Job-Ready Graduates Fee Hikes and End 50k Arts Degrees) Bill 2025 and her continued advocacy to reform the failed job-ready graduates scheme. While I don't agree with everything in this bill, I do agree with its core premise—that JRG urgently needs reform.

As has been pointed out by previous speakers, the Albanese government rightly criticised JRG reforms when they were in opposition. Over four years later, they've done exactly nothing to change this program. It isn't working.

The Australian Universities Accord found that it's not working. Yet JRG has now been in place for longer under Anthony Albanese than under Scott Morrison. Maybe as a Senate we should just start calling it the Albanese government's job-ready graduates scheme.

They've had over four years to fix it, and yet we've seen nothing. We've seen them kick it down the road to ATEC. We now know that ATEC, as yet, doesn't have a directive to look at this as a matter of urgency.

Yesterday I hosted students here at Parliament House to talk about the impacts that JRG is having. Charlie, a humanities student at the ANU, said: 'As a student, it's hard enough logging into myGov and seeing the mountain of debt that I'll need to pay off, and it's that little bit more disheartening knowing that, on 1 June each year, indexation adds to that debt.

My brother graduated only three years ago with a HECS debt of around $30,000. We studied the same degree. Mine will cost $70,000.' Chip told us: I expect to graduate with a HECS debt of around $90,000 because of this harmful Job Ready Graduates Scheme.

And for me and others like me, the additional cost is frustrating because it adds so much to the cost of living the young people already face in a great country that promises the next generation a fair go. A Treasury working paper from May 2025 found: 'In both creative arts and humanities, we expect it to take more than 25 years for three-quarters of students in each field to repay their bachelor's debt.' The paper said: Many students in these disciplines may continue to make repayments toward their debt in their late 30's, 40's, and beyond.

The government talks about the fertility crisis, about young people not having children—and they wonder why! When you look at carrying a massive HECS debt, the cost of rent, the cost of housing, just the general cost of living in this country—you cannot talk about intergenerational inequality without actually addressing something as fundamental as the job-ready graduates scheme.

Innovative Research Universities found that it is segregating our higher education sector, putting degrees like law out of reach for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They found that total domestic bachelor's degree commencements declined by 3.5 per cent between 2020 and 2024. They said: … but low SES student commencements were down 9.8%— almost 10 per cent down— … with a 2.2% decline for non low SES students.

So, clearly, when we talk about intergenerational inequality, this is a matter of urgency for this government and for this parliament. IRU goes on to say: For courses with the highest student contribution rates— under the JRG policy— (including Humanities, Commerce and Law), low SES commencements declined 19.7%. That's a long way from leaving no-one behind, when you have a 20 per cent decline in low-SES commencements for those degrees.

PBO modelling I commissioned in 2025 found JRG has jacked up student debt by $10.26 billion. New research from Universities Australia shows that, since 2021, the cost of maintaining a basic student standard of living has increased by 29 per cent, well above economy-wide inflation. We've got students in Australia now paying over $50,000 for an undergraduate degree.

And these changes, as young people point out, were made by some people who had free university education and others who had very affordable university education that they could pay off once they got into the workforce, yet both sides of politics here seem very happy to be saddling young Australians with $50,000-plus of debt that they're going to be paying off into their 30s, into their 40s.

Surely we don't want a two-tier higher education system in this country. The whole idea behind HECS, or HELP, is that, regardless of your background, regardless of the balance of your parents' bank account, you can pursue your dreams. If you want to go to university, you can go to university and study what you love.

This business of trying to incentivise students into certain degrees based on the cost clearly doesn't work. Young people are not making their life decisions based on what they think their HECS debt is—unless you're from a low-SES background; then you certainly are because $50,000 worth of debt is not something that you want. Young people are making and should be able to make their decision based on what they love, what interests them and how they want to contribute to our society.

There's wide recognition amongst the major parties, from what I've heard in their contributions, that it's a failed scheme. Let's get on with changing this scheme and let's get on with making it fairer for young Australians who are studying. One of the related issues has been raised by the crossbench.

I thank the member for Kooyong for her work on this. She introduced a private member's bill on Monday that goes to the timing of HECS indexation. As a country, we are happy to charge indexation—essentially interest—on money that graduates have already repaid to the ATO.

We wouldn't allow that anywhere else. Why does the Commonwealth government think that it's acceptable to charge indexation on money that has already been repaid? You can see why young people are getting cynical about some of the decisions made in here.

You wouldn't accept the bank charging you interest on money you'd already repaid to them. Why do we do this to students? We've heard some contributions slamming the bill rather than putting forward amendments.

I would hope that we would be able to engage on an issue like this and actually make a bill better. We've also heard about the need to get more young people into STEM. I think that's something that people across the parliament agree with, but the major parties need to understand that you can't do that unless you fund research in this country.

I speak to so many academics and researchers about the lack of funding for research and just how hard it is to recommend to their students that they go into research. For one, it's so damn hard to get research money. If you can, you're spending 30 to 40 per cent of your time filling out paperwork for grants.

I've spoken to researchers who say they can't, hand on heart, say to young Australians, 'Yes, go into research; it's a great career,' because we are at record low spending on R&D as a percentage of GDP in this country. We are so far below the OECD average. Labor, again, had big promises, coming into government with a target of three per cent for spending on R&D.

It hasn't shifted at all. We've got the SERD review sitting there now but no action. No doubt the minister will say, 'We're taking a very calculated and methodical approach,' but I hear from researchers that this is desperate.

For one, we're losing people here in Australia, as we've seen with CSIRO. There have been more cuts at CSIRO under the Labor government than we saw under the Abbott government. We're seeing a talent drain—young, talented Australians who are going overseas.

I met with a professor who had just had his hundredth PhD student graduate with a doctorate, and 96 of the hundred were working overseas—had gone to Europe, had gone to the US. It just shows how tragically shortsighted our approach is when it comes to R&D in this country. You have to assume that the real reason that we haven't seen reform to Job-ready Graduates is that it costs money.

As was pointed out by Senator O'Sullivan, part of JRG lowered the cost of a whole range of courses and jacked up other courses. So there is a cost to undoing that. There is a cost to having a system where, regardless of what you study, you have a manageable debt that you can pay off.

But surely we have to start viewing this as an investment in our future. This is something that surely the Treasury should be looking at and saying: 'Yes, it's going to cost us money, but we're investing in our future. We're investing in education.

We're investing in young people in this country.' I won't tolerate that excuse from the government when they won't bring in something like a gas export tax, which the ACTU put forward, that would raise us $17 billion every single year, which is us basically getting paid for our own resources—for the export of our gas. They won't touch something like the fuel tax credits for the biggest, most profitable miners in this country.

That's another $3 or $4 billion. That's $20 billion a year. How is that fiscally responsible?

How is that fair to Australians who have a HECS debt and have been slugged until recently? I think there were welcome changes to the rate of indexation, but they are still being charged indexation on money they've already paid back to the ATO. Why are we a country that raises revenue by charging indexation on amounts that have already been repaid to the ATO and raises revenue by having one of the most expensive passports in the world?

If we go to 2030, we're going to get almost as much from Australian citizens paying their passport fees as we'll get from the petroleum resource rent tax. That should embarrass every one of us in this place. That is not the country we should aspire to be.

There is money there if we want to invest in young Australians. There is money there if we want to make our higher education system truly accessible to the point where we have first-in-family students taking that opportunity, graduating, moving into the workforce and serving Australians; where research is seen as an exciting career; where we have more funding for research and development in this country; where we have a government that doesn't just keep kicking the can down the road rather than making the hard decisions to change things and to actually take on hard reform.

On the one hand, we're happy to slug Australians. As I said, we charge them indexation on money already repaid to the ATO. We slug them.

It'll be $1 billion next year to get passports in this country. For an Australian passport, we charge double what the Canadians are paying, what the British are paying, what the Americans are paying and what the Kiwis are paying. That's flat out revenue raising.

But we won't even take on the multinationals. We won't lay down the law for these big hyperscalers who want to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data centres here. We won't put a mechanism in place to say, 'We want a fair return so we can invest in things like education.' We're going to be in the same situation we're in with gas if we continue with the major parties.

We're going to look back and we say, 'What have we done?' There was a great little sugar hit to GDP during construction, but now we're not actually getting a good return from this AI boom and all these data centres that are owned by multinationals because they don't pay much tax here, and we have to pay international prices to access compute in our own data centres.

I thank Senator Faruqi for this bill. I really think this is a matter of urgency for this parliament.