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Universities are Ripping off Students and the Country

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Many graduates are asking whether attending university and getting a HECS debt was worth it.  For many, the answer is no.

With Vice-Chancellors earning over $1 million a year, degrees are costing more yet worth less.

One Nation would stop universities ripping off students and cut the HECS debt being accumulated. We’ll also require universities to publish the average salaries of graduates for each degree, so you know what you’re signing up for.

Transcript

I speak on the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024. The university degree system is failing our students and our country. Schoolies is happening right now on the Gold Coast and across the country. These school leavers are too busy celebrating finishing high school to be listening to this speech. Yet maybe their parents will be listening. To schoolies I say: this is the last break some of you will have before heading to university. Enjoy it. Be warned: universities do not have your best interests at heart. Today, they act like a greedy corporate business, and you’re their cash cow. For people heading to uni, please be aware that you’re taking on a very big HECS debt. That debt is meant to be in return for something. Uni is meant to give a good qualification that students can turn into a sound career. For many people, though, universities aren’t doing this any more. Instead, unis are loading up school leavers with millions in debt for degrees that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. 

Many people watching might wonder how they’re getting away with this. If a uni doesn’t give you a degree that can enable you to earn money, and you can’t pay back the debt, then the unis should go broke, right? HECS is completely different. The uni gets the money upfront from the government—from the taxpayers. Then you owe HECS to the government, seemingly forever for some students. The uni gives you a degree that doesn’t live up to its promises and immediately laughs all the way to the bank while you’re stuck paying HECS debt to the Albanese Labor government. The universities’ lust for money shows up in the data. In 2005-06, an average person with a HECS debt owed $10,400. Today, the average debt is an astonishing $27,600. That’s nearly triple in a bit under 20 years. 

The entire system needs a fundamental reset. One Nation believes that the future students at schoolies right now should be given all of the information to make an informed choice about their future. This bill does not help students do that. Every university should be forced to publish the average salary of graduates from each year and degree at one year, five years and ten years after completion as a form of accountability and quality control, putting responsibility back on the universities. This would break the university scam of treating students like cash cows to load up with debt for useless degrees. It would empower school leavers to make a choice that matches their goals based on real-world data, not leave them in the dark. This data is available. Every uni student is required to have a unique student identifier number—a USI. Everyone with a HECS debt has a tax file number. These have been going for years. It would be simple to match up tax file numbers with unique student identifiers and publish graduates’ average earnings, anonymised to protect identity. 

But the government won’t do this, because universities are powerful. They earn unfathomable amounts of money with amazingly overpaid vice-chancellors at their heads—and there’s the core. As the Australian Financial Review’s journalist Julie Hare reports: 

In 2022, Paddy Nixon, the then-vice chancellor of the University of Canberra, which was ranked equal 421st best university in the world, took home a salary package of $1,045,000—the same as Dame Louise Richardson who was running the world’s best university—Oxford. 

In South Australia, Colin Stirling, boss of Flinders University—which ranked 380th in the world—took home a pay packet of $1,345,000. That’s not bad, considering it was over $100,000 more than the salary of Lawrence Bacow, who was head of Harvard University! At the University of Queensland, the vice-chancellor earns over $1.2 million a year—more than double what the Prime Minister earns. 

Despite being defined as not-for-profit and exempt from tax on revenue, these universities are making billions of dollars. In 2023 the University of Queensland generated $2.6 billion in revenue. Half of that, $1.3 billion, was spent on employee expenses, like the vice-chancellor’s salary. The University of Queensland sits on a piggy bank of more than $4.1 billion in net assets alone. These universities are not simple little charities. They’re huge businesses rivalling the top 10 companies on Australia’s stock market. They have abused the social contract with our country and the generous guarantees that governments—taxpayers!—give them. 

This bill would make some minor changes to the indexation of HECS debt, bringing it down from 16 per cent over 2½ years to 11.1 per cent. But it only tinkers around the edges. This bill does nothing to address the fact that the average HECS debt has tripled in two decades. It does nothing to make sure that it’s worthwhile getting into debt for a degree. It does nothing to address the fact that many people going to university would be better off getting a trade qualification. It does nothing to address universities using prerecorded lectures, sometimes more than three years old, and playing them back once a week forever. There’s no expense, just lots of revenue. 

One Nation’s plan for HECS debt and universities would fix all the things this bill does not fix—all the things that this bill neglects. Inflation is compounding in a way that the original architects never expected. We need to stop the pile-on and give people time to pay down their debt. To do this, One Nation would freeze HECS indexation completely for the next three years. 

Secondly, universities must be made accountable for the degrees they’re delivering and the education they’re not delivering. One Nation would force universities to publish the average salaries of graduates from their degrees one year, five years and 10 years after graduation, so that students know what they’re signing up for. Is the debt going to be worth it? 

Delivering degrees is getting cheaper, so course fees should be getting cheaper too. One Nation would cut the fees for subjects that use repeated, prerecorded lectures and large numbers of group assignments. Our universities should be focused on delivering a good education for Australian students first. They should be focused on students first and on delivering good education. One Nation will enforce English standards for international students, so that universities aren’t sacrificing Australian educations to increase profit from international students—to the detriment of Australian students. We’ve discussed that in the past. I’ve raised it. 

Finally, having a HECS debt shouldn’t mean graduates are locked out of buying a house, which they are at the moment. In combination with our people’s mortgage scheme, offering five per cent fixed-rate mortgages, people with a HECS debt would be able to roll their debt into a home loan and pay it off together. Where they can’t get a loan from the bank because of their HECS debt, One Nation will get HECS debtors into a stable, clean, cheap home loan. 

Mr Andrew Norton, a professor in the practice of higher education policy noted during the inquiry into this bill: 

All parts of the system – the original fees charged, the indexation arrangements, and the repayment system – need to work together in a coherent way … 

The parts of this system are not working for the country. Instead, they’re working for highly paid vice-chancellors and the consultants in the education sector. 

One Nation believes in a university system that works for the students that choose to study there and in the same type of support for people doing a trade. Until we fix the core parts of the system, the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024 is merely tinkering around the edges. That’s all it’s doing. One Nation will make the changes needed to ensure a university system to serve students and to serve our country. 

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State-Sanctioned Start-ups Proposal a Sham

Before the election Labor promised to give grants to students who want to start-up a new business.

They’ve broken that promise and will funnel money to universities to run undefined “start-up” courses which will only leave students in real debt. It’s a Labor plan to funnel more money to woke universities instead of helping students.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I now speak on the Education Legislation Amendment (Startup Year and Other Measures) Bill 2023. This bill does three things. Schedule 1 creates an entirely new form of HECS called STARTUP-HELP, or Startup Year help. Schedule 2 increases the funding cap in the Australian Research Council Act. And schedule 3 adds Avondale University as a provider under the Higher Education Support Act.

Schedules 2 and 3 are relatively uncontroversial and should be passed before the next financial year. Deceptively, though, Labor has tied those time-sensitive measures with the controversial program in schedule 1 so that it can be whisked through. Deceit—yet another example of government deceit. Let’s consider schedule 1. Let’s cut through the deceit!

This bill started off with the announcement of an initial consultation paper and a student survey to seek the views of current students and recent graduates on the proposed design. It sounds like a great start, and yet the government has not published the outcomes of the survey and it has not published the submissions to the consultation paper it started. We only know about some submissions—in fact, only those submissions whose submitters published them themselves! Of these, many expressed concern about the lack of detail around four things: the criteria for inclusion of eligible programs; how students would be selected; how the allocation of 2,000 places would be distributed; and what the funding could be spent on. Those are pretty critical things and the government wants to hide them.

Given these concerns, it would make sense to have an initial pilot program. Many submissions appeared to agree with this and it was even suggested in the consultation paper. Yet, no, the government has decided that it won’t do this, instead pushing straight ahead with the full implementation of an expensive and undefined, untested program, and the creation of an entirely new category of debt. The program doesn’t make sense. As even the Australian Technology Network group of universities suggested, if you want to encourage startups, give the money directly to students, not to universities.

That was the government’s election promise—to provide grants for startups. Instead we have this Startup Year program, where money will be going to universities. If someone has a startup idea, under this program the government won’t give that person money to invest in their idea, to develop research, to produce prototypes or to get market research. Instead, the government will give money to universities, and the student will get left with a HECS debt afterwards. Reading about this program, readers might think that the intention isn’t to actually support startup businesses. People might think the intention is to support universities with yet another new cash cow and to funnel extra money towards them through an entirely new type of debt.

Schedule 2 of the bill provides updated funding caps. The minister explained these new funding caps as innocent indexation adjustments. Looking at the table provided in the explanatory memorandum, we have to ask: what the hell is the basis for the indexation rate? It certainly doesn’t seem to be the CPI, the consumer price index. For 2022-23, the increase is two per cent. For 2023-24, the increase is 4.8 per cent. That is 1½ times higher. For 2024-25, the increase is—wait for it—7.5 per cent. For 2025-26, the increase is 2.46 per cent.

If these increases were in line with CPI indexation, we would expect the larger indexation to apply in 2022-23—but no. Instead, the 7.46 per cent indexation won’t come into effect until 2024-25 after two years of additional indexation has already been applied. So you’re compounding the interest. Anyone familiar with how compound interest works will recognise that pushing the larger increase further down the line actually results in a larger increase to the funding. These increases amount to a significant additional 17 per cent or $137 million of taxpayer money going into the Australian Research Council’s budget over the forward estimates. It’s hard to consider these amounts as innocent indexation adjustments given their size and the deceptive way they’ve been applied. There’s that word again; it shrouds this government—deceit.

I note that Senator Henderson intends to move amendments that in effect split the bill and set up a pilot program. Senator Henderson’s amendments would carve out the Startup Year program from the funding and Avondale University matters which must be dealt with before July. They would establish a proper pilot program. This is appropriate. Let’s deal with the time-sensitive matters now and then have a proper debate about this back-of-the-envelope idea from Labor for state sanctioned startups.

To properly encourage startups in this country, we need to fix the broken taxation system and make sure energy is as cheap as humanly possible. The government is crippling startups by making it difficult to start up.

Shovelling money instead towards universities and building a HECS debt will do nothing to encourage business in this country. It’s a transfer of wealth from students to universities.

We won’t let the Albanese government hold us to ransom, bundling up necessary amendments with radical programs. If not amended and if it remains dishonest and deceitful, One Nation will oppose this bill.

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