The government is about to cut student debt by 20% across the board – so how much debt do young Australians have, and how much has it changed?
Labor’s student debt relief bill is likely to pass with bipartisan support and will slash the Hecs/Help debt for about 3 million graduates by an average of $5,500, according to the government.
Data from the tax office shows that the average Hecs/Help debt held by younger Australians increased by a third between 2009 and 2024, even with inflation taken into account. This coincides with a consistent increase in the time it will take to pay off the debt – now almost a decade.
Some economists say Labor’s 20% cut isn’t the fairest way to relieve student debt, while higher education expert Prof Andrew Norton says “more graduates will be caught on a debt treadmill, repaying less than the annual indexation on their Help balance”.
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On Wednesday, ACT senator David Pocock fronted the media alongside five other independent MPs and a string of peak bodies calling for structural reform to higher education – including student tertiary fees.
Under the Coalition’s Job-Ready Graduates package (JRG), introduced in 2021, the student contribution for degrees including arts, law and business drastically increased, with students now accruing debts of about $17,000 per year of study.
The federal government has deferred reforming the widely panned scheme to an independent tertiary commission, established this year in its interim phase.
“Labor want another review into something that we knew was broken when it was introduced,” Pocock said on Wednesday. “Where is the courage from this government to embrace hard reform?”
The independent member for Kooyong, Dr Monique Ryan, will this week table an amendment to the student debt bill to reverse the JRG package and change the timing of Hecs/Help indexation until after prepayments are made.
(Student debts are indexed every year before the ATO takes into account the payments made on them, meaning the interest doesn’t take into account the repayments.)
“If the government truly values education, it must find the capacity to fund it properly,” she said.
The National Union of Students is on her side. Its president, Ashlyn Horton, said cutting debt was a “long overdue move” that indicated Canberra “might finally be listening” to concern about the rising cost of degrees.
But she said it “doesn’t come close to fixing the structural mess that got us here”. In the meantime, the $50,000 arts degree is here, and dying with your debt is a real possibility.
