Emma Gillespie

Yeah, it was massive.

And you're absolutely right.

It was the biggest single increase since 1990.

This was in 2023 when hex debts increased by 7.1% due to a period of really high inflation at the time.

And that sparked plenty of debate.

I think we all became crash course overnight experts in indexation because we were like, what's going on with our hex debts?

Now, that ended up triggering the government to pass legislation to address that challenge of high inflation.

And it ended up tying indexation to either the rate at which wages increase, wage growth, or at which prices increase, inflation, whichever is the lowest of those two.

So the idea now is that your debt can't grow faster than wages are growing.

So after the government changed those rules, we then saw indexation lift to 3.2%.

2% last year.

Now it is 2.8%.

That's the lowest indexation since 2021.

And it means that yesterday on the 1st of June, a $30,000 HECS debt would now sit at around $30,840.

So that was a change that was actually recommended by the 2024 final report from the Australian Universities Accord.

It handed down several recommendations and one of those was to overhaul indexation to be fairer for students.

Yeah, so that was triggered in part of the government's response to that 7.1% indexation.

So we saw legislation change to how indexation is calculated, but we also saw this $3 billion of student debt wiped nationally.

So we're talking about, you know, a one-off initiative with that debt clearing versus an ongoing change with how indexation is calculated.

Now, the government did this through legislation.