Emma Gillespie

So that made, you know, STEM, teaching, nursing degrees significantly cheaper.

But at the same time, the fees for humanities, arts and law degrees soared.

So it became much more expensive to study what we studied, media, communications, journalism, for example, because the idea was that there are too many graduate media students.

There are not enough media jobs.

There are not enough teaching graduates.

And there are an overwhelming number of teaching jobs.

But what ended up happening is, you know, that numbers didn't significantly shift for those more expensive degrees.

And so students just end up getting a bigger debt that takes many, many more years to pay down.

I think it makes total sense.

And I don't want to overgeneralise and speak for all 18-year-olds, but I know when I was 18 and I was looking into what degrees I wanted to study, the cost of them didn't matter to me at all because I just thought HECS was this magical thing where I wouldn't have to think about what it costs to go to uni for 10 or 20 years.

Making a salary of X thousand dollars a year, that's future me's problem.

So I do think that there is a conversation there about whether or not this has been effective.

Ryan called it the worst tertiary education policy this century.

She says that every young Australian deserves access to the same affordable education that previous generations including many current politicians benefited from.

Well, the Education Minister, Jason Clare, actually responded to questions directly from Monique Ryan during question time last week.

He pointed to that 20% discount from last year as the biggest cut to student debt by any Australian government ever.

He said that it's taken a massive weight off the backs of young Australians and

And on the point of indexation, I think no one will be surprised to hear that he said the government has already made some, quote, important changes to the way HECS is indexed.

And that had many important benefits for young people right across the country.

Interestingly, though, he did say he recognises that there is a lot of, quote, unfinished business and there's more work to do.