Emma Gillespie

growing on money that they've already repaid just because the tax system hasn't caught up yet.

So yes, it would cost money, but is that fair?

Is the kind of overarching question here.

Monique Ryan has also called for a Morrison era scheme to be scrapped when we're having this HEX conversation, which I found interesting.

And that's the Job Ready Graduate Scheme.

I don't know if you remember this one, Billie.

I don't.

But it was rolled out in 2021.

And it doubled the cost of many degrees.

So the idea was to encourage more students to participate in degrees where there was an employment need, where there was maybe understaffing issues or a lack of interest.

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.