policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Free
for all
With New Zealand offering free
university study this year, is it time
Australia revisited this path?
By Loren Smith
W
hen Jacinda Ardern became
New Zealand’s prime minister
in October last year, many
were surprised because of her youth,
inexperience and femininity. Staunchly
Labour, she moved quickly to enact her
‘progressive, anti-capitalist’ agenda. Among
her reforms was making all forms of higher
education completely free – initially for
students’ first year.
The move is likely rattling the Australian
tertiary education sector. It is facing the
opposite situation: government funding
cuts to universities. Despite this, could
we ultimately follow our antipodean
neighbour’s lead?
Whitlam’s legacy
Free university in Australia is a Labor
legacy. From 1974, the Whitlam
government abolished university fees
in a bid to make university entry more
accessible. However, within a decade or
so, it became clear this was costing the
government too much. So, in 1989, the
10
Labor party re-introduced fees under
the HECS scheme (now known as HELP),
whereby university students could take out
interest-free loans to pay for their studies,
repayable once their incomes reached a
certain threshold.
This system persists, yet some academics
are calling for a return to the 1974‑era policy.
Associate Professor James Goodman
of UTS, for example, holds this view. He
believes universities should be public, not
private, institutions.
Vetting providers
When it comes to VET, tertiary education
payment policy differences between
Australia and New Zealand are more
extreme. Not only does Australia not offer
free VET training, it imposes interest on
loans for some of these courses, loan caps
on others, and for certain courses, doesn’t
offer loans at all.
Craig Robertson, CEO of TAFE Directors
Australia, thinks New Zealand should
be applauded for the move. However,
he cautioned that it should come with
conditions. First, if faced with economic
pressures, the government should not
be at liberty to prescribe which courses
or degrees are free. Second, he thinks
students should have some ‘skin in the
game’ to prevent the development of a
view of higher education as disposable.
Want not, waste not
ANU’s Professor Bruce Chapman, the
‘architect’ of HECS, is against free university
tuition. His position is that not only should
students pay for university, but, like in the
case of some VET courses, they should
pay interest on loans. At the Australian
Conference of Economists in Sydney in July
last year, he justified his view:
“One of the problems with student loans
– not just HECS, all student loans – is that
governments ultimately bear all the costs of
non-repayment.”
He was referring to the fact that there is
at least $1.7 billion in HECS debt at present.
A 2016 government report suggested
this amount would rise to $11.1 billion by
2025–26.
In the words of Dr Tim Pitman, research
development adviser at Curtin University,
Chapman is a “purist economist”, so
his view may make fiscal sense, but is it
socially sound?
Fair before free
Pitman thinks free tertiary education is
great in theory but potentially unworkable
in practice. For one, he believes