Job (Un)Ready

In the spirit of ANU's motto, "First, to know the nature of things," we acknowledge the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia, and their connections to land, sea, and waterways which were never seeded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present and extend our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Oh, can I tell you, democracy sausages are my favourite meal? They are galuloo with no saloonle. Get about what you've been told by the hate media. An optimistic, they have the right idea. Google in the night. Oh, such a sick affair. This is democracy manifest. Good day there and welcome to another democracy sausage. I'm Mark Kenny, Director of the Australian Studies Institute at ANU. And I'm Dr Maria Teflago from the School of Politics and International Relations. Now, when I say the letters J-R-G, what do you think of? They stand for job ready graduates. An odious policy created by the last coalition government who preferentially charge some university degrees more and make others cheaper. Based on, well, presumably based on the needs of the economy and capacity to pay, projected income, it's a range of things. Now, it's not very popular. Labor had promised to scrap the policy, but guess what? It hasn't. Joining us to discuss this from the student perspective, are the president of the National Union of Students, Felix Hughes, and the president of the National Union of Students at ANU, Charlie L. Wood. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Great to be here. Labor said that J-R-G was unfair, that his job ready graduates was unfair and wrong in principle, but has not got rid of it. Perhaps, Charlie, I'll go to you first on this. Was there an expectation among students that this was going to be got rid of? And what's the tone of conversation amongst students about what appears to be paralysis on this question? Absolutely. I mean, we students expected for it to go when the labor government came into power. I mean, labor is a party of education, a party of education policy. I think we also had an expectation for that to happen. So it is certainly disappointing to see it not happen yet. I mean, I know there's some mechanics with ATEC and stuff that's in there, but there was a general expectation from students that it was going to go. In terms of our students of feeling, I mean, the most of the cohort that I study in undergraduate degree now don't know any different, don't know what it was like before. J-R-G. So there's almost a bit of an information thing that I think Felix and I know in kind of student representation, we have to tell, we have to tell like a story, we have to tell about, this is how much you're paying, this is how much your older siblings might have paid. And so I think that's something that we're trying to do, but a lot of students don't quite realize just how bad it is until you sort of ask them to go into their ATO and say, "Oh yeah, he's $50,000, $50,000. That's a lot of money." And I think some students get very angry about it when they say that. Yeah, Felix, do you want to just sort of explain to us what J-R-G is in terms of its logic as far as you understand it? Yeah, so J-R-G was introduced by Scott Morrison with the intention of driving students to particular degrees, essentially creating demand based off price. So they increase the cost of humanities degrees and commerce degrees and law degrees and decrease the cost of STEM-ledded degrees. The idea being marketplace degrees. It didn't work at all, there's been almost no shift in what students are studying. It's essentially just created $50,000 degrees for students, which is a debt, they have no chance of paying off. It not only did that, though, it also decreased the amount of funding universities are getting each year. So you're finding J-R-G is one of those very unique issues where students, staff, vice-chancellors, chancellors, and the entire sector are almost entirely on the same page saying this hasn't worked. It hasn't actually achieved its stated policy objectives, which was to increase demand into those demolated fields. And it's left students with tens and tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Yeah, I think the other pace for it, as speaking as someone who teaches in university, is that actually the actual dollar figure going to the STEM degree to teach that student went down as well. So it was deeply perverse and it's been an interesting actual real-life experiment in incentives and a really nice demonstration of the elasticity of degree choice in demand. It's not like two different brands of toothpaste. Deciding to become an engineer is very different to deciding to become a lawyer. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's one of the great lessons of this, hasn't it? That you can make a degree, a particular degree, more expensive relative to another. But it's a deferred cost for the student. I mean, they're racking up huge debts and coming out of their higher education degrees with carrying these huge debts, which is regrettable. But at the time they're making these choices, they're not making them on the basis of cost. I mean, you're a whatever you are 18 years old and you're thinking about, correct? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I chose to study my degree when I was living in high school because I wanted to study. And I knew what the JRG scheme was. I knew that it had made my degree more expensive, but it didn't change the fact that I wanted to study policy. It just doesn't, as Mary said, it's a completely, they're not substitutable goods. I study economics. It's, I didn't assign it on this, finally enough last semester, that the economic logic is so incredibly flawed that it's sort of almost humorous in its failure. It is really, really sort of from an economic lens, hard to see the rationale behind chaining up. Mary, is it political? I think that was a political dimension to this. I don't think it is an accident that Arts degrees are now extremely expensive, a degree that has traditionally been, like, been taken up by working class students in particular, but also has produced a type of cultural politics that many within the coalition find. Deeply offensive through to a danger to the body politic and to a Western civilization. This is basically a kind of an antipathy towards unions, really. It's not an antipathy towards universities. Universities, that's right. I mean, this policy was dovetailed with the coalition's choice at the time during the COVID pandemic to go back to the legislature and to explicitly remove universities from the JobKeeper scheme. It is one of the pieces in the very sorry tale of the sort of poor state that many universities find themselves in right now. And as we began this podcast by making the point, for all that and for all the animus directed toward it by Labor, halfway through its second term, hasn't done anything about it. Yeah, so I mean, I think Felix, you might have a sort of, you might have something to sort of say here, but you know, one of the things that I don't think was anticipated in 22 is that the government would go about creating this agency called ATEC, which seems to be doing industry planning for the universities and they've given them the job of solving JRG, but of course it doesn't exist yet as a body. Yeah, I think a couple thoughts on what you said earlier about the politics of it. James Patterson gave a speech at the Ramsey Center recently where he essentially said that conservatives don't see themselves in the humanities departments at universities. And he said something was long the lines of he doesn't believe that cabinet at the time would have approved job, job, job, job graduates that deprioritized humanities if they actually thought they had a stake, most being taught there. And he kind of said, I think the quiet part out allowed, which was it was a punishment for the departments that conservatives don't feel welcome in. And the idea that students are paying the price because somehow conservatives don't feel seen in humanities department, I think is ridiculous. Some sort of it seems almost ludicrous to me to say that. Well, it's hardly a basis for national policies. I mean, it's just not sound in that regard. It almost feels like a flashback to student politics. Like they're still living this era where they're not engaged in these departments. We should punish them. It doesn't feel at all what a government or cabinet should be doing. It's not the first time I've heard that about going on in Canberra. I need to start to be honest. And as the establishment of ATEC, ATEC was a really positive step for our higher education system having an independent body, but it's not doing everything we wanted it to. We were told throughout the process of establishing ATEC that this was the first step in fixing JRG that ATEC would have a very specific fee setting capacity. And that just hasn't been the case. We know that they're doing a piece of work at the moment to investigate what those priorities are going to look like 12 months from now, but really it looks like it's kicking the can down the road for us. They're doing good work and we know that the Chief Commissioner Barney Glover has said that it's not going well enough and that JRG has failed, but we're not really seeing that commitment to action from the government still. Yeah, and I guess it's the prospect that we could get through two terms of this government, who knows what happens at the election and nothing will have changed, which is hardly what you call urgent. There were problems within the policy, even if you accepted the policy, there were problems within the operation of it. For example, Mark Warburton out of University of Melbourne has written about this in the conversation. He's done a report for the government to consider. We'll talk to him later in the year, but he makes the point, for example, that certain degrees are referenced with a lower cost, like teaching and nursing, some of these. But if you're a history teacher, then you're not just doing an education, learning how to, you know, going to lectures about teaching and about how to be a teacher, you also need to be doing history. In which case, you know, you are doing probably an arts degree and you are paying, you know, more for that. It's got internal inconsistencies within it. And of course, it makes generalizations about the sorts of incomes that people can have down the track arising from their degrees. And some of those assumptions are just, as Warburton shows, are just wrong in terms of earning capacity. - How do you feel this will impact on your life planning and your life choices that you've got a debt that, you know, someone who was under the original hex skin or a much earlier version of it, where the rate on the interest rate was much lower, and it was much more designed to be facilitative, as opposed to now, like there's been several changes to the structure of the way hex, the hex debt is calculated, which makes it less fair. I mean, what is, you sort of said, students don't really understand that like the way JRG functions, but do they understand like these other changes in their hex system? I mean, I suppose, talk us through the politics a bit more of how this plays out in the student body politic, particularly when they're facing other issues as well. - Yeah, I mean, definitely, we, you know, self-declare, that's one of the things we're trying to do, we're trying to educate people how much they are actually paying for their degree, 'cause we think it's pretty ridiculous. But like by comparison, my brother, he did PPE, so I do PPE in public policy. He did PPE. - For those people who don't know, PPE. - Politics philosophy and economics. The glorified arts degrees, I've been talking many times. - Well, he did PPE. - No need to glorify an arts degree, it's a perfectly solid gratification. - He's a heated PPE at University of Queensland and graduated in 2002. His hex debt was 30 grand. Mine already, and I've still got a copy of his left, is almost 50. And it's just, it's a really, really scary comparison to look at, because when I'm thinking about, you know, later down the track, when I eventually, you know, hopefully fingers crossed, want to look buying a house, and I'm trying to even think about applying for a home deposit, while still having 30 grand worth of X to pay off. Well, it's just not feasible, or even when I'm looking at doing other things, like going overseas, wanting to take up further study, doing post-grad, et cetera. It's just such an incredible debt burden, which is a real sort of struggle to contend with. - And Felix, did you want to add to that? - Yeah, well, I think my debt, I checked it out, it was 47 or something ridiculous for a bachelor's in national relations. And I think one of the other parts of it for us is, the government talks about fairness and equality, but it is changing what those actual degree cohorts look like. It's decreasing the amount of students who can enroll from low-sales to economic backgrounds. IOU, the innovative research universities, did a piece of research earlier in the year, where they looked at it and said that about 20% of course, what, there's been about a decrease of 20% in courses that were in creative as part of JRG from low-sales to economic students. That is, I think, really confronting. The idea that law faculties and arts faculties are becoming richer and richer and less representative of a diverse cohort of students. And when you are telling students, oh, you're actually paying more for your degree, the students you're able to say that to, it looks different now that I did five years ago. You're actually seeing in the classroom less diversity as well as a part of JRG. I think a thing I'd like to kind of add on or ask you as well, Felix, is, you know, it's been a tower of time in the sector for the last couple of years. We've seen really significant scandals, perhaps the most significant is the revelations coming out of ICAC at the University of Wulongong, and possible, you know, additional actions that might arise from serious allegations of corruption at that University and the use of consultants. There's been a number of public inquiries here at the Senate federally, and then, of course, there's one ongoing in New South Wales, and one has just issued its report in Victoria. I suppose, I know you were involved in submissions to the Victorian inquiry. The findings out of that were positive, but on the sort of more anodyne side, increasing student and staff representation on university councils, but not necessarily dealing with some of the other attendant issues. I suppose what's your view on where this sort of reform pressure is at and what needs to be done next? Yeah, I think there's been a really strong view in the sector for a long time that locking students and staff out of these decision-making bodies means not only are they not represented when those views are discussed, but essentially when the decisions come into effect, students and staff will say, "Oh, this never worked," and universities will put up their hand and say, "Oh, we're shocked, this is so surprising to us." And what universities will often result back to us say, "Oh, there's always one staff, one student member on our university council or academic board, whereas for a student or staff member who's going through that room alone, it can be really confronting, it can be really intimidating." If you're one student first in 16 adults, and as soon as you speak or say something, all of them shut you down. It can be really intimidating. And so I think the recommendation, which is to have multiple students in every single one of those rooms, is a really good step. It's positive, we welcome it. It is not enough. I think it's been growing pressure for really rethinking how universities approach their entire model. Universities have been run like corporations for far too long. And really they should recenter on why they are there. Who do they serve, why do they exist? And a big part of that reason is for their staff and students. And actually to bring back their public integrity, but also the public confidence in universities, the public has to see students and staff represented in those decision making rooms. I think there was 17 recommendations out of Victorian inquiry. A lot of them are really good. A lot of them will have practical impacts for students and staff. It didn't go as far as I would have liked. It didn't do everything that we recommended, but it is a positive step in the right direction. And that's what we're seeing across the sector. Tell a year in a university council, what's it like? - Whoa, wow, load of question. Oh, I mean, A&U, you mentioned what's happening in the University of Wollongong and ICAC and we've seen at UTS as well. There are so many case studies of universities which have kind of crumbled under the past couple of years. Sitting on the university council, A&U is actually, I would say relatively better position than on the universities we have. - You don't hear that often. - Exactly, which is an interesting thing to point out, but we have two student members. I'm the undergraduate student member, we have a postgraduate student member, and then we have four elected staff members there as well. So there's a total of six elected members on the council. There are seven appointed and you have a chance to chancellor. It is relatively better than what the sector is seeing. And I think we can see that play out on the A&U council. I mean, there's a whole bunch of reporting as to what happened last year. And obviously, I won't comment on what's happened in the SU, et cetera, but I think it is really, really important that as Felix said, you have multiple people from those elected cohorts in those rooms because they understand their experience. And they're not there to represent a particular viewpoint, but their lived experiences is incredibly vital. And as Maria pointed out, there are so many times, obviously huge major organizational changes that comes into effect. And then it fails. And the university's like, oh, well, how could we have known that was ever going to happen? And it's like, well, if you listen to the students, because there's been plenty of times where I have seen both in my position as a council member but also as the union president where something will come through. And I'll go, oh, have you thought of XYZ and the university go, no, because they're not students. And they don't go through the daily things that students go through. So it seems like a pretty simple concept to have sort of those representative voices and those sort of like the opinions, but unfortunately, a lot of other universities don't have that same understanding. But I think a lot of the Victoria inquiry and a lot more of that media pressure will hopefully lead to those changes. - My university at Monash put a submission into the Victorian inquiry where it essentially said, they claimed that there's absolutely no correlation between the number of elected members and better government in general. And they said that the number of elected members doesn't ensure diversity of opinions, which I think is just living in this crazy alternative reality. And if you say that to an ordinary person, they'll just look at it and go, well, having more voices in the room does increase their diversity of opinions. That is actually just wrong. - Well, it's just bad social science too. (laughing) - I mean, given the number of staff and student elected representatives in Victoria and universities is one and sometimes two, there's not that much variation for them to compare to, is there? - No, that's right. Can I just go back to, let's say looking at this sort of, I suppose in a broader philosophical kind of frame, how does students, this question to both of you, how does students feel about the student experience on one side and the cost of education on the other that they are, is this a topic of discussion, a big student experience does come up a lot. We hear it's not what it was. - I understand, I mean, I talked to my older siblings who went to the university sort of 10 years ago and it is incredibly different. I mean, again, I'd say the ANU is in a slightly better position post-COVID because we have a large amount of on-campus students and I think we get a little bit better of a university experience that other universities have. But I've got friends at other universities and other cities who, they'll wake up, they'll go into uni, they'll go into a tutorial, they'll do the tutorial and they'll go home. And there isn't really that campus vibrancy and that sort of same kind of experience that people used to have. And I think that is going to have an ongoing effect. Like we always talk about how, yes, your university to get you degree, but there's also so much more that you do there. You meet your friends, you might get involved in, you know, got a bit of student politics. But I think there is a huge piece of growing up and developing as a person that university gives you, which is outside of the classroom. And I think that the more that we, kind of move into this sort of online learning aspect the more do we kind of you know take away those things We will then start to see the graduate outcomes suffer as a result And I mean I've had this conversation with them quite a few academics who teach you about this kind of you know How do you make education accessible but also having the student experience? So it's a question that I don't think anyone really has the answer to But it's a really important question. Felix what what are you hearing in your in your national role as as a leader of student union? In this regard and also not just about what Charlie's talked about but also I suppose about the learning experience specifically I think there's two parts so One of the biggest if not the single biggest contributor to having a positive Live-list student experience on campus is what the role of your student lead organization on campuses your student union student guilds student association and Actually funding your student union properly as a university means they can put on festivals and events and clubs and societies and free food and What we're seeing across the country right now is really an orchestrated campaign against the funding of student unions of guilds of associations and More and more universities are seeking to undermine that funding to take away that funding to establish bodies of Universities control and what that does it actually has a practical effect on the number of events student unions can run campus And the carry-on effect of that is students have less love events. They can go to less people that can meet less club events on campus and Universities more and more we've fully seen a whole range universities introduce Deputy vice-chancellors of student experience for some sort of the last decade and The things are doing the public realm seem to look like they care about student experience But in the practical effect they are undermining and defunding the very institutions that can provide student experience and then on the student learning side Students don't go to university just for learning they go because they are communities where they want to meet people and if you go to a class And you leave that class you don't meet anyone you don't bring long friends after you've got so many students in that classroom that your tutor's never to learn your name You really don't feel like you ever since a belong at a university and it's no surprise then that after three or four weeks You drop out you don't come back and you do online learning and don't really notice is you're not there anymore No one checks up. You don't get an email saying hey, we haven't seen you around recently. So it's a multi-faceted approach Which is having a live events on campus funding a student union, but also having classroom is where the tutor can learn your name in the first place Maria, I'll get your response to that as well Interesting, you know, what what Charlie and Felix just said, but we'll do that just after a quick break Welcome back now just get your response Maria to watch Charlie and Felix are saying the about that kind of I suppose the student experience in the various Dimensions are both learning but also that community side the affection. I think that You know ideally exists between student and university and stays with them for life. Is that Under threat. Oh, yeah, I think absolutely it's under threat, you know a lot of people my age or older will remember their university days As as the place where they met their they found their people, you know, they met their lifelong friends in a lot of cases and Sometimes, you know, they met their life partner. So it's hugely formative and there's a real romanticism around The university, but that is not necessarily the experience of what it's like to be a student today And nor is it sort of the experience of what it's like to be a lecturer today I mean, you know as someone who is in a large sort of teaching a faculty You know class size like there is there is simply less resources and so the classes are bigger and I think last year was the first year that I actually just gave up on potentially learning my students names because I had 200 of them in this class And it was just not going to happen And that was really depressing And it really sort of it was a sort of signifier of how the kind of relationship has sort of changed because you know as an Instructor with the current funding available. We were making choices around You know, do we do we have smaller group sizes or do we have like better marking? And so these things are all impacting the way in which students are experiencing their learning Getting opportunity to engage with me. I think one of the things I've noticed that's been actually really most troubling to me in the last Few years is the number of students that write oh, I know you are busy Like students have in the past never cared about my time But the fact that they know to say that Is like of course I am busy, but like that's beside the point like I am also paid to do this job and to interact with them And so I thought that was that was a really that was a really strong red flag for me that something in the body politic of students They're understanding of the stress that the institution is even if they can't fully articulate it is under Is is readily apparent in the way that they are interacting You know with with staff And you know, it's got to be a less rich experience as a result. Yeah, it just strikes me that there's this sort of You know there at the surface level. There's a different approach Advocated by the let's call them the two major hemispheres of politics But in practical terms there's not much that there's all that different. I mean we saw Through COVID as you've already mentioned the university sector was specifically left out of job keeper Basically the logic was are you got plenty of money you survive kind of thing This exacerbated structural problems and has left a considerable tail and some of the things you've just been talking about in terms of class sizes and the number of resources and the cost pressures in within universities all of these things We're kind of highlighted but have not been recovered from adequately since the since then since the pandemic And there's it sort of a kind of a general paralysis it feels like in this policy space You know, it's kind of it's kind of bilateral. Well the sector. I think is politically more friendless than others You know, and that's and that's like to bring a political science lens to it. You know, that's a reflective of The position of the sector in like one in the Australian economy and to the interests that are aligned to it and vote for it And so you know, I mean, I think labor has always sort of been interested in universities But it's not exactly a vote winner to be seen championing them when the sort of dominant political discourses are culture wars and cost of living Christ see so that's like definitely part of it if you look at his sort of historical trends I mean it took labor till it's third term under hawk to really Like deal with universities in in that Under that government as well like once again like reflecting the specific needs But also the the interests sets involved and I mean, I think the the thing I would add about The you know, the way resources are reaching staff and students like that is not just a question of Government funding that is also a question of how universities are choosing to allocate those funds and what they're choosing to prioritize Like it's a what they're spending money on yeah, it's a two-part problem when we shouldn't you know, I think I think a lot of the time Like politicians Depending on their political stripe might want to sort of emphasize that it's about public funding and that's the issue And then there might be others who sort of say well, it's about internal governance But it's actually a co-production like not having enough money makes the Pressures on internal governance or its weaknesses readily visible in a way that when you have lots of money It's all above the waterline. You can't really see how many barnacles are on the ship underneath it For example, but you know, it's this is a sector that is facing Like it's had several several shocks some of them induced by global events some of them induced by government policy Which has actually been reflected in other Westminster countries around the world like we've seen most of them retreat from international students The model is changing but we've also facing Artificial intelligence like universities are at the cutting edge of this Issue around like how to Like it's called secure assessment in the in the in the jargon coming down But you know the flip side of that is like how do we ensure that Like yeah, how do we sure that you've learned something as students, but also like how do we give you a good experience As well, right? So it's it's that you know, so so and you could probably get one level into it there's been a problem of University governance and And you know kind of a cultural problem across the sector I would say Which goes I think Charlie you started off making this point about sort of accountability within within the university system There have been some shortcomings there And this is one of the criticisms that the Morrison government made about it and probably The current government has about it In terms of you know universities Being a kind of a law unto themselves. I mean you made some good points about levels of representation here, which is good But a transparency and and kind of I suppose a kind of uniqueness that universities have within the overall economy has led to When some of these problems have come to light the turns out they've come to light at a whole range of different institutions There are quite common problems here and they're associated with accountability, insularity And lack of transparency Sense of cultural self-importance perhaps Yeah, I mean definitely I mean there were so many points of marine matter, which are fantastic as always But there was the point you made earlier about um, you know governments benefit from from being able to blame the universities, the university's been able to blame the governments and such as this constant sort of tennis match of blame and who's really evolved. But I think universities should be the best model of governance, I mean, universities should be the ones who don't face the same sort of profit pressures that private corporations make. And so we should have the best governance models. I think that's a pretty subon controversial take and I think it's time that we start to model that rather than being at corruption inquiries. - I feel like, do you think one of the challenges is that students sort of cycle out of university, like into university and out of university quite quickly? I mean, is that part of the issue? - Yeah, often we won't know what the system was like five years ago and five years before that and five years before that. And students who come into university just take it and say, oh, this is normal, we should accept this. Where's, what we're dealing with right now as a sector is not normal. There is nothing about it that is normal. When you talk to people who graduated 10 years ago, they look at it and go, this is just not we experienced. And it's accumulated, I think, in the post-COVID era. Post-Jobbery graduates to a period where universities don't think of students as partners. They don't think of us as part of their community. To them, we are a stakeholder. We are a stakeholder being managed to be consulted with. And I think universities have really lost track of who they actually are there to serve. And from that, the public trust and public confidence in our universities is at an all time low. And trust and confidence in our universities is so important to our democratic system to actually having a population that goes to university, gets educated, has good jobs, and the long term impacts of having low trust in universities. If it doesn't get fixed, I think it's immeasurable. I mean, I think it's kind of important for, like, listeners to understand that some of these policies that were set in train in the early 2000s by the Howard government under Brandon Nelson. And, like, the shorthand, you could use for that is, like, there was an introduction of corporate style of governance, but without necessarily the same buffers that corporations face in terms of their-- To him, having to do annual meetings and reports to shareholders and all that sort of stuff. Well, that's right. That's right. And so it's a sort of system that has slowly drifted from this mission. That was always a mismatch, right? I mean, culturally and sort of organizationally, it didn't-- Those two systems didn't map on to each other probably. No. And I think it's actually no surprise that we are today. The other week, I saw-- I was walking past the ANU student pantry, and the line outside of this building was long. And I believe it was about to open. And it just-- it really underscored for me that we are living in a cost of living crisis, and students are famously not wealthy. So what is the reality for students right now? I'm so glad you asked. I was looking for the right opportunity to talk about the ANU pantry. So you really just give me the assistance. I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, it's really, really hard to be a student. I mean, we are facing so many different pressures from a million different directions. And from a union perspective, we are seeing that. I mean, our union pantry, we opened it last year, originally intended to do once a week about 50 students. Just an extra little bit of support. We then doubled it, and then we tripled it, and then we increased the capacity, and we're still seeing a registration form fill out in two minutes to the point where we're having to implement a new system to try and get more students in a much sort of fair way. So it is the demand for our services this year, in particular, have just skyrocketed. And I think that it goes a lot to say about the kind of student poverty crisis that we're facing. And the biggest proportion of representation that we see in those cohorts are from postgraduates, are from PhD students. I mean, we know about the PhD stipend crisis and placement poverty and all those different things. And it is significantly hurting students. And I think it's a disincentivization for students who are in undergraduate degrees, seeing what's happening in a postgrad PhD. I want to do research later in my life, but it's quite hard to justify from financial lens if I won't be able to afford it. So yeah, students are facing pressures from every different direction. More so than the general population, because we don't have as much time to work, because we have to study. And we should be out of study. It strikes me, it's such a difficult area to sort of just make blanket policy for and to apply the sorts of normal tests or metrics that we put on and restrictions. An opportunity that we put on normal businesses, because it's so, I mean, it's so tidal in term, we have semester breaks, we have summer breaks. If you were running a cafe on the campus, and I'm thinking now of the kind of private license holders that operate cafes and other businesses on campus. These things they're paying rent for, but they're really actually quite hard when you get into these semester breaks. And even sometimes, I mean, I was recently I moved around universities a bit and I was recently spent a good part of an afternoon 'cause I was doing some work down at University of Melbourne. And I was sitting in this cafe for a while, writing something, I was probably there for two hours, and the joint was pretty well mostly empty. And they got a couple of staff in there and they were very helpful and light sort of stuff. So I can see how difficult that is. That's one aspect of it. The university's looking to make income out of the shop fronts that it can rent out and so forth. And then you've got the students themselves who are, as you say, dealing with, they're in the lower income part of their lives by definition, they're full-time students for the most part. And so this is a, these are sort of dynamics that don't go well together and make for an easy situation. And I guess in the past universities have dealt with that differently. They've not had so many private operators on the campus and they have, as you were saying, Charlie, funded student unions to provide a lot of these activities. - Yeah, I mean, certainly the services. We're simply just meeting the demand that students are telling us they need. I mean, we aren't inventing these new things to try and sort of manufacture demand to make ourselves look better that we don't have as incentive to do that. We're purely doing it because we see students walking the door and say, "I'm struggling with this and this." And we're simply just trying to support them. And we are now, as Felix sort of said, we are continually facing funding issues with student organizations where if we continue to lose funding from university, because they are taking it away from genuine student-led organizations to pseudo student-led organizations where there's sort of a student board, but it's operationally led by professional staff or has university appointees, et cetera. If we continue to see that, you will continue to see sort of organizations try and meet the demand for students, but fail because they are not students. And I think that, you know, Felix's point is absolutely correct. We need to keep funding student unions to do the work that they do and to play the role that they play in universities, which is, you know, in the same way that the staff union and the NGU does is to pressure the university to respond to the needs of their community. Felix, I think what Charlie said is exactly right. And it's unfortunately not unique to ANU. It is representative of the entire country, it's happening every university right now. We're hearing stories quite literally every day of students that are going to class without eating breakfast, going days without eating, working two, three, four jobs just to get by. Universities Australia did a research recently where they looked at student income and student expenses since the start of job undergraduates. And they did report that found the cost of maintaining a basic student standard living has increased 29% since J.A.G. was introduced, which is well above the economy wide inflation rate of 24%. But in that same period, what students are spending increased by just 21%. They just don't have the disposable income to match the rise in inflation for student expenses. They just don't have the money. And a big part of that conversation is then the government's role in actually not just supporting students, but actually making sure they can thrive in universities. And that's policies like paid pracks, which were recently expanded, but still isn't as expanded as it should be. It's things like youth allowance, which still sits below the poverty line. - So, okay, you're off there. But just on paid pracks, just explain that's where students are required to do practical placements somewhere. They can be paid for that. - Yes. - So typically what happened is students would be required as part of their degree to go on mandatory placements. So, if you're a nursing student, you'd be required to go, sometimes completely change where you're living. Go to say the regions and go, and during that period, not get paid, but also have to provide food, travel accommodation. And you see these really horror stories of students that are living in tents in that period. Horror stories of students that just go, I know one case in the last few weeks of a student who was in a nursing home, and ate food, well, was reported for stealing food after they ate their remainder of food that a patient had eaten. I'm after they're going to put in the trash 'cause they just couldn't afford to eat. And it's this really horrific world we're living in where students are being punished for eating scraps out of garbage. Because as part of their degree, to pass their degree in the first place you need to go, move home for peer to weeks or months and not have any financial assistance. So the commonwealth paid pracks payment is a subsidy where students will get some cash. If they go on a placement, it's not enough money. It's not eligible for every student. It's nowhere near covering every degree, but it is good for the students that can access it and we do support it. And then beyond that, the other important one which I touched on, Charlie's touched on, is obviously funding a student unions, which I think goes back 20 years from now to the introduction of voluntary student unions and by John Howard in 2006, where the welfare of students to support a student's got presented as a choice. I think when you look at all these governments failures, these failures in welfare support and cost of living support. It really traces back to that period where it was presented as if student unions are the enemy and as if student support is an afterthought and where student unions are somehow oh yeah they're good if we have time if we have the money they're fine and really this whole discourse that we're experiencing now I don't think would be the case if 20 years ago it hadn't happened. I don't think we've been facing governance crisis right now if student unions for the last 20 years had the resources to campaign against universities when they screwed up and actually had the financial capacity to campaign actively every single time university over steps. What did you hear when hextec or a proportion of hextec was forgiven by the government before the last selection? How popular was that amongst students or is it or is that seen abstract to many people? It's quite a it's a very unique one it's a good policy that I support and I think it's really good and I want to be I want to expand it I want all-head step to get wiped but it actually doesn't help current students it does not help current student in any way shape or form it doesn't help us with the cost of living expenses it doesn't help us with rent or food and when you look at a student that was in there first and second year of university who's just seen these massive increases of job-rich graduates it does nothing for them they maybe at the time had a six thousand dollar hextec cool they now have four thousand dollar hextec they weren't repaying that to begin with because they're not earning enough they can't if breakfast every day like the discourse around that 20 percent hex cut is so disconnected from the lived experiences of students on the ground and I'm sure you know it helped people who've left university but it's really doing nothing now for students that are coming to university for first time or when the first or second year yeah I mean it was a it's a welcome policy any sort of debt relief is a really welcome policy and I know a lot of it I think the messaging around it really worked as well like a lot of students did actually realize and noticed that the big cut but it doesn't structurally change the cost of the degree in the first place it doesn't sort of structurally change the the the way that the repayments are made like it's it's a it's a one-off it's certainly helps but again universities aren't in crisis because of one-off policy decisions it's sort of a real structuring withering away of financial support which has gotten us to this mess and it's a policy that I may it can't be lost on people that is is championed by has been championed in the past by people who had the benefit of a entirely free university education of which I was one certainly not lost us so presumably we're not going back to that utopian world but there are other models that could be looked at for this the idea for example of a sort of a flat fee you know a flat one based on an average cost right across all degrees at a relatively low level which may then have which may then be varied by relatively small amounts if you're going into a profession that is on average say earns 1.4 1.3 times average wage or average income of university graduates that your you would pay so let's say it was $10,000 this is what Walburton has proposed as one idea you would end up paying instead of $10,000 you would pay $13,000 if you were at 1.3 and if you were in a profession that was or an occupation that was from a degree that was likely to be under that then you would pay 0.8 say rather than 10,000 you pay 8,000 this kind of thing at a much much lower level that's one way of doing it so it doesn't discriminate on the basis of degrees per say I don't know whether whether this sort of model is is going to be taken up by the government in the future but clearly clearly there's not a lot of happiness about the way it works at the moment I think what the NUS is a big advocate that universities and education should be public good accessible to everybody and that the conversation dialogue around self-funding your way through education is in the first place broken and really if we have a world class education system that education system would be free it would be if we had an education system that was accessible to every student that didn't leave students with decades of debt you'd be talking about how they make university free in this country not how do we shift it from $50,000 to $20,000 and that's I think a big thing as part of us yeah what do you think Maria I mean it's called a higher education contribution scheme and that was the logic of it that students made a contribution to their education what do I think about hacks I think hacks in its initial original form was a reasonable policy compromise for what was a desire to get some of this need off the off the books I think the way it had it has changed and morphed over time has not it doesn't serve the public interest as such and it doesn't serve the individual sort of students involved I mean I think you know the government has kind of indicated that it is looking to harmonize whatever this means the sort of entire higher education sort of system including TAFE like bring like having one door into higher education it's not really clear what this will actually mean for any of these sectors but we do sort of see that governments from time to time will make TAFE free for example so you do sort of see a differentiation part of that is is related to the overall lifetime earnings of the potential recipients of this but I don't know I mean from a logic perspective it seems that a simpler way to approach that is just to manage that through the taxation system yeah do you know down the line because of course plenty of people end up with hex debts that they you know they never go on to practice in their degree or they actually far worse they drop out of university and they've got a debt yeah it sits there and you know they're not necessarily earning what a lawyer would earn at the higher end I might add because you know people in people's law law degrees actually don't go on to use that degree and they don't earn very much either so I think there's there are like there are lots of sort of dimensions to this but I think we do need to sort of think about what is the purpose of our higher education system and I think so much of the discussion at least from sort of university kind of leaders university Australia and stuff like that like it really doesn't talk about students or the public good enough you know these are public institutions largely funded by public money we are going through a series of profound changes and crises you know I know this is very self interested to say but we need our universities and we need them to be focused on the public commission you know rather than like trying to understand universities as a business because it's not really a business in the same way and when it is a business you know your experience is margin which should be squashed down what about if we take some of the money that's going to privilege private schools and we say well you know you've got a you've got a license for how much money you can have spent on you as a student from reception to the end of your degree and it can either be in in subsidies or you can subsidise the you know the Olympic size pool at your private school and but you can't have both you know what about that yeah I mean I think I mean Marie's point is is really good I think we do really really need to think very very critically about what role universities play in our society like they are again where we're all in universities so there's a bit of bias here but you know they are places of knowledge they are places where we come up with solutions to some of the hardest questions and there are innumerable questions at the moment around AI taxation everything which realistically universities can answer if we actually invested in them and I think if you if you make the comparison to a huge you know one of the most monumental policy things in an Australian history Medicare it was introduced under the logic of Medicare should be accessible for all because when the population is healthy the country is healthy and there is benefit there the same logic can be applied to education when the population is smart the country is smart when we are when we have millions of students across the country given access to education and given access to the benefits of the university experience that we spoke to earlier the population benefits from that and I think that the government needs to sort of think very very critically about you know they talk about intergenerational quality all the time well this is a perfect example where we can come in reform a sector that is really really broken and then 20 years down the track we will really really get the benefits of that brilliantly said brilliantly said and a good good note on which to end this conversation Felix and Charlie thanks so much for joining us with democracy sausage it's been really terrific to get this perspective on here and something that I'm glad we've done and we'll we'll have a look at this issue again and no doubt be hoping to see some sort of action my tip is that there will be some action on this before the next election perhaps perhaps I need just before I don't know and that is democracy sausage for this week thanks for listening and we'll see you again talk to you again next week