It may seem an age since the federal election, but the new parliament has just convened for the first time. Anthony Albanese will be giving top priority to enacting his election commitments – “an honest politician? Really?” – starting with his promise to cut uni graduates’ HECS debt by 20 per cent.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

Unsurprisingly, the promise was popular, meaning the Coalition and the Greens won’t want to make themselves unpopular by blocking the cut in the Senate. In any case, the Greens’ policy is to abolish uni fees – a fairyland promise that’s easy to make when you know you’ll never have the numbers to keep it.

But just because a cut in graduates’ debt is popular doesn’t necessarily make it good policy. Is it? No and yes.

HECS – the higher education contribution scheme – now called HECS HELP because some imaginative smarty thought of adding the moniker “higher education loan program”, began life 36 years ago as an eminently fair and sensible way of helping the government afford to provide university education to a much higher proportion of our youth.

Over the years, however, successive governments have stuffed around with it, making it less generous and less sensible. So something needed to be done, but simply cutting the size of graduates’ debts doesn’t really fix the problem.

Successive governments have stuffed around with HECS, making it less generous and less sensible.Credit: Andrew Quilty

It’s clear that being provided with a uni education gives a........

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