The cuts to universities that were supposed to fund Gonski would be continued under the recently elected right-leaning Coalition government - but without the reforms. After much protest, however, the new conservative government backed down and agreed to implement the full reforms - for four years. This same government has also proposed reforms of its own: deregulation of the university sector, as well as increasing HECS, or student loan, repayments. The end result will be higher upfront costs for degrees, and higher backended costs (HECS repayments) for students. Such reforms are symptomatic of the Americanisation of the Australian economy and its culture. Such reforms will entrench class divisions, and lead to a society of endebted workers and citizens. That, of course, is the point. It's a part of the conservative grind. Entrench divisions and debt and it becomes harder to change society. In the same way that conservative governments always seek to undermine unionism and its membership, and thereby reducing the support base of its progressive opponents, conservative decision-making, such as curtailing the economic and intellectual mobility of the lower classes, is predicated on, well, preventing change! It's disappointing that the erstwhile defenders of education, the progresive Labor party, would play into the hands of its ostensible enemies.
I must confess: I depend for my livelihood on university students. I teach. The deregulation of fees and the introduction of interest rates on HECS debt may impact on student enrolments, and thereby on my livelihood. But I work in this industry because I believe it has the greatest potential for social and economic change; no other industry, no other institutional service, can empower people to understand and change their world quite like higher education. The university trains the nation's best and brightest to be even better and brighter, to transform their lives and the life of the nation. I shudder at the further diminution of the national intellect by this government's cuts to peak research and science bodies (the CSIRO invented wifi, for goodness sake!); we don't even have a science minister!
Perhaps the most egregious injury, but one most overlooked, is the loss of a critically literate electorate. Education isn't just about training workers, but educating citizens and voters to hold their government - and each other - to account. A educated electorate is a robust one, one that can change the political discourse. An honest politician is one forced consistently to answer intelligent and probing questions. The decisions politicians make on our behalf matter. We don't live in a pure economy; we live in a political economy. We have never lived, and will never live in a situation where the pure mechanism of the free market operates with impunity. Our economic success depends on our democratic diligence, and our diligence depends on our critical, higher, education.
I am, perhaps, getting too vague and abstract. There is a specific point worth discussing here, and it's the role of money in education. The usual data rolled out in the debate around HECS debt is that up to six billion dollars will never be recovered. To focus on gross expenditure is problematic; it does not address the creation or increase of value as a legitimate outcome of such expenditure. To justify increasing or decreasing funding (for anything) requires addressing the effect on value such an increase or decrease would have. Value, at its most basic, means that an investment of funds produces a return of funds greater than the initial outlay; however, this implies that value is static: X amount invested returns X(x2), thus ends the transaction. Value can be enduring or ongoing. "Institutional value," value that is created by government investment, must necessarily be enduring because a government is not like a business, nor is it like a household for that matter. The government does not seek to make profit, but to produce the conditions whereby others can profit and pursue their own interests.
Government expediture should seek, then, to create value, to produce an income capacity in relation to a specific program or object of investment, in excess of the initial outlay of money for that program. That is, ideally, the program will yield an economic benefit of greater comparable value than the raw dollars spent on it. This creation of value can be measured year by year, or in initial expense against the lifetime of value created. The six billion dollars of unrecoverable HECS debt is usually paired with the 24 billion dollars of total HECS debt, which means 25% of the debt is estimated not to be recovered. The calculation that concludes that this is somehow "lost debt" is fallacious because it ignores the broader calculation whereby the value created through the 24 billion dollars, in the form of highly trained teachers, doctors, engineers, administrators, business people, among many other disciplines, PLUS the 18 billion dollars that IS expected to be paid back is compared to the 6 billion dollars of unrecoverable debt.
Put another way, we can ask the question: How much value is created in society and the in the economy by the activities of the aforementioned professionals? Then, to that value we can add the amount of money that will be paid back (approximately 18 billion dollars). Then, we can compare that combined number of institutional value + repaid debt - unrecoverable debt to determine the total amount of money, or rather value, that the HECS debt mechanism helps to put into society. The ratio of created value to lost debt, I am willing to bet, will be orders of magnitude in favour of the former. We can assume this on the basis that education is inherently value-adding. One of the central motivations for higher education is to "up-skill" to pursue a better, higher paying, job. If value is not created in this way, then we would need to rethink our entire educational philosopher. HECS is an investment, one that yields indirect value. But that's the thing: the government's success should mostly be measured indirectly. A government doesn't make a profit - it's not a business. Indirect value, institutional value, the regulatory and legislative mechanisms the government creates and oversees that produce value for its citizens to pursue fulfilling lives, personally, economically, and socially, is the true measure of any government.
