My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Cargotten woman from Gadighal Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Just a warning on this episode, we will be talking about sexual violence. If you or someone you know needs help, you can call one eight hundred respect.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's Monday, the twenty fourth of July.
I'm Tom Crowley, I an Nicople and we're standing in for Sam and Zara.
Just for today, the government is scrapping the Rule Nina which says failing a university subject makes you ineligible for a hex loan. It's just one announcement off the back of a new report commissioned by the government looking at how to improve higher education in Australia. There's set to be a major shakeup to Australia's university sector.
Reporter says universities need to rethink how they treat their students. To improve retention rates and outcomes rich, poor, City, Bush, black and white. We need to set up a system that's sustainable for the long term that helps all young people get a crack at university.
We'll let you know what the report found and what changes we can expect in the deep dive, But first, what's making headlines this morning.
Major fires on the Greek island of Rhodes have led to thousands being evacuated, with temperatures across the country hitting forty five degree celsius. A number of European neighbors have sent firefighting resources to the area. Meanwhile, a number of key tourist sites in the country remains shut during the hottest times of the day.
Big W says it will be stopping an in store announcement affirming its support for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which will be voted on in a referendum later this year. Big W was playing a message as part of an acknowledgment of country across its stores, but it will be now taking that message down based on customer and store team feedback.
The Good Vibes Festival in Malaysia has been canceled after the lead singer of India banned the nineteen seventy five. Matt Healey attacked the country's leadership over the anti LGBT laws. Heally said, I do not see the point of inviting the nineteen seventy five to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with before kissing beast player Ross McDonald. Homosexuality is a crime in Malaysia and can attract a twenty year prison sentence.
And the good news, a possible solution for disposing nuclear waste has been discovered by researchers at the University of Houston. Molecular crystals capable of capturing radioactive pollutants could be used for waste management and other sustainability related applications. All right, So Nina, we're talking about universities today because the government has released a fairly wide ranging review on the university sector. So it gives us a chance to spend a little bit of time talking about it.
A long awaited review as well.
It was a while coming, and I think, you know, sometimes when we get these big reviews, they can be a little bit doom and gloom, and there are some negatives to come to later on. But I think we should start with universities really as a great Australian success story. We're coming off decades in Australia where attendance rates at universities have increased. The university industry, if you like, is a massive export. We have so many international students who
come to Australia. Australian universities punch above our weight on the global scale, and university attendance here at home has made a huge difference to the lives of many people. But just like any sector, there are issues and this government report focused on some of those issues. It asked, I guess three key questions that we might focus on today.
The first of those is how well are universities doing and offering opportunities to as broad across section of people as possible, and in particular to giving educational opportunities to people from disadvantage backgrounds. Then once they get there, are they getting a good experience? Are they safe and happy? And do they have the supports that they need? And then finally, is the way that we're funding universities and the way that we're asking students to contribute to them
is that working. Are there ways that that can be improved? So I think they're the kind of three questions and maybe that I mean that last one Nina about the funding, might be a good place to start, because that's where the big headline was.
The headline that TDA ran with was that the government is scrapping a rule which says university students who fail more than fifty percent of their subjects currently aren't eligible for hecks. So what did the reports say.
Well, that rule is on the way out, it seems so. It hasn't been around for very long. That rule. It was introduced by the Morrison government in twenty twenty and it only came into effect last year. And the idea was that if students fail more than half their subjects, they can't get student loan assistance. So basically they can't
get a hex loan and they have to pay upfront. Now, what this report found was that that disproportionately disadvantages people who are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and from regional I guess, people for whom there are already barriers to university, and particularly in the low sees case, people who are already worried about the cost of going to university having this additional threat over your head that if you fail you're going to have to pay more. It seemed to be a barrier.
At Western Sydney University this year. It has already led to one thousand, three hundred and fifty students being forced to quit, most of them from poorer backgrounds. More than thirteen thousand students at twenty seven universities have already been hit by this. Instead of forcing them to quit, we should be helping them to pass.
That's the Minister for Education, Jason Claire, and the report recommended acting that rule, Jason Claire suggesting the government will follow through.
So that was the headline that we ran with at TDA. What other points were made in this report?
So they're already really a couple. It was a long report that had some really interesting thoughts which we'll get to about the broader state of the sector and the system.
And it is an interim report, right, you still need to reap for a final report and recommendations on the way forward.
Yeah, so this I think the Minister is conceiving of. This is the beginning of a process. You can call it a road map, you can call it a I think they call it an accord. You know, you use whatever buzzword you like this is the beginning of a conversation. But the specific items on the list there were very few of them, and they were mostly about this question of how do you get people from disadvantage backgrounds into UNI.
So as well as this fifty percent pass rule, there was a suggestion to create more regional university hubs, and the idea there was really all about I guess, visibility and accessibility across the country rather than just one campus in a major city, you know, bringing university education to people where they live, to combat regional barriers in particular.
Then there were also suggestions about how to get more First Nation students into university and specifically to guarantee a fully funded place for all First Nation students who are eligible for their desired course. So that's something that's currently in place of First Nation students from regional, rural and
remote areas. This would broaden it to all First Nation students and that was in recognition of the fact that although First Nations participation at universities has increased over the last decade or more, they still remain underrepresented relative to their share of the Australian population in the university population.
So those were kind of the key action points for the government in the shorter term, but there are a lot of broader things to say about some directions the government might consider going in future.
One of those other areas that the report brought up for consideration was to do with the way the help Hex system is currently working. And I did notice that when we put up the story on Instagram, a lot of the comments related to Hex's debt and the way that indexation is occurring. What did the report find.
Yeah, it is, it's an issue. I guess a lot of our audience probably has HEX debts, and so it's understandable that that's a part of the system that they focus on a whole lot, this question of how much they are asked to contribute to the cost of their degree, and in a cost of living context, when people are facing a whole lot of financial strain. I think that the burden of hextets is something that a lot of
people have been conscious of. And look, spoiler alert, this report hasn't recommended tearing down the HEX system and making the whole thing free. And I know there'll be some people in the audience who wander about that issue, So I guess, yeah, it is important. I think to give a little bit of a context for why we have the system that we have, so I guess Australia did used to have free education for a short period of
time starting from about the seventies. The reason that we moved instead to this hex loan system was basically the idea that university graduates make a lot more money across their lifetime than non university graduates, and this was the government at the time suggesting that they should then make a contribution to part of the cost of their degree, so we don't pay for it all. The government funds a portion of our degree that we don't even see.
It just funds universities directly, but Australian university graduates are asked to pay for a portion. They're able to take out a loan, and that loan, as I'm sure many people know, is income contingent, so you only have to start paying it back once you earn above a certain level. Currently that level is about fifty thousand. And the idea there again is that it's you know, once you start earning money out in your career that you have to repay.
The debt doesn't follow you when you die. There's no interest on that debt. It does get updated to match inflation, so there are some complications there, but the idea again of this system is that university graduates, you can almost think about it like a tax on unigraduates in reflection of the higher earnings that they're expected to have.
Okay, so that's the context what has actually been recommended in this report moving forward.
So, like I say, the review didn't recommend, you know, tearing the whole system down, but it did point to some I guess quirks of the way the system is structured that might be a little bit unfair to a degree, no pun intended. So for example, one of them, and an issue that we've certainly talked about on this podcast
is indexation. So your hex det gets updated every year in line with inflation, and that's not something we've had much cause to notice until recently, when inflation has been quite high and a lot of people got a big bill shock on their HEX debt in the last year or so. The review acknowledged concerns about the way that is structured and the way that that's calculated, and whether
there might be fairer methods. Again of nothing specific for the government at this point, but a recognition that might be one to look at. And the other one is this idea of repayment cliffs. So it comes back to I said before, it's roughly fifty thousand dollars is the level where you have to start repaying. And the way that's structured is a little strange, because if you earn a dollar below the amount, you pay nothing, and then if you earn a dollar above the amount, you suddenly
have to pay hundreds of dollars. And that's applied in an uneven way that can actually create these weird circumstances where sometimes you could get a pay rise at work and actually be worse off because you trigger one of these extra repayment thresholds. And so the review also recommended taking a look about whether that structure is fair, whether that structure's sort of distorting people's financial situation. So a couple of of kinks in the system that it recommended
ironing out on the HEX front. But if you're hoping to see an end to the HEX system, certainly this review hasn't gone there.
Tom One of the reasons I was really keen to see this interim report is that a little while ago on the podcast, Zara interviewed Shanna Brenner from end REAP on campus. They've been calling for reform in response to sexual violence at universities. Did we see anything in this report to address those concerns?
Yeah, there was a little bit. It did touch on, I guess, a range of issues about the human experience of going to university because I think, I mean, we've been talking a little bit so far about I guess the transactional nature of universities, you know, getting as many people in as possible, getting them degrees, and then how do you make them pay for it? But universities aren't
just transactional. They're not just conveyor belts to a job, you know, they're places where people have their formative years. I suppose people do a lot of growing up at university. They spend a lot of time there building contacts that will last them for a lifetime, thinking about what they want to do with their lives. It's really important to make sure that universities are a nurturing and welcoming environment
and of course a safe environment. And I think that that was definitely a theme of this review and something that Education Minister Jason Clair acknowledged in his press club speech, basically suggesting that he was going to raise this issue with state and territory ministers.
Don't underestimate the seriousness with which I take this or my willingness to act. Recommendation here is that this is the way to do it, and I want to implement that recommendation.
Tom will definitely be keeping an eye on this one, and I'm sure we'll get you back on the pod when we know more.
Yeah, we've got the road map. Time to start driving down right.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Daily Ohs. As always, we really appreciate it. If you're listening on Spotify, there's a little box that you can tell us what you're thinking if you liked the episode, and any feedback you might have. Sam and Zara will be back tomorrow. Until then, have an excellent day.