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• Education minister hints at relief on student Hecs debt and university course fee changes
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Report says HECS needs to be ‘simpler and fairer’: Clare

Clare says the report includes recommendations about student allowances and proposals around indexation and how to reduce HECS payments He says it makes clear that “HECS has to be simpler and fairer”.

Bruce Chapman, the architect of HECS, has helped the panel with a recommendation which says there are ways to reduce upfront payments for people on lower incomes. For example, if we were to go down this path, it says that someone on an income of $75,000 a year would pay every year about $1,000 less. That is something that could provide people with an immediate cost-of-living benefit once they finish uni and are in the workforce, on top of the tax cuts that we’ve introduced and will hopefully go through the Senate this week.

This is bigger than one budget, but we do need to get started now to build the foundations for long-term reform.

Different models are suggested. The report also recommends that if we go down this path, we set up an implementation advisory committee to look at the detailed structure of it and make sure we get the legislation that underpins it right.

The report is that all universities look the same at the moment, roughly the same number of students teaching the same sort of subjects and says we would benefit from a bit more diversity – different universities doing different things. Some bigger, some smaller. Making sure they have got what is immediately needed.