You forgot to mention the fact that some women work permenant part time and never earn enough money to actually pay anything back. I know quite a few nurses who have worked part time or casual their entire working life, mainly because it suited their family lifestyle. I also know quite a few female doctors who had a baby very soon after graduation and went into permenant part time work.
Also, the issue of women working in lower paid professions is a personal choice, it is not mandatory. I was a nurse for over 30 years and it was never about the money, only job satisfaction.

The article seems to be implying that our esteemed Minister for Women and PM would act in a manner that exacerbates problems for women, so it's obviously entirely wrong.
The Canetoad is justly famous for his forward thinking and sensitivity and his caring and nurturing nature is there for all to see on a daily basis.
The Canetoad's vision for the future is clear and easily understood, one need only consult the history books to see it.
Putting women back into the home and keeping them under-educated and subservient is demonstrably good for them, just look at how happy their menfolk were with that situation, proof-positive of it's benefits for all concerned.
So, let all the women of Australia cease their complaints, let them find a good man and give him a good home and children and assume their "proper" role in society and stop bothering their pretty little heads about things that don't concern them, we'll all be happier in the long run, and let us thank the Good Lord we have a political party and leader that are so wise and caring.
Sickening isn't it, yet it's very obviously the policy of those currently running this country!

The author fails to mention the extraordinary subsidy in uni fees. The disparity isn't between males and females, the true disparity is between those that got into uni and those going to private colleges.

My daughter was fortunate to get into a design course at uni where the fees are less than 25% of those charged by private colleges. It seems a little unreasonable to complain about some very small interest charges when the government is already providing a massive subsidy and so many others miss out.

I certainly hope this is true.

It just might reduce the number of girls doing pretend disciplines for soft degrees, only to be able to get clerical work in the public service, at ridiculously high, [for the work involved], wages & conditions.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if it actually did a bit to balance the gender divide in teaching. Even a slight reduction in the bleeding heart brigade in education would help the nation.

Even better, it might reduce university enrolments, & bring them down to kids with an IQ high enough to actually learn something useful. Got to admit, I'd like to see that.

don't worry Amanda if we continue with country destroyers like that of the party you belong to, the Greens and Clive no one will be getting any assistance with education. The whinging and whining from the commun ity then will of been caused by people like yourself. 'Progressives'are great at stuffing things up and then crying about the consequences of their stupidity.

Yes Amanda.
And because women invariably need to take time out of their lives to marry and raise a family, this is exactly as it will pan out, with a much higher debt, bulked up by compounding interest!
Bracket creep could also play a part, to make the repayments kick in, and well before any semblance of a family budget can afford them?
If the government is so short of money, then it has a number of other viable choices!
1# repealing wealthy old men's tax breaks on their huge super deals! Surely it's already enough that privilege has allowed them to amass huge fortunes, without them also putting the bite on the less well off, as reductions to the bottom line; that's currently costing the budget bottom line some 40 billions PA!
And as things stand, will soon cost the budget bottom line more than that paid as pensions! Deal with it now, and before it becomes even more unaffordable/untenable!
2# family trusts cost the budget bottom line some thirty billions PA, and only to bulk up much higher incomes!
None of these things are being proposed to be touched, just old age pension entitlement changes, and a very much more expensive HECS debt etc!
When this Government parked it rear ends on the treasury benches, fair play just flew out the window!
If things are that desperate, why not cut out all welfare for the rich, and then use that money to completely negate the so called deficit!
And start drawing down debt with the billions left, and in just five or six years.
This different approach would allow more discretionary funds to be held in the hands of those, with little or no choice but to spend them and thereby soften the economic hard landing, which could very easily be part of an unavoidable future; but particularly, if the current economically illiterate government keeps unnecessarily cutting!
Rhrosty.

a few more areas that could save billions

1. Complete waste of funding 'progressive' ideology on multiple current affair programs on the abc/sbs.

2. Hopelessly failed Green schemes that have lined the pockets of those on the gravy train.

3. Funding immigration programs where the participants have very little chance or desire for work and obviously detest the Western lifestyle.

4. Create some real accountability in billions spent on the aboriginal industry that continue to produce very bad education and health outcomes.

It certainly will affect women more adversely than men, but that shouldn't be the focus of protest.

The fact is that ALL young people whose parents are not rich enough to fund their tertiary study are being saddled with a long-term compounding debt.

Tertiary study is no longer a career option to improve your long-term job prospects and salary. It's now a mandatory entry point for most professional and non-professional careers.

This is just another victory for neo-liberalism in its eternal quest to saddle the population with the biggest debt possible, at the earliest age possible. At the same time, neo-liberalism's other partners in crime - globalisation and privatisation - are creating the very type of mass job insecurity that makes such debt unsustainable.

Only, when this unsustainable debt starts nipping at the heels of the well to do will they finally start waking up to what fiscal imbeciles they've been.

Killarney, well said.

I do have concerns with the aspect of tax payer subsidised education that has low and middle income earners being taxed to subsidise the education of professionals who's fees they can't afford and who I suspect can often avoid a lot of tax themselves via the lurks available to businesses but thats a different aspect of the issues around tertiary education.

R0bert

Government funding of universities should be abolished.

You can see why from Killarney's and R0bert's posts. What these people stand for is the abolition of international trade, and the abolition of private property, and of course the repression of human freedom that would be necessary to achieve it. And that's why they love government funding of universities - because they are a nurse and vector of their nasty anti-social belief system masquerading as concern for the less fortunate. What they will never answer is, what about full socialism do they understand to be contrary to their purposes?

Killarney if people are being saddled with big debts, it is more to do with the high remuneration, & low productivity of university staff. Require a reasonably productive work load of this staff & cut the paper shufflers by half, & we could reduce education costs by more than 50% easily.

We are obviously charging university students too little of their education costs, when it costs more to become an electrician through TAFE training, than it does to become a BSc electrical engineer through subsidised university courses.

We also should make it mandatory that only students with a reasonable chance of repaying their hex debt be eligible for funding. All too many aged, disabled & lifestyle students will obviously never be able to repay society for the huge cost of their education, the hex is a minor part of the exercise. We should never be supporting & funding the education of people who will obviously never put that education to work for the good of the community that funded it.

R0bert

Yes, I also have a problem with taxpayers funding the tertiary educations of children of the rich and well off, but that can be ‘easily’ resolved by means testing – whereby a sliding scale of income thresholds requires the parents of students under 25 to fund either all or part of their children’s tertiary study.

However, the quote marks around ‘easily’ in the preceding paragraph are there because Australia’s political landscape has so catastrophically (but subtly) changed in the last 30 years, that anything requiring the rich to both pay their own way and to help out the less well-off has been relegated to a level of political debate sitting just above paedophilia and just below excrement.

Hasbeen

TAFE courses are still part of the whole tertiary education industry, which comes under HECS-accreditation.

The tertiary education industry reaps huge profits (foreign students being one of our top ‘export’ industries) and has the potential to reap billions more (by removing ALL financial restrictions and caps on ‘domestic’ tertiary education).

So far, Australia has avoided going down the American path of uni-prenueralism, but that era is now at an end. As with virtually every other walk of life, the Coalition government is busy putting the final deregulation nails in tertiary education's privatisation coffin.

HasBeen,
I agree. The higher costs could be a good thing if less women take sociologogy and other useless degrees. Especially when so many woman have such a short working life. Many women only work for about 10-15 years full time in their lives. Other times they are pursuing lifestyle goals and want the taxpayer i.e. men to pay for it. If so many woman are going to get degrees there should be incentives for them to remain in the workforce for longer.

But to be honest something like 50% of marriages fail and that's when the costs will just be passed on to men anyway.

Today's society is just geared to providing women with 'choices'.

Killarney is right. The debt will be a problem for all young people, not just women, although women are particularly disadvantaged because they have babies. The debasement of the universities can be traced back to the Dawkins reforms of 1988, according to Barry Jones, who was Minister for Science at the time, the greatest mistake of the Hawke-Keating years.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/04/25/1019441281290.html

Before the Dawkins reforms, there were a reasonable number of universities for a country with the population of Australia, plus a network of Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs). The CAEs gave basic undergraduate degrees and various types of vocationally oriented diploma courses. They were very much cheaper to run than the universities because they didn't give advanced degrees or do research. This doesn't mean that the quality of education was compromised. It was quite possible for a student to do a first degree at a CAE and then go on to a university for further study and get First Class Honours. I know at least two people who did it.

The Dawkins reforms turned all those CAEs into universities or made them amalgamate with universities, dramatically raising costs to ruinous levels and paving the way for an explosion of credentialism and for using the universities to disguise the true extent of unemployment. Research is underfunded because it is spread too thinly, admissions standards have suffered, and staff student ratios have steadily deteriorated. Letting the universities fund themselves by running an immigration scam has created another lobby for unsustainable population growth and wreaked havoc with academic standards. Just talk to an academic about the pressure for grade inflation and passing students who ought to fail. 'The customer is always right.'

I recall a Liberal politician discussing these issues with Terry Lane on Radio National's "In the National Interest". The politician (I forget his name) was saying the same sorts of things as Barry Jones, but when Terry Lane asked him why the Howard Government didn't reverse the Dawkins reforms, he said that it was politically impossible.

A few years ago I worked with a young Asian man in a nursing home. He was employed as an assistant nurse while completing his university degree. As he was not a sponsored immigrant he had no vehicle, lived in shared accommodation and worked nights, fitting his schooling in there somewhere. He was also battling with being allowed to remain in the country, which I found bizarre considering the commendable efforts he was putting in daily. Luckily for him he got in before this ridiculous addition to fees, and tax?
I realize that the tax paying workers of the country have been chosen to try to repair the deficit. (We should feel honored ) After all its only fair to allow the wealthy to 'maintain the lifestyle have become accustomed to' :)
Out of curiosity, the women attending university who themselves, their parents or partner, cant afford the initial uni fees, and have to take the taxed student loan. Also have to seek employment to live and begin repaying their loan (I couldnt imagine one of the big 'four' granting such a substantial loan, given the clients circumstances). Anyway my question is - would, if she became pregnant, be granted paid parental leave? Either way like Jo said 'they'll just have to tighten their belts'

One more relevant story. When I began working as an assistant nurse (hail hard working people), not long after the certificate 111 was introduced and became a requirement. Our wages decreased by a couple of dollars an hour but we became qualified and permanent. Fortunately the first course was free.
Down the track, casuals would commence work and training for their cert 111. Ladies and men of varied ages and family situations.
By now there were a couple of agencies offering courses. I cant quote the actual cost of the course but the fee was deducted from the student pay.
How devastating and humiliating for a hard working mother of two, making the change to work in the 'caring' industry, to be receiving $7.00 an hour for several months. She could qualify for partial benefits as long as she is actively seeking full paid employment.
There were a few struggling for quite a while.

This is another "I want he government to pay for everything" topic.

Behind all the flowery prose, the essential fact is, why should plumbers, electricians and motor mechanics pay taxes to send the children of the middle class to university so that they can be high wage earners in the future? Especially since those university students have little regard for economic principles anyway, and support every crazy socialist humanitarian cause that drains our treasury?

Australia has a system which is fair to students and taxpayers. The government will loan you the money to get a degree provided that you pay the money back when you become a high income earner. This also provides incentive to study hard as the student can not afford to fail.

The next time a boatload of pseudo refugees land in Australia asking directions to the nearest dole office, university students should realise that these people are reducing the Australian government's ability to increase any subsidies it presently gives higher education. A university degree should make you smart enough to figure out he connection between importing productive people and importing people who will always be a drain on the economy.

LEGO,

The existing HECS system is not unfair, and high income earners also pay tax at higher rates, as well as HECS, if they haven't already paid up front. Interest is charged at the rate of the CPI, so that the money owed is not eroded or inflated in real terms. The uproar now is because the Liberal government is proposing to charge real interest rates on the unpaid balance, so that a small debt is changed into a large debt by the magic of compound interest. This is especially hard on women, because the best years to have babies are when women are in their twenties and early thirties, before most of them have had a chance to pay off the HECS debt.

The other issues are that the university system has been made unduly expensive by the Dawkins reforms, as discussed in my previous post and that a lot of people are going to university who don't have the ability or the motivation to benefit from it. This is great for our politicians, because many of these people would otherwise be in the unemployment statistics.

As more and more people go to university, you also get creeping credentialism. An employer hires a woman with a B.A. in English Literature as a secretary. She takes the job because she is desperate for work. The employer prefers her because she is likely to be easier to train than a school leaver and she can already write and spell. If enough bosses do this, a university degree effectively becomes a requirement for the job, even though it does not require university level skills.