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.