Those of us who paid nothing for our priceless university educations (thank you, Mr Whitlam) look and listen in horror at the descriptions of the deregulated jungle of higher-education changes and mountainous HECS debts enthused over by Christoper Pyne, the Minister for Education.
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His ears may have smouldered a little during Monday's Lunchbox Debate at the Australian National University as a panel discussed the topic, "Beyond the budget - where next for tertiary education?".
Not that, even though he was the subject of plenty of the debate, he would have felt an actual inferno around his ears, for the discussion, in a packed little theatre in the characterful J.G. Crawford Building, was eminently civilised.
Even (and especially) Professor Bruce Chapman, the inventor (in 1989) of the HECS system, though he is surely appalled by the Minister's vision, managed to express his horror quietly, gently and wittily. All of Gang-gang's hopes (for journalists like colour and movement, and I had even brought some matches) that this debate, on this subject, on the campus of a university, might descend into at least some effigy-burning, were dashed by the gentility of Chapman and fellow panelists Julie Hare of The Australian, Professor Glenn Withers and John Niland, AC. But everyone remembered, with disbelief, how Tony Abbott and his hoplites had promised, before the election, that higher education would be treated with "benign neglect". Now it turns out that the Abbott government is passionately interested in paying rapt attention to the sector.
Hare told us that while some were prophesying that the day of the $100,000 uni degree (with its concomitant levels of student debt) was nigh, in fact it was already here. She reeled off examples, including Bond University, which is effectively charging $120,000 for some degrees, "even in arts".
Crikey. I can remember how in the uni toilets wits would write on the cubicle walls just above the lavatory paper: "Arts degrees. Feel free to take one."
Chapman explained that everything about HECS as he'd conceived it and as it had worked until now, "comes down to questions of risk and uncertainty", for HECS was a kind of insurance instrument.
"Most of the popular discussion about HECS over the past 25 years has been about the level of debt. So every January when there's a lull in politics to report, I'd get six or seven phone calls from journalists saying, 'Oh my God!. HECS debt is out of control!' And then I say, 'Well, what's the state of housing debt, or credit card debt? Why are you focusing on this. It's completely uninteresting.'"
He said it pained him that the least-noticed, least-discussed thing about the HECS system was that "it is an insurance instrument" and that governments are in the business of risk management of risks people can't possibly manage for themselves, because "there's a lot of randomness out there we can't handle".
"The best example in Australia is Medicare. We don't know what will happen to our health.
"But why do we need risk management in the higher-education system? Because there's so much uncertainty. Something like 25 per cent of people who enrol in undergraduate courses in Australia don't graduate. Then many people, put up your hand if this applies to you, changed your course because you didn't like what you were doing."
About half of us, the brown paper lunch bags in our laps rustling as we did it, shot up a hand.
"Many of my mates who were studying economics with me moaned, 'This is SO BORING! We're off to study law!"
We all fell about at the naive idea that law would be less boring than economics, and Chapman said that, yes, they made a terrible mistake and that what we choose to study at university is, like whom we choose to marry, something you never really understand "until it happens".
Other risks and uncertainties for uni students, he mused, as well as the unexpected things we all have no control over, things that that betide students' families, include the fluctuations of labour markets. When he was at uni, there was an exciting, but as it turned out, ephemeral, mining boom, "and so people enrolled very enthusiastically for geology". Four years later they had their degrees but there were no jobs for them.
HECS, he pleaded, should be a form of insurance against all of these risks. Absolutely crippling HECS debts would transform what HECS was meant to be. He was worried about those with big education debts, including that 25 per cent who never graduate and who are not well-off but who have HECS debts, and enlarged ones, in "the new world" of higher education.
"The HECS principle was based on [that] whatever happened in an individual's future, they will never have to pay back more than the real cost of the debt, as indexed to purchasing power."
This columnist, my university-honed imagination (for I did, at no cost, let alone for $120,000, an arts degree packed with philosophy and poetry) wrestling imaginatively with the very Big Ideas just discussed, hurried off across campus. Even the leaves in the leafy ANU's trees were whispering anxiously about the changes to come.
