There are but two certainties in life: death and student loans, with a v. v. v. high likelihood of the latter triggering the former.
The average Bachelor of XYZ graduate’s total HELP debt is roughly $20,000, which takes about 8 years to pay off, but that figure could DOUBLE under the higher education reforms being introduced by the government this year.
That means ex-students would carry ’round the debt burden for roughly 13 years, and be well in their 30s by the time life’s worth living again.
Australia *does* run one of the most generous student loan schemes in the world, as one one of few countries that save low earners from paying off their debt-mountain by offering income-contingent student loans, but holyfuckingshit is it expensive to get a degree here; a bunch of countries like Germany, Finland and Sweden charge little or no tuition fees.
Regonising that we don’t have a chance in hell of either a) entering the property market, or b) living our best lives while we have a shit-ton of HELP debt to pay off, the Liberal Senator for WA, Chris Back, is now floating the use of grads’ super funds to repay student loans.
He reckons the plan would ease cost of living stresses for peeps in their 20s and 30s at a time when they likely have young families and mortgages, allowing them to make up the shortfall in super later in life, when the cash be flowin’ free-er.
“At a time when they really do have, if you like, a high liability, perhaps a young family, a mortgage or whatever, they’ve got this HELP debt sitting over them,” he told ABC Radio.
“When they have got that burden of be it mortgages, be it children’s education or whatever beyond them, they can then accelerate that repayment to make sure that come the time of retirement they actually have got at least as much, if not more.”
Back’s hoping to convince Treasurer Scott Morrison to include it in his first budget, on the grounds that it’ll save the Treasury hundreds of millions of $$$ (last year, the gov’t lent uni and TAFE students $30 billion to cover course fees).
“I am very hopeful that it will find its way into this year’s budget, if not I am very, very hopeful that it will find its way into our policies going forward into the 2016 election.”
Back says the plan has already been green-lighted by the Coalition‘s backbench education policy committee, though Labor’s likely to cock-block anything that undermines the original purpose of superannuation (ie. so that we can be stress-free old people).
And let’s not forget how quickly Joe Hockey‘s suggestion that the youf be allowed to dip into their super funds to break into the property market was shot down last year i.e. about as quickly as this balloon deflates.
Source: ABC Radio.
Photo: Getty / llstein Bild.
