In the speaking notes distributed to government MPs and senators entitled “budget explanations: schools and higher education”, the “facts” are somewhat sparse.



“For some students, university fees will go up. For some students, they will go down,” the helpful notes advise MPs to say.

“This is only fair as: Australian university graduates earn on average up to 75% more than those who do not go on to higher education after secondary school, over their lifetime, graduates may earn around a million dollars more than they would have if they had not gone to university. In anyone’s language, this is a very good deal and it is only fair that students contribute a reasonable amount to the cost of their education.”

In case any students wanted to speak the more precise language of how much they might be likely to have to pay, the notes steer MPs to a “general response”.

“There are many scenarios particular to individual students and therefore I can’t respond to every particular case,” reads the script.

“I recommend anyone with questions on how they might be impacted by the reforms to higher education visit the Department of Education website at www.education.gov.au.”

And that link takes them to the portfolio budget statements, which don’t really tell them anything practically useful either.

Alternatively, from Wednesday afternoon, the student could visit the Greens website www.whatwillmydegreecost.com.au and calculate the likely cost of a degree, and by Friday morning, more than 2 million had.

“We decided to build our calculator because [education minister Christopher] Pyne refused to release government modelling on the impact of these cuts,” the Greens senator Lee Rhiannon said.

Or they could look at modelling by Universities Australia which calculated future engineering students may have to repay as much as $113,170 – assuming additional fees of $23,923 on top of the existing fee level of $37,319, plus $51,928 in interest charges at a rate of 4%.

The government has now released one calculation, done in Pyne’s office and “verified” by the department, which shows that someone who graduates in 2019 with a starting salary of $67,848 and a debt of $30,000 will pay about $3,900 more under the new interest rates than they would have under the old ones, and would take one more year to pay off their loan. The government also takes issue with the assumptions the Greens, and Universities Australia, make about the likely increases in course fees.

As Bernard Keane argued on Crikey on Friday, the modern media, with more varied sources of opinion, more varied sources of information, less capacity for in-depth analysis and rapid social media verdicts, make it much more difficult to sell a complicated budget than the slower moving and predictable world of, say, John Howard’s time.

Nevertheless, down at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Howard was saying some smart things. “We have sometimes lost the capacity to respect the ability of the Australian people to absorb a detailed argument,” he said.

“I think the Australian people normally get their politics right … they do have a great capacity to absorb the arguments, they will respond to an argument for change and reform … [but] we sometimes lose the capacity to argue the case – we think that it is sufficient that we utter slogans," he continued, without explicitly accusing anyone in particular.

He also said that when listening to the explanation of a policy voters wanted to be satisfied on two counts – “that it is in the national interest ... and they want to be satisfied that it is fundamentally fair ... they won’t support something they don’t regard as fundamentally fair.”

It was like the old emperor telling the new emperors they have no clothes.

But back up the hill in the parliamentary chambers, no one was listening. They droned on in the nude, parabolically speaking.

The gap between the real-world hunger for a practical, detailed understanding of the budget and the political world of point scoring, where success is measured in soundgrab seconds on the evening news, seemed bigger than ever.

The Coalition was stubbornly ignoring its former leader’s helpful pointers, continuing the “wall of sound” strategy to try to force public acceptance of the budget, like a parent berating a child to eat greens.

The government does mount an argument that “fiscal repair” will be “good for us” but prefers to avoid the detail and kind of skips over the fairness argument with two implicit propositions: 1) that there were no other choices to cut spending or raise revenue other than the ones that it made; and 2) the choices it made won’t really hurt anyone very much anyway.

Both are demonstrably untrue and – almost in spite of the pointless, mind-numbing, nature of the political debate – voters have cottoned on to this. Of those polled by Essential Media, 48% thought the budget cut spending “too much” – seven points higher than just after budget day; 53% thought the opposition should vote against some budget measures, including 41% of Coalition voters; and 63% thought the opposition parties should block the deregulation of university fees.

Labor, meanwhile, asserts the budget is “unfair” and “goes too far” and is “twisted” and “wrong” and many other things found under the entry for “bad” in the thesaurus, but rather than focusing its parliamentary attack on examples to illustrate these contentions, it repeatedly diverted to a political “trick of the day”.

One day, for example, Labor asked several questions about whether the immigration minister, Scott Morrison, had endorsed the pre-election economic forecasts rather than the mid-year economic forecast as the relevant starting point for the budget discussion (there was an economic point to this, but not one that makes much difference to voters thinking about the budget and whether their kid will be able to afford to study) and another day sought to make mischief with an (already comprehensively denied) report that the Liberal party had “tricked” the National party into supporting the budget decision to reindex petrol excise.

Oppositions always do some point scoring and soundbite trawling but in among it all Labor lost the focus of its attack – the budget’s unfairness – and did not answer the Coalition’s main accusations, whether the ALP believes some spending cuts or revenue increases are needed from somewhere and where – even in the most general of terms – they could come from.

I suspect John Howard would say the debate about this kind of budget needs to be right down in the detail, the kind of detail voters want to absorb so they can understand what will happen to them and decide whether it is fair. That’s exactly where he successfully argued out the case for the goods and services tax.