University and TAFE student fees would be scrapped and overall higher education funding increased by 10 per cent, under the Greens higher education plan released on Tuesday.

The costed plan will also see a boost in Youth Allowance and Newstart payments by $75 a week, and an expansion of Austudy to cover all postgraduate students.

The plan would be funded by ending fossil fuel subsidies for big business and making offshore mining companies pay royalties for extracting gas from Australia.

Greens higher education spokesperson, Mehreen Faruqi, said the plan was “transformational”.

“It will change forever how we think about education,” Senator Faruqi said.

We have universal primary and secondary education. Free public higher education is the missing piece of the puzzle.

The most recents stats from the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that around one-third (36 per cent) of federal education funding goes to unis and TAFEs, totalling $33 billion.

The Greens’ plan would cost $129.6 billion over a decade.

There are nearly 1.1 million Australians studying at university, and another 391,000 international students, according to Universities Australia.

Prime Minister Gough Whitlam scrapped university fees in 1974, and free education stayed in place for 14 years, until the Hawke Government introduced HECS in 1989.

Boosting Youth Allowance, Newstart and Austudy

Senator Faruqi said increasing welfare payments was an important element, as it gave students the confidence they could make ends meet while undertaking their diploma or degree.

“It’s time to end the debt sentence. Young people are graduating from university and TAFE

with crushing debts that take almost a decade to pay off,” she said.

Senator Faruqi, who used to be an academic at the University of New South Wales, said she saw first-hand how students on welfare payments struggled.

Youth Allowance at the moment doesn’t cover costs for students.

“Some of my students were doing three jobs just to make ends meet. This is on top of full-time study,” she said.

“We know that students can’t afford to pay rent, and many of them can’t afford food. This is in a country that is probably one of the wealthiest in the world.”

Taxing big miners

The Parliamentary Budget Office costed the Greens’ higher education plan, looking at the savings associated with ending fossil fuel subsidies for big companies.

“When we fill up our cars at the petrol station, we have to pay excise on that fuel of 41 cents a litre. If you are a big mining company burning fossil fuels, the government pays the excise back to the mining company. It is one of the most expensive spending programs of the Federal Government, just below the funding they spend on child care and public schools,” Senator Faruqi said.

Scrapping the subsidies, and charging gas companies a royalty on extracting resources, would cover the higher education changes.

That would bring in $140 billion over ten years, and that’s more than enough to fund universal fee-free education for everyone in Australia.

“At the moment there’s $278 billion of credit that these [gas] companies have in taxes. They make super profits. Nowhere else in the world are these super profits allowed to happen,” she said.

“If people are taking away resources from Australia, the very least we need to do is make sure our communities get some kind of compensation for that.”

How does the Greens policy compare?

In last year’s budget update, MYEFO, the Coalition announced it would cap the number of Commonwealth-funded university places to 2017 levels. That means that if universities want to increase the number of student placements in courses, they will have to find the cash from other parts of their budget.

Universities Australia said capping funding meant 10,000 university placements would go unfunded.

In addition to limiting the amount of funding unis get for student placements, the Coalition limited the amount of student loans people get over their lives ($150,000 for medical, dental and veterinary students, $104,400 for everyone else) and made changes that would mean people have to start repaying their student loans sooner.

At the moment, if you earn $51,900 you’ll have money taken out of your pay cheque by the Tax Office to repay your HELP loan. From July next year, that threshold will fall to $45,800.

The Coalition’s changes will save $2.2 billion over the next three years.

The Federal Education Minister, Dan Tehan, also announced a review into freedom of speech on university campuses, arguing that students should have the right to express their views, even if those views were unpopular.

Labor has said it will remove the freeze on Commonwealth funding for unis, and waive the fees of 100,000 TAFE students if it wins next year’s election.

It also wants to set up a $300 million University Future Fund to invest in new research and teaching buildings.

“Cuts to the number of students attending university and an absolute freeze on spending on the infrastructure that makes our universities world class,” Shadow Education Minister Tanya Plibersek told ABC’s AM program.