Before Joe Hockey was US ambassador, before he was federal treasurer, before he even made it into parliament, he was an independent leader of the Sydney University students representative council.

Graduates enter the workforce with debts ranging from $30,000 to $75,000 and the budget will ask them to contribute more

Joe wasn’t a Liberal at the time. Liberals were social outcasts on campus and also in the middle of an ideological campaign against student unionism, which made their participation in student politics close to untenable. Joe got elected on what he called the “varsity ticket” based around the elite student colleges where free kegs were the core organising principle, and not being linked to a Labor party that was designing a system of Hecs fees was his point of difference.

On the student council he led a charge against university fees with gusto, rallying all campuses to march on Martin Place where he declared the dawn of a new era of student activism.

I followed Joe’s campaign up close and personal, breathlessly reporting the angry protests as part of an earnest collective editing the student newspaper, arguing the proposed fee would be the thin edge of the wedge. We never suspected how thick that wedge would become.

Fast-forward 30 years and campuses are very different places, where the cost of degrees has increased exponentially and education is one of Australia’s largest international export industries.

Today local students share theatres with full fee-paying international students, living sponsors of a business model that lost track of quality learning long ago, an open question whether anyone is really getting what they pay for hanging over the campus.

University students face fee rise of 7.5% as funding to sector cut by $2.8bn Read more

Today graduates enter the workforce with debts ranging from $30,000 to $75,000 and now on the eve of the federal budget students they are being asked to contribute even more.

This is not the first time the Coalition has attempted to drastically increase university fees – remember Christopher Pyne’s ill-fated $100,000 degrees, one of the poison pills embedded in Joe’s disastrous first budget?

This time the government is going the triple whammy – reduced university funding, higher fees and lower repayment thresholds. Responses from this week’s Essential poll highlight the dangerous course the prime minister has embarked on.

While views are mixed on repayment thresholds, there is strong opposition to cutting funding to universities and increasing student fees.

The government is proposing to increase student fees for university education by 7.5% over four years and cut university funding by 2.8%. We asked to what extent respondents agreed with these statements about the proposed changes, and the government should be concerned at the results:

Despite nearly 30 years of student fees, 45% of Australians think tertiary education should be free.



While the increased fees are unlikely to reduce the budget deficit in any meaningful way, they will make it harder for Australia to be realise the PM’s dream of being a more innovative nation.

And while the wealthy universities may have the funds to ride out a funding cut, the majority of Australians think that young people most definitely don’t.

That’s where these proposals risk doing Turnbull the real damage – young people smashed by uncontained housing prices, likely to be hit with penalty rate cuts, now taking a whack on their tertiary fees as well, are right to feel under attack.

Unlike the students Joe and I marched with 30 years ago, this is not a fair cop, there is no notion of redistribution at its heart, simply a cynical attempt to screw more money out of a sector that should be driving our future prosperity.

If federal budgets are all about priorities, tonight’s offering will use higher university fees to fund national security and corporate tax cuts. If it dies it will serve as a further condemnation of this hapless government.