PETER VAN ONSELEN: Why Albanese’s $16billion gift to the Australians who need it LEAST is his dumbest move yet. Here’s what he should have done instead

So Labour, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to abolish 20 percent of HECS debt, and is footing the bill for it with taxpayers.

Anyone with current HECS debt will have a fifth of it written off. But only if Labor is re-elected.

If Labor loses, no debt cancellation. If Labor wins, taxpayers’ dollars will flow to university graduates. It is an expansion of middle class prosperity at the expense of the needs and hard work of the working class.

Why this shameless election fraud? The Albanian government is concerned that university graduates will vote for the Greens, and has therefore developed a policy to win these voters back to the Labor Party.

But it comes at the expense of Labour’s former working-class base: voters who haven’t gone to university but perhaps hope their children will one day. They get nothing, and their children will get nothing, because this election bribery is a one-off, designed to help Anthony Albanese win a second term.

It’s also about continuing the story of Albanese’s nearly two dozen Qantas business class upgrades that dominated the news cycle last week.

Unfortunately for Labour, when Education Minister Jason Clare announced the policy this weekend, he also had to admit he had requested an upgrade to business class on a flight to Singapore.

How fair is this one-time cost of $16 billion to taxpayers?

If you never went to college, you don’t get anything. However, you can help cover the costs of the debt relief that goes to all those university graduates who have studied anything from cultural and gender studies to art appreciation and climate change.

Anyone who was curious about the sociological impact of changing attitudes towards pottery – and devoted three years of higher education study to sociology before adding a fourth honors year to really delve into some of the pressing unanswered questions about this particular subject – will receive a 20 per cent reduction in their HECS debt.

Workers in the outer seats of the metropolitan areas, meanwhile, get nothing. This includes retail workers, temporary and part-time workers in the hospitality industry, or anyone else who does not benefit from the higher wages that university graduates enjoy throughout their working lives.

Only those college graduates benefit from this $16 billion election fraud.

Think about that. If you were less fortunate and didn’t go to college but instead broke your back in a blue-collar job right out of high school, this policy will get you absolutely nothing – except more national debt that you and your kids will pay for.

Those who earn a college degree, the data tells us, go on to earn more than non-college workers, and thus live more prosperous lives. Yet non-uni graduates pay for this debt relief for uni graduates who can do this just fine on their own.

A current lawyer earning a six-figure income who has not yet paid off his HECS debt will receive a 20 percent cut if Labor is re-elected.

If you’ve already paid off your HECS debt, you won’t get anything either. Too bad you worked hard to erode debt faster, if you did.

Or if you are just a little older and further along in your working life and are now saving to buy a house, you will not get anything from Albo’s election fraud either.

If you go to college next year and beyond, you won’t get anything either. This change is not structured in a way that will make your life easier through some future long-term investment in higher education.

You won’t get any of this policy if you’re a young Australian who has yet to start university, probably because you’re not quite of voting age at the moment.

So if the cost of higher education is the government’s real concern, they will be all in on that issue in the future.

The fact that this policy is universally applied to all college graduates, and not just those who have obtained certain degrees, is perhaps its worst feature.

Anyone who has studied nursing, primary and secondary education or social work has done so to contribute to the healthcare and education needs of the nation.

Such university graduates sacrifice future earnings to study in areas that contribute to society without huge pay packages. But they benefit no more from this blatant attempt to put pork in the barrels than would-be lawyers, financial brethren, and plastic surgeons.

These types of careers can earn university graduates more than a million dollars a year, yet they all get a 20 percent discount on their HECS debts, paid for by the bricklayer, laborer or gardener who checks out the finance department’s investment properties at lunch. maintains. .

It’s a policy joke so embarrassing that Team Albo should be ashamed of themselves. Economists such as Professor Steven Hamilton and Chris Richardson have called it “stupid” and “stupid” respectively.

But it’s so much worse than that. It is a political party that uses your tax dollars to buy its re-election. It should be illegal, but it isn’t.

It’s stupid economic policy designed as smart politics, by a government that hopes voters are either too stupid to realize how unfair the bribery is, or too selfish to care about it because they personally benefit from it .

But perhaps Australians will send this cynical Labor government an unequivocal message and despise it for trying to buy an election victory with more debt.

Those who came up with this idea are so economically illiterate that they think canceling $16 billion costs nothing because the HECS debt is outside the budget.

It’s too stupid for words.

The fact that an obligation is outside the budget does not mean that it costs nothing.

This policy is also cynical politics because of the timing of the announcement. Six months after election day, but it won’t come into effect until Labor is re-elected?

What obvious pork barrels. It is understood that it has now been made public because Labor is polling poorly and distracted by the Qantas upgrade scandal.

The idiocy of this policy does not end there. Because it is universally applied to everyone with HECS debt, even those now living overseas who have no intention of ever returning to contribute to the Australian economy will get a 20 percent discount on their HECS debt!

We’ll find out when the Senate estimates are made how this policy came about in the first place. I bet professional public service had little to do with it.

It is a shamelessly politically designed handout in the hope of winning votes among HECS debt holders.

Remember: Your children, who may be planning to go to college in the next few years, won’t benefit from this policy at all—a clear sign that it’s not designed as some sort of fix for the system.

It’s purely about buying votes.