Just when you think that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese social media couldn’t get any more cringe, he comes out with this absolute banger.

Yeah, I want to say that this is why you don’t let the work experience kid do your social media, but that would be an insult to work experience kids. There is absolutely no way that anyone under the age of 25 would choose that particular piece of elevator music that turned what was presumably supposed to be like a the right stuff moment or maybe a chariots of fire moment into me.

But what’s even worse than this bit of disposable social media content is the policy that he is promising to ram through. 20% off the HECS-HELP debt of all Australians that have one. It’s a measure of the complete failure of our universities that our university graduates actually think that this is a good policy.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project, and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. I am 100% viewer supported, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is not giving me 20% of a discount on my bills. So, I really appreciate each and every one of you that buys me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and those of you who buy my books, my DVDs, and my merch from goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. You are helping me to keep going and bring stories and perspectives like this one.

Now, the simple fact is that the government has completely buggered up the higher education sector in multiple different ways. And this 20% debt forgiveness, it’s just the latest in a long list. And we need to go through that list because that background is important to understanding why this hecs debt forgiveness idea is just such a terrible bit of policy.

The government buggered up higher education the moment they mandated that specific degrees were a prerequisite for specific jobs. Now, you might object. Of course, we need people to be qualified for their jobs. And I agree. I don’t want my surgeon to be just a self-taught hobbyist. And I don’t want to drive across a bridge that was designed by someone who thinks that their time in the sand pit in the backyard when they were a kid qualifies them to build bridges. So my issue is not with qualifications and training and having requirements on people in order for them to do certain jobs. Not at all.

My issue is with the idea that it is the government who should decide what a qualification is and what it isn’t and which ones should be required for what jobs.

See, you instantly remove any kind of market in qualifications the minute the government steps in and mandates things. You’ve removed any kind of incentive to innovate or to improve. What you create is a protection racket, which is something of a theme here at the Topher project because that’s pretty much all governments ever do. They create protection rackets.

In this case, a protection racket where lucrative jobs are protected by government force. You can’t get that job. In order to get that job, the lucrative ones, you have to pay your dues to the people doing the protecting. In this case, you have to go through the government funded university process to get the tick of approval from the protectors.

And if you want to know why universities are so bloated, inefficient, behind the times, and expensive, and yet also incredibly busy, it’s because they are operating inside a government-run protection racket that doesn’t just shield their graduates from future competition in the marketplace for their jobs, but it also shields the universities from competition from innovators.

Now, but Topher, you might object there’s lots of competition in the university sector. Yeah. From other universities who are a part of the same protection racket. That’s like saying that before Uber came along there was lots of competition in the taxi sector because well there were lots of taxis. Yeah, there’s a lot of taxis but they’re all part of the same protection racket. They operate under the same umbrella, the same rules.

So the first thing you need to understand about universities is that governments have turned them into gatekeepers.

And if you want access to the lucrative opportunities on the other side, you have to go through the gates that the universities control, which means you have to pay your dues. And yes, the government will actively work to stop any alternatives or innovators from out competing our universities in the education space because in the process, if they allowed that, it would break up this very lucrative protection racket.

But that’s not the only way that the government has buggered up the uni sector. Unis have benefited from the protection racket and therefore they could charge a fortune for their bloated and lazy three and four and even six year degrees that honestly most of them not all most of them could be taught in one year.

Now before you object oh it’s about giving the graduates a well-rounded understanding of whatever some crap like that let’s not forget that when someone starts university they’ve already spent 13 years of their life inside a government-run education system with a government curriculum. And if you’re telling me that we need to go slow in our universities, give them time because the students can’t go that fast, then what you’re actually telling me is that our high schools and our curriculum needs a good whipping into shape as well. Which to be honest, I would agree with that point.

But moving on, because the universities became lazy and bloated and protected from competition, they were able to charge obscene prices for these relatively worthless degrees. And the government stops anyone from entering those lucrative professions without the degree. So people are forced to pay those dues pretty much no matter what they are to an organized crime syndicate, a protection racket in the hope that one day they’ll be able to make that money back later.

Now the government has tried to regulate course costs down, but the universities are so bloated. It’s genuinely hard to put a student through uni. It’s expensive. Not because they’re getting a great education with all these resources being poured into them, but rather because the university has all kinds of unnecessary costs and bloat and overpaid busy bodies. So whenever there was talk of cutting fees to universities, well, the universities themselves ar up about it. And so the high costs remained, and people began to complain about the costs.

So instead of the government recognizing that it had created the problem and putting an end to the protection racket, allowing competition in credentials and qualifications and education to drive innovation and reduce costs, it decided it was going to fix the problem by helping. And they helped in the form of the hex debt scheme which was created in 1989 where the government provided loans to young people. People who had no income, no capacity to repay in the hope that once these young people had that degree, assuming they finished, then they would be able to repay that debt over time.

The scheme has undergone really substantial changes over the last 35 years.

It’s now called the help scheme. But fundamentally through all of those various iterations, it has only made things worse because it reduced the perceived cost of a degree. The sticker price dropped to zero, leading to fewer people actually doing the math and realizing that truth be told, most of the university degrees, the ones that they might have been interested in, aren’t actually worth the price.

And it’s no coincidence that since the hecs scheme was implemented, the number of humanities degrees has skyrocketed, and education debt has skyrocketed with it. Now, under Julia Gillard, all limits were removed on the number of government supported places in any given degree. Up until then, the government had kind of tried to make sure that the money was going into degrees that were actually going to be useful. But after those limits were removed, it became a complete free-for-all, and universities were now completely disconnected from any of the realities of the job market that their graduates would be entering.

They didn’t need to make sure that there was actually demand for the jobs that they were training these students for. They made their money by selling the degree to their hapless and clueless victims and the value to the student that’s not really relevant anymore because well the student’s not really paying for it unless they actually started to earn lots of money after they graduated later on.

So you know if the student couldn’t find a job after graduation then really if you think about it that means the degree is free cuz you never have to pay it back. And yes I have listened with disbelief as friends of mine have expressed exactly that sentiment. Carelessly racking up tens of thousands of dollars of debt, really uninterested in whether or not they will ever be able to pay that back.

And so now we’ve had multiple generations of young adults devote three or four or more years of their lives to racking up debt for a degree with dubious market value, failing oftentimes to get a job in the industry they studied for because their degree was worthless or because the industry was already oversupplied. And then when they finally start earning money, flipping burgers or some other thing, and they actually have to start repaying that university debt, now all of a sudden they resent it.

And I can understand from their point of view that would feel pretty unfair. And it is. They’ve been taken advantage of by the education system itself, which views them as a disposable commodity. Students now are just a necessary evil. They’re a consumable for the universities. They’re not the customers anymore. It’s the government that’s the customer cuz it’s the one paying. Remember, if you’re not the one paying, then you’re not the customer. You are the product.

And students now are just the products of universities being churned out while they get paid by the customer, which is the government.

And as long as this protection racket remains intact, no one questions whether these students are actually being taken care of or whether they’re being taken advantage of.

But the thing is, as much as that sucks, just because these students were gullible enough to be taken advantage of by snake oil salesmen with pieces of paper as their promised solution to all of your future worries, well, just cuz they were gullible doesn’t mean the rest of us should have to pay for it. And Anthony Albanese promised 20% reduction in what’s owed under the Hex help scheme doesn’t make the degrees cheaper either.

Making the degrees cheaper would require the breaking up of a protection racket and the allowance of genuine competition in credentials. No, forgiving some of the debt just changes who is paying for these worthless degrees. Now, instead of the burden of these worthless degrees falling on the students who got duped into signing up for them, now the burden is being lumped onto people who perhaps already paid off their own uni debts.

And if that’s you, then well done. but also onto people who don’t even have a uni degree in the first place. Blueco collar workers, trades, people who never had the time or the opportunity or perhaps just never had the desire to go to university. Now, typically these are people who have been working for longer because they started younger. They didn’t spend four more years extra in some kind of university degree.

And notionally, so the story goes, these are people who have lower earning potential than a Uni grad cuz that’s what the promise of university is. Spend those four years and a few tens of thousands of dollars getting a degree and the rest of your life you’ll be better off because of it. Now in practice of course that stopped being true a very long time ago. University degrees are often worthless now. But the universities don’t care because students line up to get them anyway because in the students mind they think well I’m not really paying for it. It’s just going on to hex and I’ll never have to pay that back unless I’m earning squillions.

And now we are discounting those university debts, the ones of those fortunate enough to be Uni students in the first place by 20%.

And we’re putting that burden onto the backs of all taxpayers, including those without a degree and those who’ve already done the right thing and paid their loan off. And given the country is already deep in debt, this is just going to drive us further into the red to the tune of an extra $16 billion, which will now have to come from general revenue from all taxpayers instead of being repaid by the borrowers. Which means that in practice it’ll actually be our children who will be working in whatever job they have with or without a degree who will be paying for decades to come so that some dropkick today can get a humanities degree that’ll never be worth anything any time in their lives.

The government destroys everything it touches. And I mean everything. And once it starts destroying something, it can’t stop because its meddling creates problems which it then promises to solve by meddling even more which creates more problems which they promise to solve. And down and down we go into this bottomless pit. The government cannot solve problems by throwing our money at them. The only way the government can actually solve a problem is by getting out of the way and letting the market sort it out.

And you know what? You’re right. The free market is far from perfect. It makes many, many mistakes, but it self-corrects and it rewards the people who make better choices over those who make poor choices. That’s how it corrects. In contrast, bureaucrats and politicians also make many, many mistakes, but they get rewarded for doubling down on their mistakes and they reward the people who make bad choices along with them. And this 20% discount on hex debt is just one example of many.

We need to have a free market in credentials where multiple private credentiing agencies can compete on quality and price and the stringency of their training and universities can compete in an open market to train people to attain those credentials at their own cost or perhaps at the cost of an employer if the employer sees enough value in that credential for that particular employee. And the government should not be running universities, funding universities, creating protected industries for universities to exploit. Nor should they be lending money to students so that they can go into debt on worthless degrees.

And the final straw now is that after doing all of those things, the government certainly should not be putting the costs of the failing system onto people who never participated in the problem in the first place.

And all of this is to say nothing of our failing education standards when compared globally or of our glut of useless degree holders who are working as NDIS support workers or in other fields completely unrelated to their studies. And I’ve also said nothing of the pyramid scheme that is a Uni degree that is only valuable if you go into academia and teach more students the same worthless degree which is only valuable to them if they go into academia and teach more unsuspecting victims. And so the cycle continues.

Anthony Albanese is buying votes among young, impressionable idiots.

Buying them with your money so that they can be further insulated from the consequences of their own poor choices and so that the government can look like it’s fixing a problem which it created in the first place. The fact that Anthony Albanese is boasting about it on social media suggests that in today’s Australia, people’s votes are very much up for sale.

Sadly, that’s not something I can fix. All I can do is call it out in the clearest possible terms and hope that somehow someday the people of Australia decide that their vote is not for sale.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to see through the BS, the smoke screen of our politicians, media, and lobbyists to understand what’s really going on and at a minimum to be able to make better decisions for yourself. And hopefully if enough people start to see and understand the kinds of issues that I’m talking about, then perhaps we can build enough understanding among Australians so that things can change for the better. But then again, maybe not. I don’t know. But I’m going to do my best regardless of the outcome.

And I’m so thankful to each of you that has supported the Topher project by buying me a coffee. You are making it possible for me to keep going and hopefully in time to help more Australians understand that the government is not the solution to our problems. The government is our problem. And hopefully if enough people can understand that, then we can see some real change.

Hey, I can dream, can’t I? And if you haven’t already, please check out my books and DVDs and merch from goodpeoplebreaklaws.com.

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