In 2005, Vladimir Putin was relatively new into his Presidency. But he knew the power of the media. And a young Ahron Young was among the first journalists to work for Putin’s new news network, Russia Today.
In 2005, I sat down for a job interview at Camden Lock in London. After a 45 minute audition, where I spoke off the cuff about Michael Jackson as if he had died (a test to see my ad-libbing skills), a woman arrived at the interview, and quietly sat down.
“How would you feel about living in Moscow?” she asked. It was the only thing she said.
I’d never thought about Russia before, other than James Bond films. I’d applied for a job at a “new English language news channel”.
I’d soon be offered a job as a producer and presenter at something called Russia Today, now known simply as RT.
A week and a lot of paperwork later, I was one of 84 American, British and Australian journalists on a British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.
Before I go on, I’d like to state to the reader that isn’t a “tell-all” piece designed to offend anyone. But given Russia is right now the aggressor in an invasion in Ukraine, it felt like the right time to shed some light on the early days of RT, from my perspective. Just one of many who worked there. RT has now been banned from the airwaves of many countries. So how did the adventure we optimistically started get to this point?
I like to think of myself as an opportunistic guy. But it was immediately clear to me that Russia was very different to anywhere I’d ever been before. A BBC correspondent put it this way: “It’s kind of like going to the moon. It’s round, but completely different to earth.”
The first thing we did when we got off the plane was visit a clinic to be tested for HIV. At one stage there was a mixup and they almost used the same needle on me that was used on the person before. We then spent our first 24 hours nervously waiting to find out if our adventure would be cut short.
I was just 23-years-old at the time and it felt like I was heading off to university. All these young, fun, opportunistic journalists from around the world getting set for an adventure. We partied hard and had no idea what to expect on day one. Some moved in together, I decided to rent a super cool but expensive apartment in Kievskaya. My real estate agent told me there were more billionaires living in my street than in all of Manhattan.
Admittedly, I’d never worked for a start-up before, and in hindsight my expectations probably far exceeded what my new employer could deliver. Our new offices were pretty basic. Our studios were luxurious compared to what the Russian journalists endured in other parts of the building. We called the dividing corridor the Berlin Wall.
The early days at Russia Today. Sasha Twining kicked off RT’s first ever bulletin.
In the weeks that followed, we met former CIA agents who told us how to survive living in Moscow, and how we could avoid paying police bribes. Never keep your wallet in your hand. Never smile at anyone you don’t know.
Management continually told us and international media that RT aspired to be Russia’s version of CNN or BBC News. But in their second breath, they’d criticise CNN and the BBC for pushing western values.
Late on air
We were due to go on air late 2005, but cold temperatures froze the satellite dish on the building’s roof on launch day. Management said it was a “cyber hack”., while a few of the engineers thought it might just need a bucket of hot water.
The place was uber-mysterious, but that just added to the excitement – that feeling you’d never know what would happen next. This was much better than being a suburban newspaper reporter back home in Melbourne, the normal career path for journos my age.
A few things stood out. We were divided into six teams. Three teams working 12 hour shifts, four days on and four days off.
Most of the Russian journalists were young and fresh out of university and were the sons and daughters of influential Russians. I loved the opportunity to work alongside people who could one day become influential Russians.
Editor-in-chief of RT and Rossiya Segodnya — Margarita Simonovna Simonyan
Is the Kremlin watching?
There was an ever-present feeling that the Kremlin was watching. We were told they had a live feed of our three month rehearsals. There was an “Output Editor” some of us were weary about, who watched everything we put to air. Our Russian colleagues told us he’d worked for the intelligence agency.
Our boss, the young Margarita Simonyan was polite and respected by the staff. She never suffered fools. I rarely saw her on the newsroom floor. Her office was upstairs, behind double security doors, just like M’s office in James Bond. Sound-proof and seemingly emotion-proof too.
Then there was Putin. He was never there but he was always there.
In the first few weeks, the adjustment to Russia’s limits on free journalism were laid bare. One British journalist was reprimanded for referring to extremists as “Chechen Rebels”. A rebel sounds sympathetic to the cause.
There were LGBT protests in Moscow, but I never saw them covered on RT’s news. I was once reprimanded for accidentally making a pro-gay gaffe. A sports story about a sack race and I said off the back “there’s nothing inappropriate about two men in a sack”.
Shortly after, Moscow’s mayor YuryLuzhkov told the BBC “there are no gays living in Moscow”, only to correct himself weeks later and thank “those who work in the airline and entertainment industries for their efforts”.
Vladimir Putin’s visit to RT
There were two studios at RT in those first few years. The main news studio was absolutely tiny. And the second studio was huge, devoted to one show that aired one hour a week.
I wondered why we didn’t swap studios, given the news was on 99% of the time and should therefore require a larger, grander space.
“Because if President Putin visits, he’ll be interviewed on the one hour show, so he needs the biggest studio,” came the response from a floor manager.
The first time I ever hosted rolling coverage was when Ariel Sharon went into a coma. Lucky RT had checked my ability to adlib before they hired me, because I had to talk continuously for 45 minutes about his history, and let’s just say that at 23 I was not an expert in Middle Eastern politics!
Then there was the hilarious moment a producer rushed into the studio to save me by handing over some background notes. But she was stopped from entering the studio because the paper was white, the machine had run out of pink paper, and scripts had to be printed on pink paper. But we got through!
Visiting the Kremlin
I toured the Kremlin three times, and was arrested four times. Three of them for not paying a bribe to the underpaid police who constantly demanded papers from tourists, and the other was a late night goose stepping episode with my mates at Red Square. I shall never apologise for that one.
I’d walk to work through the snow, wearing everything I owned, my nostril hairs spiking into my nose, my iPod earphone cables would snap if I moved direction too quickly. I’d call Dad back home in Queensland where it was the middle of summer. Everyone was happy… and smiling!
In Moscow, during that winter, it was easy for depression to set in. It’s daylight for about an hour a day, and that light feels like there’s a fluro on somewhere miles away. Many of my colleagues used sunbeds to help boost their moods, while others quit and headed home to the comparably pleasant English winter.
I discovered the best entertainment on a weekend was to hire a gypsy cab on the side of the road and see how far I could travel while negotiating for the lowest price. When I originally arrived in Moscow, it cost me 2000 Rubles to get to the city from the airport. I got it down to 150 after four months.
The cab drivers would give this young Westerner the same history lesson every time. They despised Gorbachev, were embarrassed by Yeltsin, and while they didn’t entirely trust Putin, they admired his self-made image as a strong leader.
This is a city where tourists could easily buy a bobbing head plastic figurine of Stalin. That’s right, the Soviet dictator who killed an estimated 40 million of his own citizens.
Whenever you questioned a Russian about something bad the country had recently done, they would immediately snap back – without flinching – with a catalog of similar, but not the same, failures by the United States. At that time, it was the invasion of Iraq and Bush’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina. Both valid points of course.
But my memory of the Iraq war was being a radio journalist in Melbourne three years earlier. As the US and allies were preparing to invade, there were massive protests in Melbourne and Sydney against the war. Over 200,000 marched in Melbourne every weekend alone. And I covered it live. It led the news on every network and splashed the front pages of newspapers.
In Moscow, unauthorised protests were illegal. Political experts say it’s the difference between western democracy and a managed democracy. It didn’t matter who votes, but who counts the votes.
Young Russians love the high life
Obsessed with the West
During that period, it felt like Russia was a country obsessed by the West.
I often wondered if anyone back home had ever referred to “the East” with the same eagerness to prove a point that no one else worries about.
Russia reminded me of Jan Brady, always looking up to her older, better known sister, shouting “Marcia Marcia Marcia”. Except in this world, Jan has nukes.
I made a few lifelong friends at Russia Today, and everyone was very open about their motivations for moving to Moscow and taking the job. For many, it was the higher pay than working for a news network in London. Some of them are still there. We all had different experiences.
RT was the first of its kind, but now just one of many English language news channels financially supported by governments around the world. During that first year, we never knew who was funding RT. The Kremlin said it wasn’t them. There were rumours it was a friend of Putin’s who received tax breaks.
Story first, safety last
There were several times I didn’t feel safe, and I was open about my editorial concerns. The Russia Focus segments, which we ran during the news, focused on happy stories about Russian animals mostly. I felt that the stories of the lives of every day Russians could be better told. Shouldn’t news shine a spotlight on homelessness and inequality in the hope that things will change?
By June, it was time to go. There had been knocks at my door at weird hours, and I never answered. One day I got on a plane, left all my possessions behind, and headed back to the UK.
I was 24, it had barely been a year, but I left Russia feeling like I’d had the best adventure ever. The most thrilling experience of my life. Sure, not everything was perfect, but I got to start something under unusual circumstances.
Seventeen years later, I fear that Russia has regressed back into its darker, inner self. A look around any democracy in the world shows you it isn’t perfect. But it’s like a harsh diet – you can’t quit it after three weeks and expect results.
I remember going to the Moscow Conservatory to watch a performance of Tchaikovsky. As we entered with our expensive tickets, a group of little old Russian ladies, known as babushkas, were arguing with the attendants as to why they could no longer get in for free. What was this paying business? Well, that’s the difference between communism and capitalism.
The young Russians
I remember the young Russians as friendly extraverts, who loved to visit super cool cafes and nightclubs, who frequently travelled to Europe and had the latest Motorola phone. They represented a stark contrast to the older generations and all those gypsy cab drivers who lamented for the Soviet Union.
The young Russians longed to be citizens of the world, and loved western and European culture. The most popular bootleg DVDs at the markets were Hollywood films. The handbags were fake Guccis and D&G.
This week, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright remarked on her first meeting with Putin, and how the West completely misunderstood him in 1999.
Even if the West is somehow able to deter Mr. Putin from all-out war — which is far from assured right now — it’s important to remember that his competition of choice is not chess, as some assume, but rather judo.
Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright meets Vladimir Putin
Ahron Young is an award winning journalist who has covered major news events around the world. Ahron is the Managing Editor and Founder of TICKER NEWS.
If you’re a young person in Australia, you probably know new social media rules are coming in December. If you and your friends are under 16, you might be locked out of the social media spaces you use every day.
Some people call these rules a social media ban for under 16s. Others say it’s not a “ban” – just a delay.
Right now we know the rules will definitely include TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Reddit, X, YouTube, Kick and Twitch. But that list could grow.
We don’t know exactly how the platforms will respond to the new rules, but there are things you can do right now to prepare, protect your digital memories, and stay connected.
Here’s a guide for the changes that are coming.
Download your data
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and most other platforms offer a “download your data” option. It’s usually buried in the app settings, but it’s powerful.
A data download (sometimes called a “data checkout” or “export”) includes things like:
photos and videos you’ve uploaded
messages and comments
friend lists and interactions
the platform’s inferences about you (what it thinks you like, who you interact with most, and the sort of content it suggests for you).
Even if you can’t access your account later, these files let you keep a record of your online life: jokes, friendships, cringey early videos, glow-ups, fandom moments, all of it.
You can save it privately as a time capsule. Researchers are also building tools to help you view and make sense of it.
Downloading your archive is a smart move while your accounts are still live. Just make sure you store it somewhere secure. These files can contain incredibly detailed snapshots of your daily life, so you might want to keep them private.
Don’t assume platforms will save anything for you
Some platforms may introduce official ways to export your content when bans begin. Others may move faster and simply block under-age accounts with little warning.
As one example, Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads – has begun to flag accounts they think belong to under-16s. The company has also provided early indications that it will permit data downloads after the new rules comes into effect.
For others the situation is less clear.
Acting now, while you can still log in normally, is the safest way to keep your stuff.
4 ways to stay connected
Losing access to the platform you use every day to talk with friends can feel like losing part of your social world. That’s real, and it’s okay to feel annoyed, worried, or angry about it.
Here are four ways to prepare.
1. Swap phone numbers or handles on non-banned platforms now.
Don’t wait for the “you are not allowed to use this service” message.
2. Set up group chats somewhere stable.
Use iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, or whatever works for your group and doesn’t rely on age-restricted sign-ups.
3. Keep community ties alive.
Many clubs, fandom spaces, gaming groups and local communities are on multiple sites or platforms (Discord servers, forums, group chats). Get plugged into those spaces.
4. Don’t presume you’ll be able to get around the ban.
Teens who get around the ban are not breaking the law. There is no penalty for teens, or parents who help them, if they do get around the ban and have access to social media under 16.
It’s up to platforms to make these new laws work. Not teens. Not parents.
Do prepare, though. Don’t assume you will be able to get around the ban.
Just using a VPN to pretend your computer is in another country, or a wearing rubber mask to look older in an age-estimating selfie, probably won’t be enough.
A note for adults: take big feelings seriously
Most people recognise the social connections, networks and community enabled by social media are valuable – especially to young people.
For some teens, social media may be their primary community and support group. It’s where their people are.
It will be difficult for some when that community disappears. For some it may be even worse.
The ideal role of trusted adults is to listen, validate and support teens during this time. No matter how older people feel, for young people this may be like losing a large part of their world. For many that will be really hard to cope with.
How to keep your agency in a frustrating situation
A lot of people will find it frustrating that we’re excluding teens, rather than forcing platforms to be built safer and better for everyone. If you feel that way, too, you’re not alone.
But you aren’t powerless.
Saving your data, preparing alternative communication channels, and speaking out if you want to are all ways to:
own your digital history
stay connected on your own terms
make sure youth voices inform how Australia thinks about online life going forward.
You’re allowed to feel annoyed. You’re also allowed to take steps that protect your future self.
If you lose access, you’re not gone – just changing channels
Social media bans for teens will create disruption. But they won’t be the end of your friendships, creativity, identity exploration, or culture.
It just means the map is shifting. You get to make deliberate choices about where you go next.
And whatever happens, the online world isn’t going to stop changing. You’re part of the generation that actually understands that, and that’s a strength, not a weakness.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has given a dramatic warning that sophisticated hackers backed by foreign governments are increasingly targeting Australian infrastructure such as telecommunications and airports.
ASIO chief Mike Burgess warned we are now at “the threshold for high-impact sabotage”.
He said authoritarian regimes are more willing to disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure to damage the economy, undermine Australia’s war-fighting capability, and sow social discord:
Imagine the implications if a nation state took down all the [telecommunications] networks? Or turned off the power during a heatwave? Or polluted our drinking water? Or crippled our financial system? I assure you; these are not hypotheticals – foreign governments have elite teams investigating these possibilities right now.
Burgess also said foreign spies are increasingly targeting the private sector to steal trade secrets to give foreign companies a commercial advantage.
So what exactly is the nature of this serious threat? And what can Australian companies, businesses and their leaders do to protect from the threat?
State-backed hackers targeting companies
Burgess has previously warned of the “unprecedented” threat of espionage and foreign interference.
At a conference on Wednesday, he ramped up that warning. He said although foreign spies usually target government information, they are now increasingly targeting the private sector, including customer data.
In one example given by the spy boss, nation-state hackers compromised the computer network of a major Australian exporter and stole commercially sensitive information. This gave the foreign country a significant advantage in contract negotiations.
In another case, they stole the blueprints of an Australian innovation and mass-produced cheap knock-offs that nearly bankrupted the innovator.
Foreign companies connected to intelligence services have also sought to buy access to sensitive personal data sets and collaborate with university researchers developing sensitive technologies.
These threats are significant – an estimated A$2 billion of trade secrets and intellectual property are stolen from Australian companies by cyber spies each year.
The risks of high-impact sabotage
Burgess said authoritarian regimes are now willing to go even further and act dangerously by engaging in “high harm” activities, such as sabotage.
Advances in technology are making it easier for foreign countries to obtain what they need to conduct sabotage. Sabotage, and particularly cyber-enabled sabotage, is low-cost and deniable, but potentially high-impact.
Burgess revealed authoritarian states are attempting to penetrate Australia’s critical infrastructure, including water, transport, telecommunications and energy networks. The attempts are “highly sophisticated” and testing for vulnerabilities in networks.
Once they have penetrated networks, they are “actively and aggressively” mapping systems, seeking to maintain undetected access that enables them to conduct sabotage at any time.
Burgess provided a very real example involving Chinese hackers known as Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. While Salt Typhoon penetrated the telecommunications system in the United States, Volt Typhoon compromised US critical infrastructure to “pre-position” for potential sabotage.
“And yes, we have seen Chinese hackers probing our critical infrastructure, as well,” he said.
To understand how devastating such an attack would be here, Burgess pointed to the recent Optus outage that lasted less than a day and affected calls to Triple Zero.
The Australian Institute of Criminology has estimated cyber-enabled sabotage of critical infrastructure would cost the economy A$1.1 billion per incident.
On Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said China had lodged a protest with the Australian government about the ASIO chief’s comments.
What does the law say?
Espionage, foreign interference and sabotage are all crimes in Australia. While our laws are broad enough to capture the kinds of conduct described by Burgess, we cannot rely on criminal prosecutions to address this problem.
This is because of the practicalities of enforcing laws against offenders who may not be identifiable or may be located overseas.
Instead of relying on the criminal law, we all need to be aware of the risks and take a proactive approach to security.
So what should you do?
According to Burgess, Australian companies, businesses and their leaders can do several things to protect their networks from espionage and sabotage:
understand what is valuable and what is vulnerable
consider what data, systems, services and people are important to your business and your customers
consider what data, systems, services and people are at risk
think about where things are stored, who has access and how well are they protected.
He advises the threats are constantly changing, and responses need to keep up and keep changing, too.
Burgess encouraged leaders and boards to ask:
If these threats are foreseeable, and our vulnerabilities are knowable, what are we doing to manage this risk – both at the operational and governance level?
Are you taking reasonable steps to manage the risk effectively and to prepare for, prevent and respond to a disruption?
Australians think students are being asked to pay far too much for their degrees.
Just under half (47%) of Australians surveyed by YouGov in June 2025 believe a worker on an average income should be able to pay off the debt for a standard three-year degree within five years.
When it comes to the cost of a degree, 58% believe a student should pay A$5,000 or less per year – less than a third of what arts students now pay.
Just under one in five, or 18%, believe a standard degree should be free – as it was 50 years ago, when the Whitlam Labor government introduced free university education in 1974. This ended in 1989, when in a world first, the Hawke Labor government introduced the income contingent Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) – which is still with us today. It has continued to evolve, with costs to students rising with successive governments since.
Today, thanks to the Job Ready Graduates scheme introduced by the Morrison Coalition government in 2021, the cost of an arts degree has risen to over A$50,000.
Unsurprisingly, the Universities Admissions Centre found that concern over HECS debt influences the decision to attend university for 40% of Year 12 students.
How did we get here?
Free education
The evolution of Australian universities has passed through three distinct phases. These were first defined by Hannah Forsyth and paraphrased by John Quiggin as: the sandstone era from 1850 to 1945 that saw each state establish its own university; the era of expansion from 1945 to the election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983; and the era of transformation from the 1980s to today.
The post-World War II era of expansion saw the Commonwealth take over primary funding for universities, while leaving the states in charge of governance. This split responsibility continues to the present day as a source of regulatory incoherence.
In this era of sweeping social and economic change, ahead of the 1972 election in his “It’s Time” speech, Whitlam declared:
We will abolish fees at universities and colleges of advanced education. We believe that a student’s merit rather than a parent’s wealth should decide who should benefit from the community’s vast financial commitment to tertiary education. And more, it’s time to strike a blow for the ideal that education should be free.
For many, Whitlam’s 1974 reforms remain the high water mark. But while university education was free of charge, it was not freely available. Limited places meant problems of equity and access remained.
Profit in universities – from the 1980s
The Dawkins reforms in the 1980s, named for education minister John Dawkins in the Hawke Labor government, remade Australia’s higher education sector. In many ways, the basic structure and market orientation that he put in place remain intact, including incentives for universities to compete internationally and operate like corporate entities.
Competition between universities and their embrace of a profit motive has suited successive governments. It has meant universities increasingly raise revenue from market-based sources, including student fees, rather than relying on the public purse. In 1995, the federal government spent 0.9% of GDP on universities, with this dropping a third to 0.6% in 2021 (implying a $6.5 billion reduction).
To put it another way, in the 1980s the federal government contributed around 80% of the sector’s funding, now it is closer to 40%, while the number of students has more than tripled to over 1.6 million.
John Dawkins increased the size of the university sector – and introduced HECS. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade/Wikimedia, CC BY
Dawkins increased the size of the sector, which opened up access and led to a more than doubling of the percentage of Australians who study at university (from 2 in 10, to 4 in 10 people today). He did so by transforming colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology into universities.
Dawkins and Hawke built a system that fused Labor’s aspiration for fairness and equality with their own stamp of economic rationalism that was then very much in vogue.
Government policies included floating the Australian dollar to integrate the Australian economy with global markets, allowing foreign banks into Australia, reducing tariffs, and privatising or corporatising government-
owned enterprises such as QANTAS, Telecom (now Telstra) and the Commonwealth Bank. University policy directed towards corporatisation and competing in international markets was yet another example.
Under the new HECS scheme, university students were charged $1,800 a year, regardless of the course they were studying. Repayments, at 1% of income, started once their pay reached $22,000, rising to 2% at $25,000.
Domestic enrolments soared and lecture halls heaved as the system welcomed thousands of new students, many of them the first in their family to attend university.
International students: a huge change
During the Dawkins era of rapid growth, the Hawke government introduced a full-fee-paying system for international students.
Higher education expert Andrew Norton from Monash Business School described it as one of the most important higher-education policy decisions ever made: “Public universities proved to be surprisingly entrepreneurial, sparking double-digit annual international enrolment growth rates through the 1990s.”
The nation’s universities thrived among international competition, becoming the envy of many other nations in their ability to attract the best and brightest from around the world. In 2024, international students made up 26% of total enrolments in Australian universities.
The shift to attract international students had many flow-on effects, including Australian universities increasingly playing the international rankings game. These are scored by organisations such as QS and Times Higher Education with universities vying to become one of the top 200, 100 or even 50 universities in the world. The scoring is weighted in favour of research over student satisfaction, leading universities to prioritise the former while the latter has eroded.
Australia has achieved remarkable success in international university rankings. In the 2026 QS rankings, for example, Australia has nine universities in the top 100, more than any other nation except the United States and the United Kingdom. And on a per capita basis, Australia far exceeds those nations.
When it comes to university rankings, Australia outperforms the world. This matters not just for bragging rights or prestige, but because rankings are a key attractor of international students.
This has produced a self-reinforcing cycle. Universities prioritise research, which boosts their rankings, thereby attracting more international students, whose course fees provide the income to fund research, and so on.
Notably, the education of Australian students does not fit within this dynamic; at best, they are cross-subsidised by the additional income from their international counterparts. The system incentivised this as government funding declined, especially so for major universities able to compete on the world stage.
The Dawkins reforms sowed the seeds for decades of over-reliance on international students and the revenue they generate. They also propelled universities down an increasingly corporatised path. As the editors of the 2013 book, The Dawkins Revolution, 25 Years On, put it:
Dawkins […] turned colleges into universities, free education into HECS, elite education into mass education, local focuses into international outlooks, vice-chancellors into corporate leaders […] He remodelled higher education and how it was funded in only a few years.
Unlimited bachelor degrees – at a cost
Such radical change has had many unintended consequences with which governments have been grappling ever since.
A change of government in 1996 brought new policies under Liberal prime minister John Howard. This included replacing the single course fee under HECS with differential course fees, whereby students able to earn higher salaries on graduation (in areas such as business and law) were charged more.
The sector underwent significant reform again in 2012, with the Gillard Labor government scrapping capped student places to usher in the demand-driven system recommended by the 2008 Bradley Review. Universities could enrol unlimited numbers of Australian bachelor-degree students into any discipline other than medicine and be paid for each of them.
The number of bachelor-degree students soared but the system groaned under the expense. As Andrew Norton observed:
The policy ended because of cost. By 2017, demand-driven funding had caused spending to increase by more than 50% in real terms since 2008. From 2013 to 2017, every federal budget included an attempt to curb higher education spending, while keeping the demand-driven system.
The Turnbull Coalition government ultimately responded by freezing bachelor-degree spending.
$50,000 arts degrees
The system veered off the rails with Morrison’s Job-Ready Graduates in 2021. This blunt, ill-conceived policy removed the link introduced by the Howard government between student fees and graduate earnings in favour of setting prices based upon what the government wanted students to study.
The idea was that a strong price signal would steer students away from the arts and humanities into areas of national labour shortage such as mathematics, agriculture and nursing. It took the idea of a market for higher education to an entirely new level, distancing the system even further from the notion of education as a public good.
The policy failed in its own terms and also failed the nation as a whole. While the plan was, for example, to use high prices for arts degrees and low prices for agriculture degrees to change student choices, it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how students choose what to study.
A potential history student did not seek a career in farming, nor did a student passionate about philosophy shift to mathematics. Instead, it made the entire university system more socially regressive and inequitable.
Price has not proved to be a significant determinant of choice between degrees. One study found that fewer than 1 in 50 students changed their field of study due to differential fees.
But while price has little impact on what degree to enrol in, the cost of a young person’s preferred degree can have a life-defining influence on whether they study or not. Not only are students now lumbered with higher fees and debt, but many are dissuaded from going to university at all.
Job Ready Graduates introduced deep unfairness. Arts degrees covering areas such as history and English literature moved to the highest fee category with business and law, despite arts graduates earning the lowest graduate incomes and often coming from the most disadvantaged parts of society.
An arts student incurs a debt of $16,992 per year or $50,976 for three years of study, compared with $4,627 a year or $13,881 for three-year degrees in areas including agriculture, statistics and mathematics.
The prices will increase further in 2026. Many arts graduates never earn enough to pay this off because of their low salaries and the ongoing indexation of their debt, effectively incurring a debt until death.
The annual cost of an arts degree is now nine times the original 1989 contribution, a rate well ahead of inflation. Student fees have increased from a third of the salary earned by an arts student on graduation to more than two-thirds.
Extracting more fees from students has led to student debt reaching astronomical levels. It peaked at more than $81 billion before the Albanese Labor government reduced debts by 20% and shaved $16 billion off the total.
Devastating student pressures
Record high fees and the associated debt is only one of the major pressures faced by Australian students. Like the rest of the community, they have also been hit by cost-of-living pressures that have left many in poverty.
As a result, the proportion of students having to support full-time study with full-time work has doubled, from 1 in 14 students in the 1990s to one in seven in 2023. This mix is devastating for students and causes many to drop out. Full-time work or full-time study is difficult enough, let alone trying to combine the two.
Students are taking longer to pay off their debt, now taking 9.9 years on average compared to 7.3 years in 2006. Government policies that permit delaying repayment to higher income levels will further slow this, meaning many graduates will hold student debt well into their thirties as they face other financial challenges, such as securing a home loan or starting a family.
The Albanese government’s one-off decision to wipe 20% off student debt will cut $5,520 from the average graduate debt of $27,600. This makes a meaningful difference for graduates yet to pay off their debt, but it
does nothing to address the problem with the level of the fees in the first place. In particular, the policy provides no benefits to new students.
It is akin to addressing the housing crisis by paying off 20% of every current mortgage without doing anything to reduce the cost of housing.
Urgent need for fixing
The deep problems with student fees are well known. The interim report of the Australian Universities Accord, released in June 2023, said the Job Ready Graduates package needs to be fixed “before it causes long-term and entrenched damage” and that without change the higher education system “will rapidly become unfit for purpose”.
New students will be saddled with the consequences of Job Ready Graduates for the long term. Every day we delay a fix is a bad day for the current cohort of students.
The Productivity Commission joined the call for a “new funding model as a priority” given the “design flaws” of Job Ready Graduates. It said the “differences in student contributions by perceived labour market needs fail to meet their goals while arbitrarily increasing debt burdens on some students”. The Accord’s final report in February 2024, highlighting this unfairness, found the student fee structure needs to be replaced.
The government has yet to act on this. Instead, students must wait for the newly established Australian Tertiary Education Commission to design a new funding and fees model.
