The Daily Telegraph stated that when the former Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke gave us HECS student debt, he created a "monster [which devoured] womens' savings.
It is very true that equal pay for women is long overdue. The question should be: why wasn't this fixed years ago? That goes for a range of things, not to forget superannuation and pay rates. The fact that we still have to talk about this issue in 2023, shows that there is still a lot of work to do in pushing down the patriarchal society of the 19th century.
The issue of student fees, however, makes me ask questions about why many people have to spend a lifetime paying for their student fees.
The reason why is very simple. Extreme market forces control the same-system-fits-all bureaucracy, in which we live. This is everywhere.
It means that whatever the best people can do, sets in concrete the rate of work and rate of pay and amount of student fees, to which everyone else must adhere.
If you work in sales, your monthly sales figures must be on par with the best sales people in the company. If you sweep the floors, you must be as fast as the best floor sweepers and to demonstrate my point, if your tertiary education puts you into middle class employment, then your income will be on par with the best people in that industry. It's nonsense, of course.
This assumes that companies will pay the best female workers the same income as the best male workers in middle class jobs, which require university degrees. The Daily Telegraph article suggests it ain't necessarily so. One reason for this is because many women do part time work, because of parenting responsibilities or because they are more likely to take time out to become a carer for a relative.
The market forces, however, will charge these women the same amount of money for education, as the people who earn the most money from middle class work, as a result of their higher education.
It is very true that we must fix this inequality now.
There are other observations to be made in terms of the disparities within the HECS system.
It is very clear that many people who get a degree at university will not become as well paid as the best university graduates. The fact that some students graduate with honours and some do not is a case in point.
The government continues to apply expensive fees to everyone, even though these fees were originally designed for the 12 per cent of people who had a university degree in 1989. They were more or less the elite. We now choose to apply the same high fees once reserved for the very elite, to all people with degrees. In those days approximately one in 10 people had a degree. Today that figure is one in three and yet we apply the same elite standards to the weaker students, as we do to the stronger ones, as part of market forces and same-system-fits-all bureaucracy.
We do this to older workers. Same-system-fits-all bureaucracy has driven market forces to hurl older workers out of the workforce in their forties and fifties, because the norm is that they have had their turn to make their fortune and now the baton must be passed to the younger generation. Well what about the older workers who have had shocking work lives and have never really succeeded at anything and have spent their lives in menial and short-term casual labour. Why must we apply market force driven same-system-fits-all-bureaucracy to them?
In all aspects of our lives, our governments have over regulated everything. It reminds me a bit of advertising lecturers in the late 80s, who told us how the creatives and numbers crunchers (or bean counters) in ad agencies declared war on each other regularly. Now, however, all of this is so regulated that both combattants have declared peace - but peace at a price, where economic rationalism within the advertising industry has destroyed creativity.
Western thought used to put the individual at front and center, but now up front we can see the rough end of economic change. Corporations want their workers to solve problems as a team. This is at the expense of a brilliant individual, who can solve a problem on his or her own. Such a person is an idealist. A bureaucracy will tear down such people and hurl them onto the scrap-heap at rapid speed. The regulation of this century has destroyed so much of our wonderful western thought. We have entered the dark side ― Joseph Walz