The 48th Parliament of Australia and second to be controlled by the Albanese Labor government commenced yesterday. Nothing much was achieved; day one tends to be consumed by swearing in ceremonies and plenty of pats on the back.
But that will soon change: today Parliament is expected to pass a student debt relief bill, with the support of a Liberal Party that has completely lost its way. I’ve written about why this policy is a bad idea, and an opposition party that cared about equity and fiscal conservatism should reject it out of principle. It should not, as Coalition education spokesman Jonathon Duniam weakly conceded, support it because it was “one of the centrepieces of the government’s agenda at the last election”.
People vote on a large package of policies. Even if you disliked Labor’s position on this issue, you wouldn’t necessarily have voted for the opposition: perhaps you liked some of their other policies even more, or disliked many of Peter Dutton’s.
If the Coalition wants any chance at governing again then it’s going to have to take positions on issues exactly such as this, where independent researchers found:
- it’s horizontally inequitable because similar individuals who studied the same degree at slightly different times receive very different levels of debt relief;
- it will do little to accelerate debt repayment; and
- most of the benefits will go to future high-income earners.
In two days we’ve had Albanese restart the culture wars—has he already forgotten the results of his divisive first-term referendum?—and a large, vote-buying wealth transfer to the upper-middle class using borrowed money.
Yep, the 48th Parliament is off to a bad start.