Last November, the Albanese Government announced a promise to cut all existing student HELP loans by 20%. It was a key Labor federal election promise, one that the Coalition opposed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeatedly pledged that it would be the first bill put before the new parliament.

The bill – formally the Universities Accord (Cutting Student Debt by 20 Per Cent) Bill 2025 – promises to benefit three million Australians with a student loan and forgive $16 billion worth of existing debt. As the education minister’s media release today points out, the whole thing is conceived as “cost of living relief for the Australian people”.

But the title of the bill is kind of a red herring. The “Universities Accord” was, in a nutshell, a massive review of the structural flaws in Australia’s university system. There’s little in its Final Report about student debt forgiveness, certainly not “one-off” relief packages. There are a few lines about waiving some “life-long debts”, but even these are followed by the conclusion that waiving debt does nothing to address the integrity of the fee system as a whole.

To be fair to Clare, there is a little bit of Accord-inspired structural reform in the bill. Specifically, the bill offers a new “fairer repayment system” that raises the income threshold at which people start paying back their HELP debt (from $54,435 up to $67,000). It also ensures that debt repayments are based on income above that threshold, rather than total income.

The explanatory memorandum is at pains to show that this change “addresses recommendation 16(b) in the Accord’s Final Report”. But what were the Accord’s other recommendations for student debt reform?

First, a major change to the way HELP debt is indexed over time. Instead of debts rising with inflation every year (which led to a 7 per cent spike in debts back in 2023), the report said debts should rise with whatever is lower – inflation or the wage price index (WPI). The government did, in fact, implement this reform in 2024.

Second, the report also recommended that the Morrison Government’s Job-ready Graduates (JRG) package, with its massive fee hikes for humanities, society and culture, and communications students, be scrapped. JRG means people studying these courses end up with higher debts than they used to (sometimes as high as $50,000), and take even longer to pay them off. As the report says, a fairer HECS-HELP system would charge students based on their projected lifetime earnings.

So far, JRG has been kept firmly in the too-hard-basket. But scrapping JRG and reforming student fees is a much-needed reform, one wholly deserving of the “Universities Accord” title. The new Australian Tertiary Education Commission, established on 1 July, has been asked to start work on this straight away, but the federal government will ultimately be asked to take the decisions that matter.

Cutting student debt is nice for some, but bigger reform would be better for everyone.