Politicians do it all the time, often with an accidentally on purpose backdrop of a community setting or park somewhere, as they endeavour to look people focused and sympathetic.
There was certainly a fair degree of sympathetic camera staring happening around the time of the one-time HECS reduction which was applied to a lucky group of university students who grabbed a handy 20 per cent discount on their existing debts.
The realities of truly understanding how the numbers play out for younger teachers first coming out of university are quite different.
Once you strip back the layers of rhetoric and pretend understanding, you come up with a set of numbers that can be quite startling.
Now I’m not a mathematician, but then neither of many of the young people entering the education workforce for the first time, often just discovering the implications of that debt they have ignored for the past four years.
I do know fundamental financial literacy however, and I know that if you take a beginning teacher salary in Victoria (for want of a better example) and combine it with a HECS debt and rising living costs, you begin to see a pattern emerging.
It’s a pattern of ongoing, long-term financial challenge. One where housing insecurity and problematic loans become a stark reality, and not just the stuff of political camera moments.
In 2025, the starting salary for a teacher was roughly $79K or about $425 a day for a CRT. As HECS is calculated now, you only repay 15% on the difference between $67K and your salary.
There’s a little caveat to understand though.
The HECS debt is indexed each year, going up by the cost of inflation or wages growth, whichever is less. It is not a static debt, but a growing one. Just like any other loan.
To work our example, we need to make some assumptions. Let’s say inflation stays at the 2025 rate of around 3% and our graduate teacher has a debt of $18,800 after four years of study.
In their first year, their debt increases with inflation to over $19000, then they repay around $1800 to bring it back to $17500. In Years 2 to 4 after university, our graduate is lucky enough to keep working and loving their job.
They keep repaying their HECS debt so it’s back to around $12000 by the end of Year 4. They decide to travel overseas for a year, which means they don’t pay any HECS as they are below the threshold. They return to teaching as a CRT, remaining below the threshold for the next two years.
In this time, the debt is increasing, (assuming a baseline inflation or wages rate of 3 per cent) so that by the start of Year 8 it is back to around $13500 and our not so new graduate returns to full time work.
At this point we are heading into quite speculative territory as no one really knows what wages, repayment rates and HECS arrangements will be in 2033.
If we assume our teacher is now earning towards the top of Range 1, their salary will likely exceed $90K, with repayments of about $3450.
They will finally be at a point where they are making a real dent in their debt, forcing it steadily back towards zero.
Assuming of course, they don’t want to buy anything fancy and outlandish, like a house.
