Friday 29th of March 2024

when being a tight-arsed "adult" is more stupid than being a young idealist...

when joe's past is catching up with his budget...

 

 

Two weeks after delivering a budget seeking to push the cost burden onto students, a young Joe Hockey has emerged as the unlikely former leader of student protests against similar reforms.

The 48-year-old treasurer may have reason to cringe at Nine News footage unearthed by Fairfax Media showing him protesting against the introduction of a $250 upfront charge planned by the Hawke government in 1987.

Some critics say his federal budget means getting a degree could end up costing future students $120,000.

In the footage, Hockey, then 22 and president of the Sydney University student representative council, says: "We will continue to go out onto the streets and to protest, and actively encourage the public to support us in our campaign for free education."

Hockey, a law and arts student, also wrote on the subject for the University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit attacking the kind of deregulation measure his own government is now proposing.

"The Liberal party, which released its education policy two weeks ago, promised to cut back funds to universities and, at the same time, leave the universities to charge whatever fee they wished," he wrote.

"Such a policy is suicidal for student welfare. We will have no effective voice in our own fortune."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/28/joe-hockey-video-shows-treasurer-protested-student-fees

 

 

all over the place, not knowing what their hands are doing...

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has quashed suggestions the Government will collect higher education loan debts from dead people's estates, but appears at odds with his Treasurer Joe Hockey.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne has told the Australian Financial Review he has "no ideological opposition" to collecting debts from the estates of students who have died.

And Mr Hockey says HECS debts should be treated no differently to other loans.

"It shouldn't be different to any other loan," he told the Nine Network

"It's only against the estate of the individual. It's not going to go across families and so on. 

"That's the same as any other loan, any other mortgage we have in our lives."

But, speaking almost at the same time, Mr Abbott told ABC NewsRadio he would not be changing the current system.

"I want to make it absolutely crystal clear this Government is not going to change the existing rules," he said.

"And the existing rule in respect of university debts, fee help debts, HECS debts, is that they cease, they cease, on decease, as it were."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-29/abbott-rules-out-chasing-post-mortem-hecs-debts/5485736