Every parliament passes one law it will be remembered by. This one chose well: the abolition of tuition fees is generous, overdue and — whisper it — genuinely popular across party lines. Which is precisely why the applause should worry us. Laws this loved are rarely audited by the people who love them.
So let us audit. The scheme costs $3.1bn a year before a single maintenance grant is paid. It is funded by a training levy on large employers and the closure of two tax reliefs — instruments that yield beautifully in a growing economy and treacherously in a shrinking one. The Fiscal Council’s phrase, “credible but tightly drawn”, is auditor-speak for: this works until the first bad year.
And the first bad year will come. When it does, a future finance minister will face a choice the act’s drafters have quietly deferred: cut the university settlement, raise the levy, or let quality erode invisibly, one unreplaced professor at a time. The third option is the silent default of every underfunded system on earth.
There is a way to armour the promise, and the bill’s own machinery hints at it: the October funding formula. Index the settlement not to enrolment alone but to delivered cost per subject, audited annually and published league-table style. Make underfunding visible the way exam results are visible. Shame is a fiscal instrument; ask any treasury.
None of this is an argument against the act. It is an argument for treating it as infrastructure rather than gesture — maintained, inspected, boringly renewed. The students of 2027 will get their free degrees either way. Whether the students of 2040 get the same universities depends on the arithmetic nobody cheered for this morning.