Oh, I fully expect them to privatise HECS - they were making noises about that back at budget time this year, and while the idea may have been dropped back then, I'd be expecting it to come back with full bells and whistles in the Mid Year Financial and Economic Outlook statement as they scrape around for any means possible for trying to save money. If nothing else, they're likely to outsource the debt collection arm of the whole mess - expect the nice folks from Dunn and Bradstreet to start contacting your students any time soon.

The problem at the heart of things is that the pace of automation has sped up to the point where more and more jobs are under threat. More and more things are cheaper for businesses to do via the internet, or through mechanical means, or if you have to employ humans to do it, you shop around for the location which will let you pay them the least. So the jobs which are being lost aren't just manufacturing jobs any more - we're starting to see job losses from professional areas as well, and those will only speed up as companies figure out how to put more and more things online, cut more and more corners, and outsource more and more jobs to places where a ten hour shift is only something to write home about because every other employer on the street has people working twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch.