Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's great to hear that those opposite have obviously given away their previous job-ready graduates program, which increased the cost of tertiary education substantially. It's good to hear that they've finally realised that there is a value to tertiary education and that there is a value to intergenerational equity.

We speak often about the importance of education in this place, and we speak about how it changes lives. Many of us, like me, are the first in our families to have the benefit of tertiary education, and we have that personal experience of opportunities that tertiary education can provide. One of the really important tenets of the Labor Party is our commitment to making good quality education available to all Australians, ensuring that everyone has opportunity, irrespective of family wealth. Of course, as a country and as an economy, it is also very much in our interest to ensure that we are developing Australians with the education and skills to do the highly skilled work that we need. Every business I speak to talks to me about their need for more skilled workers, so encouraging people to take up tertiary education and skills training is a productivity issue, a quality-of-life issue and an equity issue.

During the campaign the Prime Minister promised that the first bill to be introduced under a re-elected Albanese Labor government would be this one, to cut 20 per cent off student debts and to increase the threshold that you need to start repaying your student debt. And here we are. This bill, the Universities Accord (Cutting Student Debt by 20 Per Cent) Bill 2025, cuts the student debt of over three million Australians by 20 per cent. In Boothby, just under 24,000 students and former students will benefit from this.

The average student debt today is $27,500, and this legislation will cut that by about $5,500. All up, it will cut student debt by more than $16 billion. The cut will be backdated to 1 June 2025, before this year's indexation occurred. This policy applies to uni students, vocational education students and some apprentices.

This bill also changes repayment systems. It raises the income threshold, when you have to start making repayments, from $54,435 in 2024-25 to $67,000 in 2025-26. It also replaces the current repayment system with a new marginal repayment system. The current system is based on your entire income, and, once you earn above the minimum repayment threshold, you pay a percentage of your entire wage as repayment. Under the changes in this bill you'll only pay a percentage of your wage above the minimum repayment threshold. For example, right now, if you earn $70,000, you'll pay $1,750 each year. Under our changes, you'll only pay $450. That means you'll pay $1,300 less a year, and you can still pay more often if you want to.

While cutting student debt will help young Australians to get ahead, this change to the repayment threshold and structures is an immediate cost-of-living measure. Many of the people who will benefit from this are of the younger generation. They're just starting out, building their careers and lives in some very tough international economic conditions. This cost-of-living measure will mean they will keep more of their income in their pocket; they'll earn more and keep more of what they earn.

I've paid my fair share of HECS debts and I've been lucky enough to be able to pay my student debts off, so I won't personally benefit from this. But, when I went through university, degrees were much cheaper. My HECS contribution represented around 24 per cent of the cost of the degree, compared to about 45 per cent now. So there is an intergenerational equity issue here as well.

We know that young people starting their careers are often on lower incomes. They're trying to enter a housing market suffering from a 40-year backlog in housing, thinking about maybe having a family. So this bill, the Universities Accord (Cutting Student Debt by 20 Per Cent) Bill 2025—and the changes to the repayment threshold and calculator—goes to levelling the playing field a bit for them. It also builds on our previous work in the tertiary education sector. We've wiped $3 billion of student debt and fixed the indexation system; we established a Commonwealth prac payment, to support teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students; we locked fee-free TAFE into law; and we've asked the banking regulators to review the rules, to make it easier for those with a student loan to get into the housing market.

Our changes provide relief for students and young people, while continuing to protect the integrity and value of the HELP system, which has massively expanded higher education access for millions of Australians.

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