Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Kooyong for her question. She's probably the best member for Kooyong the parliament has ever had; there's a bit of support up there in the public gallery. Thank you for your focus on education, for your focus on fairness and for your support for the legislation to cut student debt by 20 per cent. Twenty per cent is a big cut. It's not as big as 33 per cent—that's how much the Australian people cut the number of Liberal MPs in the chamber at the election—but 20 per cent is still a big cut. And it's going to help a lot of Australians. Three million Australian will get their student debt cut when this legislation passes the parliament.

The truth is we've got a good education system, but it could be a lot better and a lot fairer. That's what the Universities Accord report is all about. It's a blueprint for reforming our higher education system over the next decade and beyond. The job-ready graduates scheme, which you referred to in your question, is the subject of recommendations in that report. We've already begun the task of implementing that report. I think we've bitten off a big chunk of it already, about 31 of the 47 recommendations in part or in full. That includes paid prac and the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, which began this month. It also includes measures, in the bill that we're debating this week in the parliament, to fix the repayment system for HECS, something that Bruce Chapman, the architect of HECS, described as 'the most important change to the system in 35 years'.

There's more work to do. We'll keep working through the recommendations in the Universities Accord report and take advice from the Tertiary Education Commission.

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