Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was going through this, and I was fascinated. I went to the website of the Australian government Department of Education. It goes through the grand outcomes of the Universities Accord (Cutting Student Debt by 20 Per Cent) Bill 2025. It tells me whether the 20 per cent reduction applies to me, whether I should consider making a voluntary repayment, when I will see the 20 per cent, why will my student loan debt go up, what if my HELP loan for recent studies is not showing and on and on it goes.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I'll tell you one thing it doesn't show you—how much it's costing the Australian people. It doesn't tell you that. When we hear this and when we say, 'This is what the government is doing,' it sounds like it's almost coming out of Treasurer Jim Chalmers's pocket or maybe out of Mr Anthony Albanese's new house or a magical place. It's actually the Australian people. The Australian people are paying off other people's debts. The Australian people are forking out the money from their pockets to pay off another person's debt. That is actually what is happening here. Let's talk about some of the other Australian people who are paying off people who go to university's debt, and I went to university. They're fitters and turners. They're plumbers. They're shearers. They're bricklayers. They're chippies. They're boilermakers. They're just farm labourers. They don't get their debt paid off, but they're paying off another person's debt. How do you think they see this sort of conceit? 'I'm entitled, after I've been to university, to have the taxpayer pay off my debt.' Why?

I know that you've got the numbers in the House to get this through, but let's just end this rhetoric. Just remember who's actually paying for this. It's not the government, as if you whip the tin around the Labor Party and say, 'Chuck your money in here; we're going to pay off the debt.' It's actually other taxpayers that are paying off the debt. If they don't pay off the debt from the other taxpayers, it'll go on the $950 billion that tonight is in Australian government securities outstanding, on the Australian Office of Financial Management website. It hasn't been through $1 trillion yet, but it will. It's another one of those mistruths that was peddled, but if you keep doing things like this—borrowing money to basically give to somebody else, which is what you're really doing—you're just giving the money to somebody else, and you're making somebody else stack bricks, go to work on building sites or work as a contract musterer on a farm. You're making them pay off the other person's debt. Just inform your rhetoric about exactly what it is. It is not a gift from the government. It is a payment by one group of people to another group of people. You're paying off somebody else's debt with their money.

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