Sarah Witty (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. How is the Albanese Labor government helping Australians with a student debt to be able to own their own home? What has been the response to these reforms?

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

I thank the member for Melbourne for her question. She gets this; she represents more young people with a student debt than anywhere else in the country. Young people don't always see something for them on the ballot paper come election, but they did this year, and they voted for it in their millions. They voted for cuts to student debt by 20 per cent and they voted for measures that we're taking to make it easier to buy a first home. One of those is what the Prime Minister and the Treasurer and the Minister for Housing just spoke about: being able to buy a home with as little as a five per cent deposit.

We have now passed laws to cut student debt by 20 per cent, and that will help three million Australians—a lot of them young Australians just out of TAFE, just out of university, just out of home, just getting started. But that legislation doesn't just cut their debt; it also cuts their repayments. That will make it easier to save for that five per cent deposit. For someone on an income of 70 grand, it will reduce the repayments that they have to make each year by about $1,300. That's a lot of money. It means more money in their pocket rather than in the government's. That is real help to save for that deposit. That was a recommendation from the universities accord.

There's something else that we're doing here too. One of the other things that the universities accord pointed out was problems with the way banks look at HECS when they're assessing whether to give you a home loan or not, and it recommended changes here too. I want to pay tribute to the Treasurer for the work that he has done here. He asked APRA and ASIC to look at this, and in February this year we announced that they would update their guidance to banks to make it easier for Australians with a student debt to get a mortgage. That has now happened. That happened in June. Under these changes, I am advised that a dual-income couple with student debts could borrow up to $150,000 more for their first home when combined with the tax cuts and interest rate cuts that have happened over the last 12 months or so. HECS shouldn't be a handbrake on homeownership. That's why we're doing this. We're doing what we promised. We're cutting student debt and we're making it easier to buy a first home, with a five per cent deposit. The changes that we are making to the HECS repayment system and in the advice to banks are an important part of that.