Matt Smith (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to help Australians with a student debt and to make our education system better and fairer? What has been the response?

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

I thank my great friend the member for Leichhardt for his question. I'm really glad that he asked me this question, because I'm about 20 per cent shorter than he is and in a couple of days student debt will be 20 per cent smaller as well. I'm five-foot-nine; he's six-foot-11. The Liberal Party are at sixes and sevens. The kids in the gallery know what I'm talking about! And, in a couple of days time, $16 billion of student debt is going to come off the shoulders of millions of young Australians. In just two days time, 1½ million Australians will have their student debt cut by 20 per cent. And next week, another 1½ million Australians will have their debt cut by 20 per cent as well. It's the biggest cut to student debt in Australian history. We promised it and we're delivering it. But it's not the only thing that we're delivering.

This year, we signed agreements with every state and territory to fix the funding of our public schools, which is something that no Australian government has ever done before, and it is not a blank cheque. It's tied to reform—the sort of reform that we know works. The reading wars are over. We know what works to teach children to read. We also know that waiting until a child is eight is too late to make sure we know whether they can read, write or count. That's why early intervention is important. That's why we're rolling out phonics checks and numeracy checks in year 1—to identify children who are falling behind—as well as more small-group tutoring, to provide support for children to catch up.

Next year, something else will happen. Next year, we'll start the work of reforming the national curriculum, starting with the first three years of maths to make sure we get the basics right: addition, subtraction, multiplication and something the Liberal Party can help us out with—division.

Next year, something else as well—education ministers have agreed to a reform that was talked about for a long time but never happened, and that's bringing together the bodies that are responsible for national testing, the national curriculum and national standards, as well as national research, under one roof to create an Australian teaching and learning commission. That's what delivery looks like, and that is what division looks like—no joy, just division. The Australian people know it, and they also know this—we're cutting student debt by 20 per cent.