David Smith (Bean, 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 provide real cost-of-living relief to Australians and support them to get a university degree? Why is it so important to continue to deliver rather than divide when it comes to education?

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

If I can thank my friend the brilliant member for Bean for his question, I might just do that! I told the parliament in November last year that we'd cut the student debt, by 20 per cent, of 1½ million Australians, but I can inform the House that that is not correct—at least not anymore, because now it's double that. Now we've cut the student debt of more than three million Australians by 20 per cent. We promised it; now we've delivered it. It's the biggest cut to student debt in Australian history. To put it in perspective, for the average Australian with a student debt, we've taken now $5,500 off their back. That's a lot of help for a lot of young Australians who might be just out of TAFE or just out of university or maybe just out of home. They're just getting started. And this isn't the only thing that we're doing. We're also cutting the amount that they have to repay of their debt every year. For example, if you're on 70 grand a year, we're cutting the amount that you have to repay every year by $1,300. Now that's real cost-of-living help. It means an extra 1,300 bucks in your pocket rather than the government's.

And there's something else that we're doing to help Australians with the cost of living. That's paid prac—financial help while you do your practical training at university—because, as many people do, if you have to give up your part-time job to do your practical training or you've got to move a couple of hundred kilometres away and rent, then it can be tough to pay the bills. That's why we're doing this. It's real cost-of-living help. We're now rolling that out for teaching students, for nursing students, for midwifery students and for social work students—people who've signed up to do some of the most important jobs in this country, like looking after our kids and looking after us when we're ill or when we're old, or women fleeing domestic violence. That's what we're focused on: helping Australians with the cost of living, unlike those on the other side who are just focused on how much they hate each other. They make the Beckhams look like a happy family. They're like a couple who bought a non-refundable holiday and then they broke up and now they've just got to sit there and suffer through it. They don't like paid prac. They don't like cutting student debt by 20 per cent. They don't even like each other.