Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously there are perils—there are many new senators in the chamber—when your supplementary question is already written out and you don't change it or vary it when you hear the previous answer. I will repeat again for the senator's interest that one of our reforms was to put in place higher repayment rates at high-income thresholds. One of our reforms means that there is now a 10 per cent repayment rate for those earning more than $134,573. Those who leave study and get jobs that are well paid will absolutely be repaying their loans back much faster than they would have in the past. That is good news in terms of the sustainability of our student loan scheme, which has billions of dollars of debt that the government carries on behalf of students and which we want to make sure we can continue to offer on incredibly generous terms. In terms of lower incomes, there is the new one per cent threshold that kicks in at $45,881— (Time expired)