Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Hansard source

The government will not be supporting Senator Henderson's amendment—and, by Senator Henderson's own admission, the opposition is clearly not supporting her amendment either. We have already acted to fix indexation. In case Senator Henderson wasn't paying attention, last year we capped indexation at the lower of CPI or the wage price index. That change applied retrospectively from 1 June 2023 and ensures that HELP debts don't grow faster than wages in the future. This was a recommendation of the universities accord, and the government acted on it. That should be no news to Senator Henderson. She was the shadow minister for education when that bill was introduced. At the time, she didn't seek to amend it to limit indexation.

Senator Henderson claims that she cares about rising student debt, but perhaps Senator Henderson has forgotten the changes that she as the then shadow minister put forward at the last election to shift the cost of Commonwealth prac payments back into student debts. They released their costings on the Thursday before the election, with the hope that no-one would notice, relentlessly seeking to shift costs to students before prac payments even started. Instead of the government providing $331 per week to teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students to offer a bit of support while they're undertaking their prac placements, the coalition wanted to make those students add that cost to their own HECS debt. According to the coalition's costing, that would look like adding $556 million to student debts over four years, driving up their HECS debt, increasing repayment times and reinforcing a fact that young people already knew: the coalition has no interest in supporting students and young Australians whatsoever.