Richard Dowling (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, note that this is not my first speech. It is worth pausing on the significance of this. This is the first piece of legislation tabled by the Albanese government in the 48th Parliament. That's no accident. It's a deliberate choice by a government determined to set the tone—a tone of fairness, of vision and of investment in the future of this country.

Labor recognises that many young people are facing cost-of-living burdens that were not faced by their predecessors. We want to ease these burdens because we need students to understand that they have a stake in our country. When they feel that sense of stake, they contribute that back tenfold. That's what improves intergenerational equity.

The headline-grabber in this bill is the 20 per cent debt-wipe. Less talked about, but equally impactful, are the structural changes regarding the minimum payment thresholds that the minister has outlined and how much you will need to repay and when. The bill does raise the trigger threshold from $54,000 to $67,000. Previously that $54,000 was not too far above the annual minimum wage. So, effectively, you were starting to pay HECS immediately, on the lowest of incomes. Raising this payment threshold, as the minister, Jason Clare, put it, means that you start paying off your uni degree when your uni degree starts paying off for you.

As well, we're replacing the current repayment system with a new marginal repayment system. Unlike the previous arrangement, the new system proposed in this bill will mean that nobody will take home less money after a pay rise. This is a recommendation supported, as we've heard, by the architect of HECS, Professor Bruce Chapman, who said we should have done it years ago. We're doing it now. And it has taken an Albanese Labor government to deliver it—promise made and promise kept.

If you spend even a few minutes on social media, you will see post after post from young Australians sharing their struggles—people working multiple jobs while studying; people who see the dream of homeownership slipping further out of reach; people who are doing everything right, yet feel they're just treading water. This bill is an investment in those people who have taken the brave step of investing in their learning and their future, and we should all support that.

Minister, as a senator for Tasmania, I'm very keen to understand what this will mean for those students in my home state who have a debt. My understanding is that the average outstanding debt in Tasmania is around $23,000 and that a 20 per cent reduction in that debt is worth more than $4½ thousand to each of the 50,000 Tasmanians who will benefit. If we look a bit further afield, in Victoria this bill will wipe $4.7 billion of debt for the 805,264 young Victorians with a HECS debt—including the 17,719 Victorians in the electorate of Corangamite, who, if Senator Henderson had had her way at the election, would have not got this debt reduction at all.

So, Minister, what impact will these changes have on Australian students, including those in Tasmania and Victoria, now and into the future?