Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I sat through a lot of what the member for Melbourne has just said about university education and I agree with him on the points of how important it is for the individual and for our society that we do get more people educated. We know the jobs of the future will require us to have more skills. The point where he and I probably differ is around how we pay for it. The idea of free tertiary education for all is perhaps a very good debating point that one can make in a debating society, but I live in the real world, where I recognise that, when university was free for all—when it was totally funded by the government—it was only there for a select few. When we had HECS come in, it meant that we were able to open up the possibility of university education to more and more people. That's the difference between his point on this and the point that I am making, which is HECS is that balance between asking people who are going to benefit from a university education to contribute to some of that education and having government help support them through that education. That system has meant that thousands and thousands of people who would have been locked out of a higher education have now had the benefits of it because they've been able to contribute to it as well as get government support for it. I think that is the right balance, because, as an individual who does get a degree, you do benefit financially from that degree—your earnings are higher—but, as a society, we also benefit from you being more educated and contributing to our country.

My parents, when they came to this country, had very limited formal education. They had the equivalent of about a year 8 education, so they were laser focused on the education of my brother and I because they recognised that having a good education would unlock so many opportunities for our family in this country. Certainly, the education that my brother and I received at university—we were both first in our family to go to university—was pivotal to ensuring our success here and that our family was able to thrive here.

I agree with the member for Melbourne on his point that young people are now being saddled with bigger and bigger debts. The way to solve that is not to take out HECS entirely—a system which, for the most part, has been working to help educate more and more Australians—but to improve HECS and to improve how we calculate the indexation on HECS. I look at my own electorate of Reid, where we've got one of the highest number of university educated residents in all of Australia. About 75,000 people in Reid have a university degree. That number is possible because of HECS, because there is this co-contribution from the student who benefits from it as well as support from the government.

We know that the fluctuation in indexation using CPI has had a huge impact on the debt of young people getting degrees. With this bill is ensuring that we are indexing HECS in a way that is going to be fairer and more affordable. I think what the education minister is doing here is saying that, yes, you do need to contribute to your education, but we do want to make it fairer. We do want to make sure that times of high inflation don't result in your debt increasing dramatically. What the education minister is doing here is using whichever is the lower of the wage price index and the consumer price index as the measuring stick of how indexation on your HECS debt is calculated. I think this is the fair and right approach to be taking. We are, as a government, totally committed to giving our university and TAFE sectors the lifeline that they need, because, under those opposite, these sectors were neglected, and, at some points during the time when those opposite were in power, totally abandoned. We saw that particularly during COVID, when they changed the rules for JobSeeker twice, explicitly to exclude those who worked in the university sector. As a result, we saw the biggest number of job losses that that sector has ever seen. Estimates are that about 15,000 people lost their jobs. We on this side of the House believe that our society benefits when we have a strong tertiary education system. That means a strong university sector and a strong VET and TAFE sector as well.

These measures here are all about trying to strengthen our university sector to make it more accessible to students, particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I have seen firsthand the transformational change that a university degree can offer people. I saw that in my own life and also in the lives of my friends and family who were able to benefit from a university degree. It meant that they could get jobs that were well paying and jobs that really helped them find fulfilling career paths. With this measure, we are going to be wiping $3 billion in student debt for more than three million Australians. This is a message to young people from this government that says: we recognise the challenges that you are facing at the moment with the cost of living and we recognise the challenges that you have faced being saddled with increasing debt as a result of your university degree, but we are making practical changes to ensure that we can fix that. This is a much-needed change.

I want to give examples of what this will mean for an average student in Reid. After the 2023 indexation, the average student HECS debt in Reid would have been about $32,700, but the change that we are making for that student with that debt means that they are now going to get about $1,400 back because of the change in the indexation. That's going to be a significant saving to that student. This is something that I'm really proud to back because it acknowledges that young people are doing it tough at the moment and that as a government we are trying to do everything we can to support them and their ambitions.

Importantly this bill also has something that so many students who are currently doing social work, midwifery, nursing and teaching degrees have welcomed, and that's the Commonwealth prac placement. Those students who are going to be entering professions where we desperately need more workers are now going to be paid while they are doing their prac. The day that this measure was announced, I went out to the Australian Catholic University campus in Strathfield in my electorate. I met with a range of teaching, nursing and midwifery students, and they were so grateful for this change.

Some of the stories I heard were incredibly moving. I spoke to a teaching student who was in his final year. Unfortunately he won't benefit from these changes, but he told me that many of his cohort, who loved teaching and loved the idea of going into this profession, simply couldn't finish their degrees, because they weren't able to support themselves through the prac placements. They were suffering a financial hit. They weren't able to pay the bills or pay the rent, so they had dropped out of the degree. That was really sad to hear. This change means that more of the students can complete their degrees and then go on to become teachers, nurses, midwives and social workers.

I heard from a mother of two. She decided to go back and do a nursing degree later in life. She did that because of the incredible care that she had received at hospital when she had had some miscarriages that had had a big impact on her wellbeing and her physical health. She really wanted to give back to the community and say thank you to those nurses who had helped to look after her, so she went back to study nursing. She said that she has had to rely on her parents to help her financially during her prac placements because, again, she wasn't able to financially afford the bills or afford to pay for all the things that her young family needed. With prac placements, eligible students will be able to access up to $319 a week, which is similar to a Commonwealth youth allowance payment. She says that that will give her greater financial independence and will mean that she'll be able to finish this degree and look after her family.

These are just some of the stories that I've heard, but I know that so many of my colleagues have met with many of these students and heard firsthand the difference that these Commonwealth prac payments will make. In fact, I'm now meeting with other students—pharmacy students and engineering students—who hope that these prac placement payments will be expanded to their degrees as well, because those are professions where we desperately need more people.

Ultimately what these measures say to young people in our community is that we know that it has been a real struggle for you and that the cost of living and the debt that you are saddled with as a result of these degrees have been really challenging, and this is one part of the work that we are trying to do to help support you. But it's not the only thing.

Certainly, young people were at the very core of our focus when we made the changes to the stage 3 tax cuts, and 99 per cent of those young people who are gen Z and 97 per cent of millennials will be better off because of the Labor government's changes. Again, this is another example of the Labor government putting young people at the very centre of the work that we have been trying to do. At the university level, we're trying to make sure that we lift the minimum wage, because many young people are working in hospitality or as early childhood educators. So we want to make sure that their wages are lifted. We wanted to put them at the very core of our focus when it came to tax cuts as well, and they are the main beneficiaries of the tax cut changes that we made.

I know that young people have been struggling for a long time. This is a government that is listening and making practical changes to try and make your lives a little bit easier.

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