Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's been a long time between drinks, as they say. When I first started speaking on the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024 on 12 September, I had the opportunity to highlight some of the key parts of the original bill, and I'm delighted to be supporting the original bill, rather than the amendments. This bill is going to do a number of things. Let's take ourselves back there.

The first change is around HECS or HELP debt, making it fairer for students and wiping out $3 billion of student debt. That means that last year's horrible debt that students incurred will actually, because of the backdating, be rebated to them. If someone has a debt of around $26,500, the debt will be cut by about $1,200, so it will actually make a real difference there. The second thing that I mentioned was the Commonwealth payment to support students doing their prac. I'm going to come back and say more things about that, but that is such a significant change, and I'm really pleased that we're looking at how hard it is to do university and have jobs and then go and do full-time placements. The third thing is around fee-free uni-ready courses. These can change people's lives. I gave an example of one local resident who said she wouldn't have even considered doing it if it had meant taking on debt, but she's relishing it and there's a high possibility that it's going to lead her into further university education.

I want to talk a bit more about the prac payments. I'm going to give a really personal example here. It matters to everyone at uni who is doing teaching or nursing or studying to be a social worker. It also matters to the old people in their families, their parents. I'm one of those mums who has a son currently studying primary school teaching, and Harry said I'm allowed to tell you about him. He has had a pretty incredible career as a musician from quite a young age, and that led him to do only a year of uni straight out of school and then to abandon his university music-degree studies to actually play music around the world. But during COVID things changed, and, having done that for many, many years, he came to a decision that it was time to go back to university and do a primary-school-teaching degree—a profession that he hopes is going to sit alongside his continuing music career.

Now, anyone who's gone to uni as a mature-age student, having lived independently—in Harry's case, for more than a decade—knows that the decision to go to uni means not only a drop in your income on a weekly basis, and the accumulation of significant debt, but also a total absence of income when you do your full-time prac. That's certainly what Harry has experienced, for weeks at a time. He sees his friends experiencing it as well. Harry makes the point that, while I know he hates asking for help, he knows he has access to assistance to get him through those weeks, but he also knows that some of his mates don't and just how hard it is for them.

So to have a bill that establishes the Commonwealth prac payment, to support those eligible nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work students who are doing those required placements, is a real game changer. It's an equaliser. Like a lot of things Labor does, it just makes the whole thing a bit fairer. Placements, we know, are really important parts of qualifications. They make sure those graduates have the skills and experience to actually be in the workforce and to test that they're happy being in that workforce.

I recognise that there are other qualifications, aside from the ones that we've started with, that do require mandatory placements. Where we've started is based on the Universities Accord recommendations that we focus on nursing and the care and teaching professions. So that's the advice that we're taking. They are all areas where we know we need people to finish their teaching degrees, nursing degrees, social work degrees and midwifery degrees.

It is the first time any Commonwealth has provided financial support for mandatory placements, so it's a really significant step, and I look forward to seeing how it supports young people. It won't be everything. It won't suddenly provide them with the equivalent of a salary. But it is a tax-funded help to allow them to continue the work that they have made a commitment to through their degrees.

Providing a help for students is also what we're doing with the changes to the way HELP debt is indexed. When we talk about $3 billion being wiped off student debt, it's a really big number. I'm very aware that, for each student or person who is still carrying a HELP debt, it might not translate to wiping out your whole debt, but it is, again, something we can do that practically assists people, certainly with the current cost-of-living pressures that they're facing, but it also lessens that load and recognises the importance of having people finish their uni degrees. So I'm really pleased about that.

I wanted to talk through how this was going to work. We talk about indexation, and I know a lot of people talk to me about the interest rate they pay on their debt, but we all know that that is indexed. It's indexed each year, so that it matches, relative to what it started out as—otherwise, you'd have a really unequal system where the person who took the longest to pay it off would end up not paying the equivalent of what they were effectively loaned by the taxpayer. So indexation just keeps it to the right level, but we know it has got out of whack and there have not been any real limits on it.

This bill caps the HELP indexation rate to the lower of either the consumer price index or the wage price index. It will take whichever one is the lower. And the backdating will go back to 1 June 2023. So, once this legislation passes this parliament, individuals will get a credit towards their outstanding student loan debt balance for the difference between the indexation rate under the current legislation and the new indexation rate.

These changes are going to apply to HELP debt as well as to VET student loans, Australian Apprenticeship Support Loans and other student loan accounts that existed on 1 June last year. They will benefit all Australians who have a student loan, will fix the issues from last year's spike in the CPI indexation rate, which was 7.1 per cent, and will prevent growth in debt from outpacing wages in the future. It's about putting that fairness back into the system. I'm really pleased to be supporting that, and I congratulate the Minister for Education for recognising the need for that and prioritising it.

In the first part of my speech I spoke about the Fee-Free Uni Ready courses. I want to stress how important they are in giving people a taste of what a university environment is like and also their capacity to do it, and to do it in a way that prepares them for what's coming. They a real game changers, and I'm so pleased to see that we're improving the quality and consistency of Fee-Free Uni Ready courses. Some people might know them as enabling courses. We're uncapping those courses and replacing the current mixed funding system. All of that means that these courses are more easily available to people. The changes are expected to increase the number of people doing these courses by about 40 per cent by the end of the decade, and by 2040 they will double the number of people doing the courses. This is how our young people get their feet into that world of tertiary education.

The last thing I want to touch on is that the bill that sits alongside this one and in fact has now just passed this parliament is also key to the Universities Accord changes we're making. That legislation is to establish an independent national student ombudsman. These two bills sit closely together, because improving the student experience at university for young people as well as older people is so important. The National Student Survey of 2021 showed that one in 20 students had been sexually assaulted since they started university. We need a better system for our university students, who pay a lot, who sacrifice a lot, for their qualifications. They deserve a safe place, and if something goes wrong they deserve an ombudsman they can go to who can help with the response to the complaint and have stronger investigative powers. This parliament has done some really good work in progressing these changes so that we can encourage more people—who'll become nurses, teachers, social workers and all the other professions we need—to get into the education system.

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