Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Can I thank my friend the fantastic member for Macnamara for his question. Yesterday the Prime Minister announced that, if we win the next election, the first legislation that we introduce to parliament will cut all student debts by 20 per cent. That will help three million Australians right across the country, including 27,000 people in the electorate of Macnamara.

They're people with a uni degree. They're also people with a TAFE qualification. If they have got the average student debt of, say, 27 grand, that will wipe $5,500 off their bill. If they have a debt of 50 grand, it will wipe about $10,000 off their bill. That's a lot of help for a lot of young Australians just out of uni, just out of TAFE, maybe just moving out of home and just getting started. If we win the next election, we will also make it easier for them to pay off those debts. You won't have to start paying it off until you earn $67,000. In other words, you won't have to start paying it off until going to uni or going to TAFE starts to pay off for you. We'll also reduce the minimum payments that you have to make each year. So, if you are earning about $75,000, we'll reduce the repayments that you have to make next year by about $1,000. That's an extra thousand dollars in your pocket rather than the government's. That's real cost-of-living relief—cutting their debts and reducing their repayments. It's all part of building a better and fairer education system. It's all part of building Australia's future.

And guess who wants to stop all of this?

The Liberal Party. That's what they said on the weekend. At least three million Australians now know where they stand. That's everyone from chippies and sparkies with a TAFE qualification to teachers and nurses with a uni degree. They now know that, if Labor win the next election, we will cut their debts by 20 per cent and, if the Liberals win, they won't. They know Labor will help them and the Liberals will dud them. That's what they'll be doing—dudding three million Australians, making them pay thousands more in debt and making it harder to pay off, harder to get started and harder to get ahead. That's what's happened. That's what we've got now with the modern Liberal Party on any education or any aspiration. This Prime Minister wants to open the doors of opportunity wider. This opposition leader wants to slam them shut.

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