Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you've got a HECS debt, I've got good news: $3 billion is about to be wiped from three million Australians' HECS debts. Today the bill to make that happen was introduced in the House of Representatives, and it should be passed shortly. This has happened because people from around the country stood up and demanded change. Earlier in the year, I started a petition to fix the broken HECS debt system, and 288,000 people signed it, making it one of the largest petitions in Australian political history. Those hundreds of thousands of Australians—students, graduates and the people who love them—put pressure on the government in a way that it could not ignore.

This is just the start. We've only just started to fix the issue with HECS debts. We need to make degrees more affordable, we need to increase the threshold for payment, we need to change the timing of indexation and we need to stop HECS debts from stopping Australians buying their own homes.

Together, we need to keep pressure on the major parties to do a whole lot more to address the rising cost of housing, energy and education. This is just the start.