Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to give more people from the outer suburbs the opportunity to go to university? How does this differ from other approaches?

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

I thank my friend the wonderful member for Werriwa for her question. Today, the Senate is debating legislation that will wipe $3 billion of HECS debt for more than three million Australians. This is the bill that fixes that spike in HECS indexation that happened last year. It wipes that out and it makes sure that this never happens again, and it is the first step in making HECS fairer. The next step is what we announced a couple of weeks ago. If we win the next election, we will cut all student debts by a further 20 per cent for three million Australians nationwide. Both these things help with the cost of degrees.

If we win the next election, we will also reduce the amount of money you have to repay in your HECS debt every year. For someone on 70 grand a year, this means you will pay about $1,300 less a year than you currently have to. It means more money in your pocket, not the government's. It means more help with the cost of living.

We also have to do something about the cost of a lot of kids missing out on the chance to go to university at all. Today, almost one in two young people in their 20s and 30s has a uni degree—but not everywhere; not in regional Australia and not in the outer suburbs of our big cities. As a kid growing up in Western Sydney, I knew that for a lot of my mates university seemed too far away; it seemed like somewhere else for someone else. Part of fixing that is bringing university closer to where people live. That's what university study hubs do. We've already got more than 40 in regional Australia, and where they are they work. More people sign up for a degree and more people finish a degree.

Now, for the first time, we're going to put them in our outer suburbs. On the weekend I announced the locations of the first 10: Broadmeadows and Epping, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne; Melton, in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne; Macquarie Fields, in south-west Sydney; Kurri Kurri, just out of Newcastle; Elizabeth, north of Adelaide; Sorell, just outside Hobart; Armadale, Ellenbrook and Mandurah, in the outer suburbs of Perth; and Strathpine, just a couple of hundred metres up the road from the opposition leader's office in the outer suburbs of Brisbane. This is all about building a better and fairer education system and all about helping more kids from the outer suburbs and the regions to get a crack at university, and there's more to come.