Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for her question. I make the point that, firstly, you need to appreciate, of course, that students who leave university or other forms of study with a student debt and get jobs are students who then go on and pay taxes, and those students will benefit from there being lower taxes. They will have those benefits long after they have repaid their student loans, and those benefits will help them through their lives to be able to buy their homes, to establish themselves, to save for their retirement, to support their families—to pursue all of those sorts of things that you expect graduates to seek to do.

The HELP scheme, our student loan scheme, as this chamber should know and acknowledge, is one of the most generous schemes in the world. It allows Australians to go to university for an undergraduate degree and face no up-front fees whatsoever. It allows them to take on a loan that has no real interest rate whatsoever and that has no additional fees whatsoever attached to it, and then to only pay it back at reasonable income levels.

What this government did—yes, the senator is right—is lower the starting threshold, but we also implemented a new lower first repayment rate. There is a new one per cent repayment rate. From memory—it's a little while since I knew all these statistics off by heart—that equates to around an $8 a week repayment of student loans for those who first reach that threshold. We also made sure that graduates earning higher incomes repay their loans faster, by putting in place higher repayment rates at higher incomes, because that's the way you sustain the most generous student loans scheme in the world.