Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The documents that we are debating today and that the government is refusing to produce relate to student debt. Student debt is not just a number on a balance sheet. Rising student debt has a huge human cost. The mental, emotional and financial toll that it takes on people is immense. During the cost-of-living crisis, people are going without meals, sleeping in cars and being unable to pay rent. They cannot pay health costs, and, on top of all of that, they are being crushed under the heavy weight of student debt, which should not be there in the first place and is rising faster than they can pay it off.

Students come out of university and TAFE saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student debt that can take them decades to pay off, if not a lifetime. This is cruel, unsustainable and utterly unfair. Student debt is a crisis that demands urgent attention, yet both the Liberal-National coalition and the Labor Party have remained shamefully complicit in the perpetuation of this crisis. Ultimately, student debt needs to be wiped entirely, and the Greens have been very clear on this.

As a step towards this, we have been pushing for indexation on study loans to be entirely scrapped. Of course, the timing of the indexation on HELP loans should be changed so that compulsory repayments are accounted for before indexation is implied, which has now also been recommended by the Universities Accord report. But I'm not going to mince my words here: where was Senator Henderson when Labor and the coalition teamed up to recommend rejecting my bill to scrap indexation on student debt, even after the committee inquiry heard heart-wrenching story after heart-wrenching story of people struggling with student debt? That would have given people relief from the record indexation of 7.1 per cent that hit student debts last year. But Labor and the Liberals decided to reject the overwhelming evidence and keep this unfair tax intact.

Where, indeed, was Senator Henderson when the Liberal-National coalition pushed through their punitive Job-ready Graduates scheme, which doubled the fees for many degrees, massively exacerbating the student debt crisis? Where was Senator Henderson when I was urging the coalition government to forgive outstanding debts from the grossly unjust Student Financial Supplement Scheme? The scheme was a rort that targeted low-income and disadvantaged students from the start. To continue to collect SFSS debts two decades on from the abolition of the scheme is simply unconscionable.

But let's not forget the Labor party, who have now been in government for almost two years. Rather than work with the Greens and wind back the Liberal-era policies which have saddled people with more debt and higher fees and cut funding to universities, and these debts take longer and longer to pay off, Labor has failed to address this pressing issue. Empty rhetoric about fixing the system means nothing to people who are struggling to make ends meet and are faced with ever-ballooning student debt. We know that student debt is out of control and the Labor government is refusing to act. It is mind-boggling that people paying back their student debt pay more into government coffers than the tax paid by planet-destroying corporations.

Both major parties are culpable in bringing us to this point. These utterly upside down priorities paint such a vivid picture of the failures of both Labor and the Liberals in addressing the student debt crisis. Under the Albanese government we have seen sky-high indexation rates on student debt, which we have not seen in a decade—11 per cent since June 2022. The clock is ticking. June is fast approaching and three million people will be hit with another avalanche of debt increase. The government knows more pain is coming for the millions of people who are shackled with student debt and it knows that it will hit women and young people and those on lower incomes the hardest, yet they are doing absolutely nothing. This lack of action is shameful, to say the least.

The Labor government must immediately get rid of indexation and raise the minimum repayment income to provide at least some relief, and then wipe all existing student debt. We must tackle this debt crisis. There is not a day to waste. Education is a basic human right. It is not a privilege. That's why the Greens are fighting to wipe all student debt and make university and TAFE free for all.

Question agreed to.