David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

We've talked a lot about housing this week. Unfortunately, we haven't seen negotiation and we haven't landed on a position that would actually legislate the government's Help to Buy Bill. It clearly won't solve the crisis on its own, but it will help, and it will help people who don't have the bank of mum and dad and are caught up in this growing intergenerational divide that we are seeing.

Another key driver of this divide is the growing student debt burden Australians, especially young Australians, face. We know that having a larger HECS debt makes it harder for young Australians to buy their first home, as banks view these mortgages as high risk due to their existing debt. We've just seen data from the ATO showing that the number of Australians with student loans exceeding $100,000 has more than doubled in just five years and is now up to 57,000 people. Total student debt is an eye-watering $81 billion.

The Labor government needs to act. We heard them in opposition talk about the disaster that job-ready is yet, coming towards the end of their first term, nothing—no movement on job-ready graduates. Before becoming Prime Minister, Mr Albanese, in June 2020, put it rather succinctly, saying, 'The Job-ready Graduates scheme will leave more young Australians locked out of university and higher costs for those who gain admission.' He was right. Now that he is Prime Minister, I say to him and to the education minister: we don't have time to wait for your new Australian Tertiary Education Commission to be established; we need reform now. Australian students need you to act and scrap the Job-ready Graduate scheme. It is an unfair scheme, it is not working, and you have an opportunity to do so.