Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Pursuant to order, I call on Minister Watt to provide an explanation.

Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My apologies for the inconvenience, colleagues, and thank you for providing quorum. In response to Senate motion No. 490: order for the production of documents, review of the HELP ATO payments system, I advise the Senate that my colleague the Minister for Education is maintaining his claim of public interest immunity in relation to these documents.

Order for the production of documents No. 374 requests all correspondence, directions, notes, briefs and other communications received by or sent to the Minister for Education or the Department of Education concerning the Minister for Education's review of the HELP ATO payments system. I'm advised by the minister that he responded to that order, and enclose documents, with the exception of documents related to cabinet deliberations which were prepared for the dominant purpose of briefing a minister on a cabinet submission and to ensure cabinet remains an appropriate forum for informed consideration of policy advice. This is consistent with longstanding practices under previous governments.

As the Senate is aware, the minister released the Australian Universities Accord final report on 23 February and indicated the government is considering its response to this. The documents requested and not already provided by the minister are documents that will inform and be the subject of cabinet deliberations as part of the government's response to the accord's final report and were prepared for the dominant purpose of briefing a minister on a cabinet submission related to this.

Disclosure of these documents is not in the public interest and is expected to reveal cabinet deliberations. It is in the public interest to preserve the confidentiality of cabinet deliberations to ensure cabinet remains an appropriate forum for informed consideration of policy advice. Release of these documents could set a precedent and compromise the ability to confidentially brief the Australian government in its cabinet deliberations and may materially impact the functioning of government as confidentiality enables frank advice and fully informed decision-making.

Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

The Albanese government was elected on a promise of transparency and accountability, and the response from the minister is reflecting anything but. Prime Minister Albanese and his ministers continue to show absolute contempt for the rules of the parliament, including the rules of the Senate and Senate estimates, defying orders to produce documents as required.

Minister Watt has just contradicted Senator Chisholm and the Minister for Education in his lame excuse as to why these documents will not be tabled. The bottom line is that these documents are not protected by a claim of public interest immunity. They do not fall within the exemption—and, Madam President, and I even wrote to you about this matter, such was my concern. The minister has made a claim of public interest immunity in relation to documents related to cabinet deliberations. This does not meet the test.

The Minister for Education is falsely suggesting that these documents are documents essentially concerning cabinet deliberations. This in fact conflicts with the letter that he wrote to Senator Chisholm on 7 December 2023, when he said, 'A public interest immunity claim may be made in relation to information and documents which were prepared for the dominant purpose of briefing a minister on a cabinet submission.' This is not what we've just heard from Minister Watt, where he said they were for the dominant purpose which reflected deliberations of cabinet and in relation to deliberations of cabinet. So we are hearing weasel words from this government, and we will not cop it. The three million Australians with a student debt will not cop it. The fact is that the three million Australians with a HELP student loan, most of which are HECS loans, have suffered an 11 per cent increase in their debt due to Labor's sky-high inflation in just two years, an average increase in their student loan of around $2,700 over two years. It was 3.9 per cent in 2022 and a shocking 7.1 per cent in 2023, with another big rise on the way this June. Escalating student debt is even impacting on Australians' capacity to borrow money to buy a home. With so many students struggling to put food on the table, enduring Labor's cost-of-living crisis, this is appalling.

The minister promised to review the antiquated ATO HECS payment scheme. We sought documents in relation to that review. This review has disappeared into thin air. Yes, he has made some statements following the accord final report, but what about the review? At the moment, Australians are being indexed, effectively, on payments they have already made because the ATO does not account for repayments in real time. If someone has a debt of $20,000 and pays off $5,000 during the year, they are still indexed on the original $20,000, which is wrong, which is unfair and which is unjust. Nine months after we sought these documents in Senate estimates, we are still seeing this government fail to comply with Senate orders. We will not cop the dodgy PII claims that this government is making. The Senate has not accepted this PII claim. I again say to the Minister for Education: we require these documents. You are required under the rules of the Senate to provide these documents. We have received advice from the Clerk in relation to the scope of a PII claim, and this PII claim does not cut the mustard.

So, President, we are very disappointed in the government's failure to be transparent, in the government's failure to comply with the rules of the Senate and in the government's contempt—absolute shocking contempt—for three million Australians with a student debt which is absolutely escalating like there is no tomorrow under this government.

Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.