STATEMENTS
Ms LAWRENCE (Hasluck) (21:25): This first piece of legislation introduced by the government at the beginning of a new term—the Universities Accord (Cutting Student Debt by 20 Per Cent) Bill 2025—sends a signal. Reducing the debt of Australia's higher education students by an amount significant enough to make a difference to their lives is the signal of the Albanese Labor government to the people of Australia that we value our young and that we value education.
We understand the challenges young people face, and we are determined to help them build the futures for themselves which inspire, encourage and energise them. Their futures are Australia's futures. We need them, and we need them to be at their best.
About 70 per cent of Australians repaying a HELP debt are under 35 years of age. In fact, there are about 16,000 such students in Hasluck alone. They're the people that are thinking about starting or supporting a family.
They're the people thinking about creating a home—building one. So their aspirations are part of the lifeblood of our nation and, when we take a burden from their shoulders, we lighten the load for all of us. In total, we will be reducing HELP and other student loans, including the VET student loan and the Australian apprenticeship support loan, by almost $16 billion.
Three million Australians will be better off. That's a good day's work. To make it even better, we'll be backdating the cut of 20 per cent to 1 June, before indexation was applied.
With its usual shamelessness, though, the coalition has suggested that we are helping people who are already privileged. Apparently, young Australians who are receiving apprenticeship support are privileged, young Australians who receive financial support for diplomas and vocational education and training are privileged and university students whose parents can't pay upfront fees are privileged.
Education isn't a privilege; it's a human right, and human rights are universal rights. The UN, through UNESCO, has agreed that education is a basic human right that works to raise men and women out of poverty, level inequalities and ensure sustainable development. Perhaps it's the 'level inequalities' bit that the coalition parties can't quite like.
Perhaps that's why they underfunded our schools, which we've fixed, with public schools now funded to 100 per cent of the schooling resource standard. Perhaps that's why they won't support free TAFE and making lives less difficult for universities and their students. Education is a human right, and it's a national necessity.
We understand the critical role of education in underpinning the futures of individual Australians and the Australian nation. In one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in this or, I think, any other country, Gough Whitlam, on 13 November 1972, filled young Australians with hope. He spoke to them of a great goal: 'to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people'.
My parents, young adults at the time, were deeply moved—and so am I, to this day—by that declaration of a great dream in words that were spoken before I was born. When the time came for me to give my first speech in the Australian parliament, those were the words I chose to repeat. What a magnificent goal for a nation: to liberate and uplift its people—all of them.
And what an expression of confidence in Australians. We have talents and capacities which see us achieving things for ourselves that aren't yet on our horizon or that perhaps are only a glimmer in the distance. We can do a lot better than just managing, just getting by or just hanging on.
The legislation passed today is part of the Australian Labor Party's ongoing commitment to that great goal, to that desire and to its profound faith in our capacity as Australians. But, when we raise the standards of our schools, we encourage the kind of education that liberates talents and uplifts horizons, and we encourage young Australians to create their own vision of the life that they might have.
When we guarantee 100,000 fee-free TAFE places each year, we commit ourselves to the provision of a skilled Australian workforce able to build Australia's future, and, when we create university study hubs, like the one that has just opened in Ellenbrook in my electorate of Hasluck, we open the doors of opportunities to people who might never otherwise have thought of tertiary education.
We have good news for our university education, and we're determined to make more. Without university education, our society wouldn't function—no more dentists and no new doctors or engineers for a start. When the number of university students declines, Australia's future is seriously undermined.
That was what was happening under the Liberals. Under Labor, we've had more than 20,000 new starters for nursing degrees and more than 25,000 new starters for teaching degrees in 2024 alone. We're also seeing more than 14,000 students taking up the fee-free uni-ready courses that act as a bridge between school or the workplace and higher education.
We respect the work of our Australian universities. Their high international reputation is deserved. We want to maintain and enhance that reputation.
We want to help them educate and inspire those students who are their lifeblood. We want our students to have the confidence that comes from good schooling and a society that encourages their goals and ambitions. Education is expensive; ignorance is even more expensive.
The cost of training a single doctor is around $60,000 a year. There's an enormous amount of time, energy, expertise and materials involved each year for each student. In every society, every individual must work out how to pay the absolutely necessary bills.
We must have highly trained doctors, engineers, nurses, scientists, teachers and lawyers too. We must have people who know what they're talking about and who know what they're doing. Vocational specialist degrees and arts degrees that teach Australians to look at the big picture are equally valued.
Further education enables students to have the creative and the critical-thinking skills to excel across careers that are expected to change five to seven times in a lifetime. So Labor's guiding principles are these: we want the best teaching and training to be available to every person with the ability and the desire to make their way in a profession of any kind, and we want the cost to be paid as fairly and as efficiently as possible.
We don't want to see anyone turned away because they or their family simply can't pay for their education. Economic discrimination on the basis of family income is unjust, just as it is foolish. Our graduates will now know that they won't have to start repaying their loans until their income is above $60,000, not $54,000 as it is now.
We need to work on making sure we have the best possible means of ensuring that universities are accessible to more and more Australians and that they continue to provide outstanding education and training. I know the Liberals don't like the sound of much of this but, unfortunately for them, the Australian people do. In November last year, legislation was passed that wiped $3 billion from student debt that directly helped three million Australians.
We did this by fixing the way indexation was calculated on student debt, and we backdated it to 1 June 2023. The Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024 capped the HELP indexation rate to the lower of either the CPI or the wage price index—yes, that's the lower, the one that helps them the most. The change applies to HELP, VET student loans, the Australian apprenticeship support loan and other student support loans.
We did this because we wanted to make sure that it would no longer be the case that indexation would outpace wages. We also supported the introduction of the Commonwealth prac payment from 1 July 2025, so, for about 68,000 higher education teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students, this will help support them financially while they do the practical part of their degree.
All of this was done in consultation with universities. We listened, we learned and we acted. We'll go on doing this in every aspect of Australian life, and we've seen this in our work that we've done to date.
Be it from tax cuts, universal again, or be it the superannuation guarantee being increased to 12 per cent, we discuss the issues that concern Australian people. We listen and we act. All our actions are aimed towards this great purpose.
The Albanese Labor government is committed to building a strong and sustainable future, a future which liberates the talents and uplifts the horizons of all Australians. I commend the motion.