Student Debt
Transcript
Ms WARE (Hughes) (11:37): I rise to speak on this motion brought by the member for Macnamara. I thank the honourable member for bringing this motion, because it gives me an opportunity to speak about some of the failures of the Labor government in relation to education generally and specifically in the higher education sector. Just by way of background, this motion talks about the HELP indexation. We have seen escalating student debt as a direct consequence of Labor's high inflation and economic mismanagement. Labor is now proposing to change the way HELP indexation is calculated to the lower of the wage price index or the consumer price index. It changes how the HELP indexation is recalculated and backdates that indexation formula for two years.
Assuming this bill is passed, the indexation, for example, will be 3.2 per cent on 1 June 2023 and four per cent on 1 June 2024, rather than 4.7 per cent. However, this still means an overall increase in student debt of 11.1 per cent. In the face of this cost-of-living crisis directly attributable to the Albanese Labor government, this is still a kick in the guts for struggling students and the three million Australians still with a student loan. Most of these students will not see a refund, as Labor is trying to suggest, providing no cost-of-living relief whatsoever. This is because there will be a rebate applied against each person's HELP loan account, which, of course, will lessen over time because of indexation, depending on how long it takes to pay off the debt itself.
I do just make the comment that this is an attempt to assist some university students. What help has been proposed by this government to assist those who will never walk into a university? What help has been provided by this government to assist those people? What help is proposed to be provided by this government to ensure that more people—for example, more of our younger Australians and our older Australians who wish to return—will have a good trades education?
We have a chronic housing shortage in this country and a chronic shortage of trades across the construction industry, particularly in our manufacturing industries, and I do not hear the government talking anywhere about how they are going to find more fitters, turners and machinists. Those people are the ones running the machinery within our factories, the ones producing manufactured goods and the ones directly contributing to our GDP.
A university education is very important. A university education was the right pathway for me, but it is not necessarily the right pathway for everybody, and we should not be corralling, into a university education, students who either are unable academically to complete the course or will be unable, when they do complete their degree, to find a well-paying and satisfying job into the future.
This bill and Labor's overall higher education policy are completely silent on encouraging universities to engage more with industry to ensure that our graduates that are coming out with very large debts will, in fact, be able to get into the workforce at the end of that time. We unfortunately do see a very large number of students leaving university before they've completed their degree. I think there has been absolute silence from the education minister around what we are doing at the high-school level and where we are encouraging our students. Clearly, the large dropout rates say to me that—and this is from careers advisers in schools overall—we are encouraging students to enrol in universities for degrees that they either are not able to complete or do not want to complete. They are still leaving university without a degree and with a massive debt.
To conclude, the federal Labor government has absolutely failed in the university sector.
Debate adjourned.