Parliamentary Updates

29 June 2026

I second the bill. Imagine you're a new graduate with a $30,000 help debt over the year, about $3,000 has taken from your wages to repay it. But when first of June comes around, the day that HECS is indexed under current law, that repayment of $3,000 has not been applied to your debt. So indexation is charged on the full $30,000, not the $27,000 that you actually owe. And meanwhile, that $3,000 that has been withheld from your aid, your wages is held by the ATO, but no interest is applied. And so that is the level of unfairness of the current system at 3 per cent of indexation, that $3,000 is the graduates are then charged and extra $90 extra on the debt that they've paid. Their debt across the population of Australian students in the tertiary system, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that it will amount to about $3.2 billion over the decade of additional indexation paid. Now I wonder why is it that governments of both persuasion, coalition and Labor have refused to do anything about it? This is ultimately a sneaky student tax. And the member for Kooyongs bill will fix this. Indexation is intended to keep the value of HECS debt in line with rising prices, but indexation, whilst not technically an interest for someone with HECS debt, has the practical effect of essentially being an interest payment and their debt goes up. And the problem is the system can increase their debt before counting the repayments already taken from their wages. I regularly hear from students and young graduates across Warringah who are worried about their financial security and the amount of debt they are taking on. They are managing high rents, grocery bills, transport costs and insecure work. They are training and getting those qualifications to build the kind of Australia we want and we need for the future. But how are we saying thank you to them? We're just sucking them with a sneaky student debt, a tax, additional tax. There debt, a tax, additional tax. There are now they're asking how are they going to save for a home or build financial security while they're beginning, they begin their working lives with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. They understand that they must repay what they have borrowed, but they rightly expect expect that the system to recognise the repayments they have already made. Why is it okay for the ATO to sit on repayments made without even applying any interest to that, or applying it to the debt? If. Imagine if every mortgage holder in Australia. If a bank charged interest on money you had already repaid, there would be outrage. Yet that is effectively what the government is doing under the current help indexation system. Now this bill will remove the indexation date from first June to first November. This gives the tax system time to count for the repayments already made from people's wages, and for people to lodge their tax returns. Then, with repayments deducted first from the debt, indexation would then be applied only to the debt that remains. This bill does not wipe student debts. It does not remove indexation, but it simply moves the date so that indexation is calculated fairly. Without this change, graduates will continue to be charged indexation on amounts that have. They have already paid that have already been withheld from their pay. Young Australians should only be charged indexation on the debt they actually still owe. That is fair. That is logical and how the system should already work. It is staggering that the government can seriously still be here refusing multi-partisan. No-one should be debating that. This is a change that should be done out of fairness. So I commend the member for Kooyong for bringing forward the sensible reform. I urge the parliament and the Albanese government to support it. You cannot, with any credibility, talk about inter-generational inequity, a system that is fair where you're encouraging Australians to build a better future and not change this aspect of indexation and the timing. None of us in this place would accept it on any kind of debt repayment if it were some mortgages or anything else. And it is unacceptable that it continue to be the case for student debts and help, help HECS. So I commend this bill to the house, and I urge everybody to be fair to graduates and change this date.