Debt for millions to soon be wiped under Anthony Albanese's promise
On Sunday, newly re-elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was pictured absolutely beaming on the streets of Sydney as he popped into a St Peters brewery before sipping a coffee and serving ice cream at Leichhardt and topping it all off by petting some fluffy pooches on his way out.
What a blissful Sunday, well deserved following an intense few weeks. After securing a landslide – and historic – victory against Peter Dutton, Mr Albanese has much to smile about.
However, he has a lot of work ahead of him to please Australians.
Along with modest tax cuts, cheaper doctor visits, more subsidised childcare, electricity bill rebates and thousands of new homes just for first-time buyers, Mr Albanese also promised a 20 per cent reduction in student debt.
Now it's time to deliver on those key promises.
$16 billion slashed for 3 million Aussies
Effective from June 1, 2025, the government will implement a 20 per cent reduction on all student loan debts, including HELP, VET Student Loans, and Australian Apprenticeship Support Loans.
It is expected to eliminate approximately $16bn in student debt, benefiting around 3 million Australians. A graduate with an average HELP debt of $27,600 will see about $5520 wiped from their outstanding loan.
This builds on the Government's announcement that from 1 July next year it will reduce the amount Australians with a student debt have to repay per year and raise the threshold when people need to start repaying.
Starting in the 2025-26 financial year, the minimum income threshold for compulsory student loan repayments will rise from approximately $54,000 to $67,000.
Additionally, repayments will be calculated based on the portion of income above this new threshold. For example, an individual earning $70,000 will pay around $1,300 less per year in repayments under this new system.
'I will always fight for every young Australian to have access to a good education,' Anthony Albanese said of the debt cuts when they were announced in November.
'My Government will make sure our education system is fairer and affordable for every Australian and we won't delay unwinding the damage caused by the former Coalition Government.
'We're already fixing indexation and today, we are going further by taking 20 per cent off student debt – for everyone with a student debt.
'This will help everyone with a student debt right now, whilst we work hard to deliver a better deal for every student in the years ahead.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News AU
41 minutes ago
- Sky News AU
‘Needs to be removed': Sustainability education linked to climate anxiety
Institute of Public Affairs Brianna McKee says sustainability must be removed from the Australian schooling curriculum to reduce climate anxiety. 'Children are at a particular stage of psychological development where they think about things in very concrete or literal terms,' Ms McKee told Sky News host Rowan Dean. 'So, when they hear phrases like 'climate action now' or 'sea levels are rising', they interpret that literally, and that causes anxiety. 'The first step towards addressing this is to take sustainability out of the curriculum. 'It needs to be removed.'
Sky News AU
42 minutes ago
- Sky News AU
Net-zero among Australia's most expensive budget items
Institute of Public Affairs Brianna McKee says net-zero has become one of Australia's most expensive budget items. 'We're spending $9 billion on net-zero, and that's up from $1.7 billion in 2022,' Ms McKee told Sky News host Rowan Dean. 'It's become one of our most expensive budget items, and Australians are paying for it. 'As soon as you ask Australians to pay for net-zero, the support just dries up.'
The Age
2 hours ago
- The Age
‘Progressive patriot' prime minister faces his call to arms
'In today's Australia, the new default should be that patriotism is a love of country that is democratic and egalitarian. It is something that includes those of different races and backgrounds,' he wrote in this masthead a couple of weeks ago. 'With his political authority unquestioned, Albanese has an opportunity to craft a nation-building agenda. The significance is more than just national. At the moment, parties of the centre-left are struggling to find compelling alternatives to Trumpist populism.' Albanese's defiance of America doesn't come out of nowhere. It rings a Labor bell. It resonates with the decision by Labor's celebrated wartime leader, John Curtin, to defy Australia's great and powerful friend of his time, Britain. 'I'm conscious about the leadership of John Curtin, choosing to stand up to Winston Churchill and say, 'No, I'm bringing the Australian troops home to defend our own continent, we're not going to just let it go',' Albanese said last year as he prepared to walk the Kokoda Track, where Australia and Papua New Guinea halted Imperial Japan's southward march of conquest in World War II. Defiance of allies is one thing. Defeat of the enemy is another. In a moment of truth-telling, the Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral David Johnston, this week said that Australia now had to plan to wage war from its own continental territory rather than preparing for war in far-off locations. 'We are having to reconsider Australia as a homeland from which we will conduct combat operations,' Johnston told a conference held by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. 'That is a very different way – almost since the Second World War – of how we think of national resilience and preparedness. We may need to operate and conduct combat operations from this country.' He didn't spell it out, but he's evidently contemplating the possibility that China will cut off Australia's seaborne supply routes, either because it's waging war in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea, or because it's seeking to coerce Australia. 'The chief of the defence force is speaking truth,' says Professor Peter Dean, co-author of the government's Defence Strategic Review, now at the US Studies Centre at Sydney University. 'There's a line in the Defence Strategic Review that most people overlook – it talks about 'the defence of Australia against potential threats arising from major power competition, including the prospect of conflict'. And there's only one major power posing a threat in our region.' History accelerates week by week. Trump, chaos factory, wantonly discards America's unique sources of power and abuses its allies. China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin are emboldened, seeing America's credibility crumbling. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, alarmed at the rising risks, this week declared a campaign to make Britain 'battle ready' to 'face down Russian aggression'. Loading Starmer plans to enlarge the army, commission up to a dozen new nuclear-powered submarines jointly built with Australia under AUKUS, build six new munitions factories, manufacture 7000 long-range weapons, renew the nuclear warheads on Britain's strategic missiles, and put new emphasis on drones and cyberwar as war evolves daily on the battlefields of Ukraine. Starmer intends to increase defence outlays to the equivalent of 2.5 per cent of GDP with an eventual target of 3 per cent. Ukraine's impressive drone strike on Russia's bombers this week knocked out a third of Moscow's force, with AI guiding the drones to their targets. The Australian retired major-general Mick Ryan observes that Ukraine and Russia are upgrading and adapting drone warfare weekly. 'The Australian government has worked hard to ignore these hard-earned lessons and these cheaper military solutions,' he wrote scathingly in this masthead this week, 'while building a dense bureaucracy in Canberra that innovative drone-makers in Australia cannot penetrate in any reasonable amount of time.' At the same time, the FBI charged two Chinese researchers with attempting to smuggle a toxic fungus into the US. It's banned because it can cause mass destruction of crops. A potential bioweapon, in other words. What would John Curtin do today? 'Curtin, like Albanese, was from the left of the Labor Party,' says Dean. 'He was not an internationalist, he was very domestic focused.' Indeed, he was an avowed Marxist who believed that capitalism was in its late phase and bound to fail, leading to world peace. He abandoned his idealism when confronted by the reality of World War II. 'He realised that a leader has to lead for his times. He had to bend his interests from the domestic sphere to the international.' Curtin famously wrote that, after Britain's 'impregnable fortress' of Singapore fell to the Japanese in just a few days, Australia looked to America as its great and powerful friend. 'Albanese can't repeat that,' observes Dean, 'because there's no one else to turn to.' 'A modern John Curtin,' says the head of the National Security College at ANU, Rory Medcalf, 'would take account of the strategic risk facing the unique multicultural democratic experiment of Australia. He'd unite the community and bring the trade unions, industry, the states and territories together in a national effort. 'It's certainly not about beating the drums of war, but we do need a much more open conversation about national preparedness. Australia might be directly involved in war, but, even if we aren't, we will be affected indirectly [by war to our north] because of risks to our fuel security, risks to the normal functioning of the economy and risks to the cohesion of our society. Is there scope to use national cabinet' – which includes the states and territories – 'to talk about these issues?' And the defence budget? Albanese is dismissive of calls to peg spending by set percentages of GDP. Apply that to any other area of the budget and you'd be laughed out of the room. The prime minister prefers to decide on capability that's needed, then to fund it accordingly. How big a gun do you need, then find money to pay for it. Medcalf endorses this approach of deciding capability before funding, but says that risk should come before both. 'And if you look at risk first, it will push spending well above 2 per cent of GDP and much closer to 3 or 4 per cent.' Regardless of what the Americans say or do. Do they turn out to be dependable but demanding? Or uselessly absent? 'Australia will need to spend more either way,' says Medcalf. 'The only future where we don't need to increase our security investment is one where we accept greatly reduced sovereignty in a China-dominated region.'
