Jason Clare was celebrating:

We promised it and we’ve delivered. This will cut the debt of millions of Aussies by thousands of dollars. The average HECS debt today is about 27 grand.

This will cut that debt by about $5,500. That’s a lot of money, and that’s a lot of help for a lot of Australians. It will help take a weight off their back. In particular, a lot of young Australians. Young Australians don’t always see something for them on the ballot paper, but they did this year and they voted for it in their millions.

And we’re repaying now the trust that these young Australians have placed in us. The next step is for the tax office to do the work they need to do. Now that the bill has passed, they’ve got the certainty they need to make the changes to their systems to pass this on to 3 million Australians. That will take a bit of time.

They’ve got to write about 50,000 lines of code to implement this and make sure that they get it right. But this is now going to happen. It’s guaranteed.

And it will be backdated to 1 June this year, before indexation happened. We’re doing that for a reason – to make sure that we honour the promise we made to the Australian people in full, that we would cut their student debt by 20%.