Sorry for the whiplash in posts. Covering Australian politics while bearing witness to a genocide is a strange time.

Jason Clare has introduced the legislation to cut existing HECS/HELP debts by 20%.

That will help those who are already in uni, or have been, but it does nothing to help those who are entering uni and paying the fees set by the Morrison government, which Labor have not addressed.

Clare says it’s ‘under review’ which is cool, but also, Labor has been in power for three years now, so it’s not as if they haven’t had time.

And a reminder – Australians pay more HECS than gas companies pay PRRT

I just spent 10 minutes reading three pages of names of children who have been killed in Gaza by Israel over the last 22 months.

This is just the names who have been recorded.

They are babies. Just kids.

At the same time there is a giant group having a photo outside the house, jovial, enjoying their time outside Australia’s parliament, in front of a building built on a hill, with a lawn on top because politicians should always remember the people sit on top of them.

That group are looking towards the War Memorial, which honours Australian soldiers who have served, and lost so much including their lives, for Australia. Including those soldiers who who fought and died in battles in Palestine.

We are supposed to up hold the freedoms they fought for. That’s why the parliament looks towards the war memorial – to remember the cost of freedom.

We are failing. We are failing. We are failing.

Independent ACT senator David Pocock is now reading names.

He too is getting very emotional as he reads the ages of the children.

There are a handful of people observing the vigil, and they are all connected to the organisations which have been advocating for Palestine.

It’s very disappointing to see how few people from inside the parliament, have stepped outside to at least witness the vigil.

We have dropped by the Voices for Gaza vigil, where Labor’s Ed Husic just finished reading a list of names from the book of children who have been killed by Israel. There are 17,000 names in the book and it only covers the deaths of children recorded before all of Gaza’s civil and health systems collapsed. There are thousands more.

Husic thanked organisers for letting him be part of it. He was visibly moved by reading the names of infant children.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare will introduce legislation to slash student debt by 20 per cent and increase the income that graduates need to earn before minimum repayments kick in.

It’s the first bill that the Albanese government will put before parliament at the start of its second term. 

People earning between $60,000 and $180,000 will save hundreds of dollars each year under the changes. 

Someone on $70,000 will save the most, $1300 a year, on minimum repayments due to an increase to the thresholds at which the debts must be paid back.

Savings vary between incomes in the bracket, with people pocketing anywhere from $200 to $850.

Bruce Chapman said it would make it fairer by giving those on lower salaries more money in their pockets, while their debts remain the same in nominal terms.

“It looks bigger, in real terms it’s not bigger,” the architect of the HECS scheme told AAP. 

But the top priority should be reviewing the price of each degree because humanities students finish with the highest level of debt and end up being the lowest-paid graduates.

“All the prices are wrong,” Professor Chapman said.

Mr Clare said reforms were being looked at, after the failure of the former Liberal government’s job ready program.

The program aimed to fill skills shortages by making it cheaper to study courses like teaching, nursing and psychology while doubling the cost of popular degrees including law, communications, business, humanities and the arts.

“If the intention there was to reduce the number of people doing arts degrees, it hasn’t worked,” Mr Clare said.

“People study the courses they’re interested in, that they want to do, that they love.”

The universities accord final report branded the program “deeply unfair” because it punished students following their interest, and called for it to be scrapped.

It recommended that fees reflect future earning potential, as part of 47 recommendations to reform the sector.

Other aspects about how HECS is paid off also needed to be addressed, Prof Chapman said.

The segment ends with Albanese asking for luck for the first question time of the new parliament later today.

Kyle says he hopes none of the Greens bring up his show again, as “they are not fans of the show”.

Albanese says, “well, they are difficult people”.

And that has been another episode of the Prime Minister of Australia does FM radio.

Kyle and Jackie O are now speaking to the prime minister about their producer Peter who often goes to Russia and has just returned from a trip to Moscow.

Kyle (who has spoken about his time being homeless) then asks Anthony Albanese about homelessness and what he is doing about it.

They will have a chat about it.

Does Anthony Albanese get woken up by a security person “or some sort of servant or something?”

No.

He gets woken up by Toto.

“She jumps up, ‘I want to go outside, I want to go outside’.”

There is also a special phone that also rings from time to time, including the time Joe Biden rang to say that he couldn’t come to Australia for the Quad meeting. It also rang when the Queen died.

“I have no idea what the number is,” Albanese said of ‘the phone’.

There is a bit of a trip down memory lane about Operation London Bridge (the protocol when the Queen died”.

Now we are talking about what Albanese wears to sleep, if anything.

“No one wants to know,” Albanese says, in the truest words spoken this week.

Anthony Albanese is continuing his media policy of speaking to everyone – he will be speaking to Kyle and Jackie O in the next ten minutes or so.

There will no doubt be a lot of Black Sabbath talk, given the death of Ozzy Osbourne.

The Greens may be preparing for the first parliament sitting, but they too have to wrangle with internal issues. The party co-founder, Drew Hutton, was expelled from the party after he refused to delete transphobic comments made by others commenting on a Facebook post he made in 2022.

Hutton did an interview with ABC’s 7.30 overnight, where accused the Greens of being “authoritarian and aggressive”.

You can read about the interview here.