CANCELLING student debt and making TAFE courses free are expected to be among the major policies the United Australia Party announces as part of its campaign towards the Federal Election on May 21.
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UAP candidate for Calare Adam Jannis said he was excited about party founder Clive Palmer's strategy for economic growth and bringing manufacturing back to Australian shores, which he spoke about in a zoom call with UAP candidates on Sunday night.
"Essentially we're going to forgive all student debt," Mr Jannis said.
Mr Jannis, 31, said the UAP was about increasing skill by taking the financial burden off education.
"Previously most of the policies were around economic policies and making sure we're paying off the debt, things like that, bringing manufacturing back to Australia again.
"We're casting a wider net now, making sure we're announcing policies that benefit all different sectors of Australia. That's going to be very, very popular with a lot of people."
Based Wellington and working in the fitness education industry for more than 10 years, Mr Jannis said details on how the plan would be implemented were yet to be finalised.
"As Clive mentioned [on Sunday], a lot of student debt never gets paid off anyway. There's people out there with student debt that hasn't been paid off for 30 or 40 years already.
"It's basically a dark cloud hanging over people's heads for the rest of their life."
Mr Jannis visited Orange and Friday where he said he touched based with a number of locals who voiced their concern about vaccine mandates, which the UAP is opposed to, largely through controversial MP Craig Kelly.
Mr Jannis said mandates restricted the unvaccinated from working in several services, like health, did not make sense.
"As we've seen, we've and its not just NSW, it's Queensland and Victoria, literally lost thousands of teachers, thousands of nurses, all sorts of workers from all sorts of industries due to these mandates," he said.
"We've learned over time ... vaccines themselves don't stop transmission, they may help reduce the severity of the disease but they don't stop the actually transmission and circulation of the virus.
"It makes no sense to be excluding these critical workers ... we could reinstate a lot of these jobs, get the economy back moving at full speed again by removing the mandates in the first place."
Mr Jannis said common sense should prevail.
"Prior to 2020, if you were sick you would stay home and if you were well you would go to work and I don't see difference between that and COVID," he said.
"What we have now is situation where we have individuals who are healthy but unvaccinated, they can't work. But there are some circumstances were people are vaccinated, have COVID but are allowed to work, spreading COVID.
"The logic is not there and it is really causing a lot of difficulty."
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