Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Tax Laws Amendment (Education Refund) Bill 2008. My electorate of Wakefield has a great many qualities and attributes, but it also has its share of problems, particularly in terms of access to education and opportunity. The 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas make it alarmingly clear that there are parts of the urban area of my electorate that are profoundly disadvantaged, and low educational qualifications are a key indicator of that profound disadvantage. At just 11 per cent, my electorate of Wakefield has the third lowest higher education participation rate in the country, which is also, I think, a disturbing indicator of disadvantage. University education is not for everyone, and that is why we are obviously putting resources into trades education and technical careers. In the north of Adelaide, my electorate is fortunate enough to have had the issue around the northern Adelaide technical college resolved and its future secured.

So we know a trade is as good as a degree and that educational qualifications can be a key determinant of people’s incomes and opportunities. But I know that there are many people in my electorate who are prevented from going to university or TAFE, or even year 12, and attaining educational qualifications simply due to their economic circumstances or, frequently, their geographical circumstances. Many country kids face a pretty big commute or have to leave home to do tertiary study. So geography can be a barrier to education, as can economic reasons. We know that there are many families who simply cannot afford some of the basic resources their kids need to really make a go of it at school. This bill is about removing some of those early barriers to people gaining a year 12 qualification.

This bill fulfils a $4.4 billion budget commitment to create a new education tax refund, a refundable tax offset of 50 per cent of eligible education expenses for children undertaking primary and secondary school studies. As I said before, it aims to knock out the barriers that exist for some schoolchildren and their families. Eligible families will be able to claim 50 per cent of relevant education expenses, up to $750 for each child undertaking primary school, to provide a maximum tax offset of $375 per child per year. For children undertaking secondary school studies, families will be able to claim 50 per cent of their eligible expenses, up to $1,500 per child, with a maximum tax offset of $750 per child per year. The measures outlined in this bill will help about 1.3 million families—that is about 2.7 million students—to afford the basics of a good education: textbooks, stationery, trade tools, laptops and home computers. Importantly, the bill also allows for home internet connections to be claimed. This is a particularly important issue, I think. Increasingly, the divide in the future will be not just about income but also about access to information. We do risk a divide in that area, and it is one of the reasons we are so passionate about broadband.

To give you an idea of how this gap is already there, one of the local primary schools in my electorate did a survey of their school population. That survey revealed that only 25 per cent of children in the school population had a computer at home and just 12 per cent had access to the internet at home. That is a figure which is staggeringly low given the importance of the internet and it obviously has a massive impact on their future opportunities and their ability to utilise the information technology present at their school as well.

This bill does go some way to address that problem. Families who may be eligible include: families who receive tax benefit part A in respect of one or more children undertaking primary or secondary school studies; those parents with one or more children who would be eligible for the purposes of family tax benefit part A but for the fact that they or their child receive certain payments or allowances, for example, youth allowance, disability support pension or Abstudy; those students undertaking primary or secondary school studies and receiving an independent rate of income support payments.

There are also measures which allow the refund to be taken up by families who have shared care arrangements and those families who choose to home-school their children. Particularly with the shared-care arrangements, I think that this is a really good recognition that many families now are living very differently from the way they did in the past. We now have the phenomenon of constellation families where people often have very complex shared-care arrangements often between one or more former partners and they may have arrangements that are even more different. So it is good to see the new government acknowledging that reality. In addition, students who go from primary school to high school in a single financial year can claim the full education tax refund based on the secondary school rate.

For Labor, and for this government, education and access to opportunity are the foundations of any decent society. As I said before, in my electorate, there are pockets of profound disadvantage and intergenerational unemployment. After 12 years of inaction, there is great cynicism in some of these areas about government solutions, and this bill does represent real practical assistance which will go directly to families. It provides also real tax assistance to those people who already do the right thing and support their children’s education.

The reasons behind the ABS statistics, which I talked to before, are complex. They need a concerted approach. This bill is a beginning to that, I think. But more broadly the government’s education revolution will play a big role in addressing educational disadvantage in my electorate and I look forward to seeing progress in the future. So I commend the bill to the House and I certainly acknowledge that this bill will help struggling families in my electorate.

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