Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the motion, and commend the member for Parkes for raising this issue. I also thank other members for their thoughtful contributions to the debate. As we have already heard, there are many education challenges which are unique to children and their parents living in the more isolated parts of our nation. The Gippsland region is probably typical of many other country electorates. We have some larger towns which offer a more diverse range of educational opportunities, but there are also many rural and isolated areas where the services are more difficult to provide and also more difficult for families to access.

In moving this motion, the member for Parkes has sought to highlight the need for additional government support and assistance to help children access a full range of educational services from early childhood right through to tertiary studies. I congratulate the member for Parkes for putting forward some practical and common-sense solutions such as the mobile preschool services in his electorate.

Education is an issue that is dear not only to my heart but to all other parents that I speak to in regional areas. We simply want to make sure that our children have access to the services that sometimes I fear metropolitan families may take for granted. From a social justice perspective it is a question of equity, and for the hard-nosed economists of the world it is a question also of productivity. Helping children from rural and regional areas to achieve their full potential will help to improve the skill base of country areas and reduce the skill shortages we are constantly faced with across a range of industries.

In a broader sense, an issue of major concern in many regional areas—and I include Gippsland in this—is the comparatively poor retention rates and participation in higher education. The Gippsland region has one of the worst retention rates in Victoria—compared to the state and metropolitan rate of about 80 per cent, in 2006 just 65 per cent of Gippsland students finished year 12.

I take up the contribution of the member for Braddon and of the member for Barker and their thoughtful comments in relation to the geographical barriers that we are placing in front of these students. There are many barriers to accessing higher education, including the lack of access in our electorates. But I believe the biggest factor is undoubtedly the cost. When you have to move hundreds of kilometres to study, set up home, get a part-time job and then excel in your studies, it is an enormous burden for students from regional areas. I fear that we are actually setting them up to fail. We need to be doing more to help rural and regional students and their families overcome these cost barriers. I support greater use of cadetships and bonded scholarships or studentships to pay students an allowance while at university and then guarantee them a job after a fixed period if they return to serve in a regional area. It is an approach that has been used at various times and I think it is worthy of further investment. I think we also need to be innovative in regard to the extra costs borne by country families when sending students away from home for further study. We need to explore all the options to overcome those accommodation and cost of living pressures, which I believe place a disproportionate burden on rural and regional families.

I would like to expand on what the member for Braddon touched on, which is the opportunities to provide a level of tax deductibility for accommodation costs for the parents who are supporting students while living away from home. Making these accommodation costs tax deductible for supporting parents would have the extra benefit of increasing the expendable income for the families back in those regional areas where there are low-socioeconomic factors and the household disposable income is somewhat lower than in metropolitan areas. Such initiatives to reduce the cost barrier would help to open the door to further studies for regional Australians.

I take up also the previous speaker’s comments in relation to the disadvantage being felt. A lot of the students from isolated areas are Indigenous students, and it is the same in Gippsland. The level of disadvantage within our Indigenous community in terms of health outcomes, unemployment and the incidence of violence in homes is, I believe, directly related to their lack of participation in the education system at an early age. To give these young people the best possible chance, the best possible start in life, we must support them through those early stages of education. It is not just an issue in the more remote parts of the Northern Territory. In our rural and regional communities in Victoria we have issues relating to our Indigenous students not participating in the formal education system. We must take up the challenge to get them to school and get them learning the skills they are going to need to succeed in our community in the future.

I believe it is going to require innovative local solutions which recognise individual circumstances in different communities rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to policy making. In my electorate there has been some excellent work done by people such as Doug Vickers, the Principal of Bairnsdale West Primary School, to encourage greater participation by Indigenous and disadvantaged children. Sometimes it may be as simple as providing resources to go to the homes of these children and bring them to school and provide them with a decent breakfast, getting them engaged in the lifelong education experience even if their parents are perhaps not as committed to the cause.

I congratulate all members for their contribution to this debate and I believe that a genuine education revolution, if that is what we are actually aspiring to achieve, must meet the needs of families in rural, regional and isolated areas.

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