Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I genuinely thank the member for Sturt for this question because it enables me to answer some of the outrageous scaremongering he has been engaged in. On budget night the government outlined some responsible reforms to student income support. Why did we do that? Because the information in the Bradley review clearly showed that this was a program that had problems with its targeting. That is, income support was going to families high up the income spectrum, including families that earned more than $200,000 a year and including families that earned more than $300,000 a year.

Faced with that, this government took the tough decision to actually better target student income support. What have we done? No. 1: most people who qualify for student income support qualify because of their family income. We have increased the family income thresholds where people will qualify. Where people would have cut out at low family incomes, now families can get support further up the income spectrum. So many families who would have been in the range of $80,000, $90,000 and $100,000 and who would have missed out under the Liberal Party’s scheme will get support under our scheme. Secondly, we have made more generous the way in which students are treated as independent by virtue of their age. Under the Liberal Party’s scheme independence was classified as being 25 years of age. We are going to phase that back to 22 years of age. Both of these measures mean more students will qualify. Yes, we have financed those beneficial changes in a tough decision by changing one of the ways in which students qualify to be considered independent and judged on their family income. In terms of the actual way in which students are treated, the ways in which students have been assessed to be independent have been changed, and that is because the evidence in the Bradley review very clearly showed that it was those work test independence ways of being assessed which were leading to this skew of students and their families getting money up the upper income end of the scale.

I have got a very clear emerging test here for the member for Sturt—and I will come to the individual example he raises in a moment. My very clear test to the member for Sturt is this—and it goes to the theme of the opposition’s attack today which has just outlined its opportunism to anybody watching or anybody listening: we have restructured these benefits so more students benefit. More than 30,000 extra students net benefit. We have restructured these benefits so that more than 30,000 students get more money, we have restructured these benefits so that tens of thousands more students get a student start-up scholarship to help with their course costs at the start of the year and we have restructured these benefits to provide relocation assistance to more people than it was available to before.

The choice here for the member for Sturt is very clear: is he going to cut all of these increased benefits in order to finance keeping the work test as it is now—I am not surprised he is running off—knowing that some of that money goes to families who earn $200,000 and $300,000 a year or is he going to make a complete laughing stock of the Leader of the Opposition by saying that we should put more money into this area of government policy? That means, of course, everything the Leader of the Opposition has ever said about debt and deficit will be viewed as a complete farce because he will have authorised one of his shadow ministers going on an expenditure blitz to blow the budget. I will wait to see which it is. I will also wait to see, when this is dealt with in the Senate, whether the word of the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer that the only budget bill they are blocking is the private health insurance bill is worth anything—another great test for the two of them and for the Liberal Party overall.

On the question of the individual raised by the member for Sturt, if he provides me with the full details, of course I will look at it, and I will look at whether or not on a proper examination of the new income tests the person he is engaged in scaremongering—the person he is frightening and the person’s family that he is frightening—is actually eligible.

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