Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is thanks to the member for Lyne that we are here today talking about the need to close the education gap for rural and regional Australia. Clearly all the speakers here would agree, and our colleagues with us here in the chamber would agree, that equitable and accessible education is important for all Australians, no matter where they are from or what their socioeconomic background is. The government knows that people from regional and remote areas are underrepresented in higher education, just as we know that Indigenous people are vastly underrepresented. We understand that attending university is more complicated for our regional students than it is for metropolitan students. After all, for uni students in Brisbane, getting to university might be as simple as 15 minutes riding on a train. But for students in Claremont it could mean a five-hour drive to Rockhampton.

The Bradley review of higher education has already told us that there is a need for a more innovative, sustainable and responsive model of tertiary education provision in regional areas to respond to rapidly changing local needs. Rural areas have lower population numbers and cannot capture the same economies of scale as those enjoyed by cities. In responding to the Bradley review, the education minister has set some ambitious yet achievable targets for tertiary education in the future. She has also set out a plan for ensuring the strength of our regional universities.

The Rudd government supports diversity in higher education and is committed to assisting universities to develop their distinctive missions. We announced in the budget, therefore, a $5.7 billion program over four years to improve higher education, which is in direct response to the Bradley and Cutler reviews. These reforms include: a move to a student-centred system underpinned by a national regulatory and quality agency, which will enable an extra 50,000 new students to commence a degree by 2013; substantial resources to promote equity and performance funding tied to quality; a landmark increase to university indexation; a phased move to addressing the gap in funding for the indirect costs of research; major reform to student income support—as we are discussing today—to better support our most needy students and an increase in postgraduate stipends; importantly, major investment in higher education research and VET infrastructure through the Education Investment Fund totalling $3 billion; and additional recurrent funding of $2.1 billion over the forward estimates for higher education, teaching, learning and research.

We are seeking to raise the education level here in Australia and recognise that there are barriers to be overcome to achieve that goal. For instance, only 32 per cent of young Australians have been to university here in Australia compared to targets of 50 per cent in the UK and Sweden. As I said, the minister has committed to the aspirational target of having 40 per cent of all 25- to 34-year-olds attain a higher education qualification by 2025, and I applaud the minister for setting that bold target. We know that this means a focus on regional areas and low-socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as our cities. Higher education reform is a key element of our education revolution. As the minister has already outlined, the Bradley review will make a valuable contribution to the preparation of the government’s higher education policy agenda for the decades ahead.

As the federal member for a regional electorate, I can say that the government is committed to providing high standards of education for those people living in rural and regional areas. Our budget of three weeks ago is already instigating major changes and improvements to the education sector and it contains substantial measures that I believe will close the education gap between rural and regional Australia and metropolitan Australia.

There has been much media in recent times and a lot of comments from the opposition and my colleagues on the crossbenches here that we have supposedly delivered a cruel blow to prospective students in rural areas and that we are slashing the number of youth allowance recipients. This is not the case.

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