Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This issue is very real to me. It probably cost my parents about $1 million by the time the three of us were educated through tertiary education. The difference between my brother, who had four kids and lived in Brisbane, and me, who had five kids and lived in Cloncurry-Charters Towers, was that he had a university in Brisbane and I did not. I must say, we did not find the money; my kids had to borrow the money through the borrowing arrangements. Four kids by four years by $10,000 a year is $150,000. So there is a $200,000 difference between a family who lives in Brisbane and wants to have their children educated and a family who lives in Charters Towers and wants to have their children educated. You would say there is a cost at home. Hold on a minute: the home is free, for starters, if you live in Brisbane; and, of course, your mother cooks the meals in the main, so you do not have the cost of cooking. My experience at university was that most of the people had to buy take-away meals, twice a day anyway. So there is a huge cost difference between a person who lives in a city where there is a university and a person who does not.

That results in a huge difference in the number of people in tertiary education. I represent pretty close to 200,000 Australians in my electorate and about 40,000 of those are in the very remote areas. Those remote and very remote areas have eight per cent of males completing tertiary education while metropolitan areas have 27 per cent, and the figures are 18 per cent versus 33 per cent for females. So where metropolitan areas have an average figure of 30 per cent completing tertiary, we have an average figure of 12 per cent completing tertiary education. That is one hell of a gap. I say to the minister that when you go ahead with something it is hard to check out every single thing, but we ask the minister to look again at this. Through you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I say to the minister: there has been a huge hole created here that people will fall through. There is a yawning gap now, and I might add that even for 12th grade there is a gap: 35 per cent in very remote areas—and a quarter of my electorate would probably fit into that category—versus an average of 68 per cent in the metropolitan areas. How can you justify this gap?

Also, remember, the government does not have to pay for us because we are not going there—because we cannot afford to. So you do not have to pay anything for us, but the city kid gets something because he has got the opportunity and he takes advantage of the opportunity. We say, ‘You can get it so long as your kids go and work for a year and a half.’ So my children could have got it so long as they went and worked for a year and a half, which one of my five children did in fact do. If you are in the country areas, you have to take a year and a half out of your life, working for no other purpose than to be eligible to go to university; if you are in the city, you do not lose that year and a half out of your life. So we plead with the minister: please, Minister, will you look at the hole that has been created here. There is now a hole that was not there before, so would you please address this issue and try to close the gap. We are closing the gap for Aboriginal people as far as death rates go. If you do not have a secondary or tertiary education, then you have most doors closed to you in life. So doors are closed for us that are not closed for people who live in the city. There is a huge yawning gap here. Minister, as a responsible minister, it sure would be nice if you tuned in here instead of listening to the opposition— (Time expired)

See this speech in context