Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

One such measure that is causing a great deal of concern among my constituents is the proposal to change the youth allowance and how students qualify for this support. My greatest concern in this area is the situation that 2008 school leavers find themselves in at present. Having made the decision in good faith to take a gap year in 2009 in order to work and qualify for youth allowance, they now find the rug has been pulled out from under their feet.

Many letters and emails from concerned parents and students have come into my electorate office on this matter. Rural students in Victoria defer from their course at about 2½ times the rate of city students. Students in McMillan and rural Victoria generally also face difficulty in finding 30 hours of work a week which, under the new rules, has to be done within 18 months. In country towns, especially during the current economic climate, where are kids from our area going to find that sort of employment? This tightening up of the work criteria for youth allowance is forcing students to work longer—in effect, two years. Most university courses will only allow deferral for one year. This will mean many students will need to reapply for a university place.

Despite the changes, the Rudd government has made no change to the actual youth allowance itself. We could talk about the amount of money that is available for young people; the money offered is below the poverty line. Parents who send their child to Melbourne or wherever their university placement may be find that rent can be up to $15,000 a year. The highest payment of the youth allowance is well short of the Newstart allowance for singles, at $453.30 a fortnight. This could and does work as a disincentive for young people, especially disadvantaged people, to participate in higher education rather than seek full-time employment.

The Bradley review recommends that by 2020, 20 per cent of enrolments in higher education should be filled by people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. It is difficult to see this happening for rural students under the new arrangements. The Bradley review also concluded that there is a need for an increased number of people with high skill levels in order to ensure Australia’s competitiveness into the future. This necessitates the increased participation in higher education of people from disadvantaged groups, including Indigenous people, people with low socioeconomic status and those from regional and remote areas. These people are currently under-represented in Australia’s higher education system.

The start-up scholarship of $2,254 and the relocation grant of $4,000 plus $1,000 each year thereafter are welcome additions and I applaud the government for those decisions. But the students must have first qualified for youth allowance, and therein lies the problem. A transition period for the 2008 students needs to be introduced in order for them to gain the youth allowance under the old rules and to give recognition to their hard work and determination to become independent. Students leaving school at the end of 2009 would be expected to work under the new rules being introduced from the beginning of the 2010.

For concerned members of parliament in this House there is another issue that has not been taken into account. Jason Beck, a principal who runs a great school in one of the more disadvantaged areas of my electorate, said: ‘Our teachers and career officers have provided the best information they can to our students and parents and now this has happened and they all feel like they have let down their own students. It has caused its own amount of stress within the school community.’ If that has happened in one school in one regional town I daresay every member of parliament should go to their secondary schools and ask: ‘What have you told your children? Do you feel that you have let them down in the advice that you have given them?’ Think about that—you are a teacher, you are a professional, you have done the right thing. You have offered them the best information you possibly can because you have got the wellbeing of those students and their families at heart. What do you say when they come back to you and ask, ‘What’s happened?’ The greatest letdown you can feel is when you do the wrong thing by those you have advised. Anybody who has been a teacher—not that I have—in any organisation knows how important their advice is to young students. I for one have been a recipient of great advice from people that have been so good to me over the years through the education process.

I call upon the minister to give this immediate consideration given the social justice issues involved here—and I mean serious social justice issues. I think the government has mucked this one up and they need to address it. That is just one of the budget measures that demonstrates a lack of concern, a lack of feeling, a lack of understanding and a lack of heart for rural Australia. That is why I condemn the member for Melbourne Ports for his remarks with regard to the member for Maranoa.

Also of concern to rural communities such as my electorate of McMillan is the stimulus associated with the spending on education. There has been serious concern about the government’s failure to deliver on its promises—not the amount of money but the actual process of delivery. We witnessed the massive cost blow-outs of the computers in schools rollout, and now we have rural and regional communities suffering under bureaucratic mismanagement in the Renewing Australia’s Schools program.

On 3 February the Deputy Prime Minister stated that this investment would:

… not only support jobs—it is also a down payment on the long term strength of the Australian economy.

Those are all valuable ideals. The program is ‘a $1.3 billion investment to refurbish and renew existing infrastructure and undertake minor building works’. It sounds like Investing in Our Schools, but now we have a bigger Investing in Our Schools—on borrowed money. The $200,000 for every Australian school is certainly a welcome boost in these economic times. The question is, as has been pointed out by the coalition time and time again: what is the actual impact of this spending? Initially, it was presented as a program which would boost local communities’ economies by providing opportunities for local businesses to come on board and construct the much-needed works. Bureaucratic bungling has taken over and now local businesses are being directed and dictated to as to what jobs they can tender for and where these jobs will take place.

I will describe one case in point. In round 1 of funding, a building contractor in Wonthaggi tendered for a number of schools in his immediate community but was informed that he was not eligible to tender for these projects. Instead he was given a list of projects he could tender for, and they were all well outside the normal areas of his operation and some would require travel of over 100 kilometres for all his people. At the same time, one of the contractors eligible to do the renovations in the Wonthaggi community is located 250 kilometres away in Bairnsdale. I ask the members: where is the logic in this process? How many dollars are going to be wasted in these tenders? How many dollars are going to be wasted in travelling, accommodation and other expenses in having workers transported across Gippsland when that money could be going to our students in the schools, as was the government’s intention? What value for taxpayers’ dollars are we seeing here?

This is a very disappointing outcome for local communities. In this example, the local contractor has built up a large and skilled workforce over a number of years and has successfully conducted business in the local community. On expressing his disappointment to the AAP Corporation Pty Ltd, the company responsible for issuing the contracts, he was told that the projects were allocated purely on a financial registration level with the Construction Supplier Register. The distances for the builders’ subcontractors and suppliers or their local connections with schools have not been taken into account.

He was also informed that, if local contractors declined the tenders offered in round 1 due to the cost factors mentioned already, the tenders would go to the big building contractors. Their offices can be found in the capital cities. Smaller builders would miss out. This was not the government’s intention. I hope this is unique to Victoria and not happening all over Australia, because I would not want to be the local member who has to go and tell the local contractor, ‘You’ve got to travel 250 kilometres.’ If you are in a city electorate, it probably does not matter, but if you are in an electorate as big as mine it sure does.

This is a very disappointing outcome for local communities. In addition to this, if the locals fail to accept a tender in the first round, what are their chances in round 2 of the Renewing Australia’s Schools program? They have been told they could be excluded. So much for the stimulus going to local communities, local jobs and local working families in regional areas. I wanted to drop that line in because it is very important—local working families in regional areas.

Further doubt as to the effectiveness of the education spending has been expressed in recent press reports:

Former Melbourne University dean of education Brian Caldwell argued yesterday that the program—

the $14.7 billion school infrastructure program—

lacked vision and there was a lack of transparency in the way the funds were being spent.

…            …            …

While it was appropriate that the money be spent quickly to stimulate the economy, he said the rush to build should not undermine the lasting value of what was built.

That is from the Australian, 28 May 2009. According to the report, many schools in Victoria were finding they did not qualify for the federal funding according to the templates adopted by the state education department to streamline the building process. It said:

Professor Caldwell cited the example of one school that had received funding for a new gym even though it already had a perfectly adequate one. “What they need is a top-of-the-line, up-to-date library … but the designated templates don’t allow the configuration they want,” he said.

In the Australian on 1 June there was this report:

HUNDREDS of high schools will miss out on—

the—

federal government program to upgrade science laboratories after the Government refused to widen guidelines for eligible schools.

A letter to the Minister for Education, Ms Gillard, signed by the Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations of New South Wales, the New South Wales Secondary Principals Council, the New South Wales Teachers Federation and the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group urged a revisit of the funding arrangements ‘to enable more schools and a greater number of students to benefit’. This was rejected. For the sake of the local communities supposed to be benefiting from the stimulus package and for the schools supposed to be benefiting from upgrades and renovation, I would ask the minister to again revisit the guidelines and policy driving the allocation of taxpayers’ dollars before round 2. This demonstrates the apparent inability of this government to understand the issues confronting rural and regional Australia.

A further issue of serious concern to rural communities is the Rudd government’s decision to scrap funding for Landcare network coordinators. The fact is the government have now moved a lot of funds to larger groups of people—and I will conclude here because my time is up. This is a difficult issue. What the government have done is move to larger commitments for bigger bulk plantings that they can put a plaque on. It is a plaque inspired Landcare, rather than a plant inspired Landcare. We in the country have done great things with plant inspired Landcare. We are not interested in plaque inspired Landcare. Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank you for giving me the consideration of your time in the House tonight.

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