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

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question. At Senator Fielding’s invitation, I did meet earlier today with a number of young people who came to parliament from Shepparton and Warrnambool, in particular. They were actually sitting at the front of the gallery just over there until an earlier point in question time. I did have a good discussion with them about student financing and about aspirations for young people to go to university and we talked through some of their concerns. The Leader of the Opposition, having had a comparable discussion with them, would be aware of some of their concerns about the student financing package.

What we talked through in the meeting I had with them was that current student financing arrangements are flawed, and there was a general consensus about that. They, like me, were concerned by the evidence that there are higher income Australians with students living at home who have qualified for the full rate of student allowance, and the findings of the Bradley review are very, very clear on this. That is a concern, and they shared that concern. I think they shared that concern because, like me and the government, they want to see dollars spent on student financing going to make the best possible difference.

Our student financing package has been drawn up with those principles in mind. We believe that money should go to low- and middle-income families. The current means test is too low. It means that many lower- and middle-income families miss out. The received message has therefore been that the only way you can get student allowance is to defer for a year and to seek to qualify as independent. The great vice of that, of course, is that many people who do defer for a year actually do not ever come back into education. And we discussed that at our meeting today. We also discussed at our meeting the new scholarship arrangements, with gaps on scholarships under the current system—

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