Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009. I thought the previous speaker, the member for Bendigo, started quite well. I agree with his sentiments that equity in education is indeed the one thing that underpins our society. Unfortunately, he only told half the story. He went on to say that more students would get benefits under the proposed changes, and that is correct, but the point of this is that they are not going to get very much. It is very expensive, particularly when you live in rural and regional areas, to attend university when you have to travel large distances and live away from home. I think the amount that some students are entitled to goes down to something like $6 a week, which is a pittance.

When the member for Bendigo was speaking about the previous government he mentioned health and bringing doctors in from other countries. Good government policy with regard to tertiary education and rural areas does deliver results—and I will speak of the Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas scheme. In my small home town of Warialda, with 1,300 people, at the moment there are seven students who are either studying medicine or have completed studies and are training in hospitals as doctors, through the RRMA scheme, a policy of the previous government. So, government policy does affect opportunities for education for rural students.

We have seen a large change, and I am relatively new to this place. The previous system was not perfect. I believe that having to do a gap year is in some ways discriminatory for rural students, but it was the only way that they could get an adequate level of support to attend university. Many students, particularly from my electorate, have chosen that route, because it is the only way that they can go to university.

It is not just the children of farmers; I do not come here as an agrarian socialist. Indeed, before I came to this place I did have some involvement in education as the chairman of the Gwydir Learning Region, one of the most successful and innovative learning organisations in Australia. It is recognised as such. It delivers education to a community of 6,000 people in an area of 10,000 square kilometres—with no tertiary education. It requires resourcefulness. We delivered training and we had relationships with the University of New England to enable those country kids to get a start. But, ultimately, if they wanted to go to university they had to leave the area. Indeed, in my electorate, Charles Sturt University, which is a wonderful institution, now has a campus in Dubbo, but it only offers about three or four courses. So, basically, if you want to do any course at all you have to travel, and not just for an hour or two; you have to travel for many hours.

What this change has meant is that country kids now do not have that opportunity. This is the biggest issue that has come through my door in the two years that I have been in this place. It is not just farmers who are coming in and talking about their kids; it is school principals, teachers, nurses, plumbers, electricians and council workers. All those people that rural Australia requires to make it grow and prosper are now going to struggle to educate their kids in tertiary education. The one aspiration that a parent has is to give their child an education and a start to equip them to undertake whatever life puts to them. Many, many parents have contacted me—and, despite what the previous speaker said, it was not a scare campaign—and the fact is that this new scheme does not stack up. The fact that there were considerable savings under the previous scheme would indicate that there is less money going out. And that is the case.

This change is not just affecting the education of young people; it is actually affecting rural communities in a broader sense. As the children of the people who are vital to our communities—the professionals who are required to drive and grow our rural communities—get a bit older they look to move to a place where there is tertiary education, because that has become the only alternative they have for educating their children. So not only does that community’s children suffer because they are not given the same opportunity as their city cousins but the whole community suffers because there is an outflow of people, who are leaving mainly to get an education for their children.

Statistically, at the moment, a child from rural and regional Australia has about half the chance of going to university as their city counterparts. It does not mean that they are less intelligent and it does not mean they are less motivated; it just means that it is very hard. If you are a rural student and you do not have a parent who is prepared to make sacrifices, even with government assistance you are not going to get to university.

The amendments that the coalition has proposed will make considerable differences to what has been proposed by Minister Gillard. The provision for getting independent youth allowance—and this is still the only way that they are going to get an adequate amount of money to undertake the course—is to study for 30 hours over an 18-month period. Also, the sorts of jobs that they require are not available. The jobs that these kids have been doing to earn $19,500 are seasonal—the sort of work that is available in the country.

One of the reasons country kids, when they get their education, are snapped up by employers all over the place is their resourcefulness. They go off and pick grapes, they work in shearing sheds, they shear sheep, they drive machinery at harvest time and they work in abattoirs. They do the sort of work that is extremely difficult. It is tedious, it is backbreaking and it is hard. That is what they are prepared to do to get their education, but in a way that actually forms part of their education. Doing that sort of work gives them another tool in their toolbox to equip them on their road to life.

That opportunity, tonight, is going to be denied them, because there is a very limited number of jobs that will give someone 30 hours a week of work over 18 months, particularly in this time of higher unemployment. Businesses are going to put on someone who is going to be there for the long term. Why are they going to put on a student—a part-timer—and train them up for the job knowing that in 18 months to two years time they are going to leave? There is also the fact that you can only defer a course for 12 months. If you defer for two years a couple of things are going to happen. Either you are either going to lose heart—the passion that drives you to university will diminish—or, if you do hang in there for the two years, you will have to reapply as a mature-age student. The position will not be held. It is a classic case of what looks good in theory not translating to rural Australia.

It is not only here that this government is letting the students of rural Australia down. Guess where the savings were made to cover the overspend that came to light in the so-called education revolution a few months ago? Were they taken out of large metropolitan schools? Were they taken out of the wealthy private schools? No. I can tell you where the savings were made in my electorate. They were made in the central schools: Collarenebri, Goodooga, Binowee, Mendooran—all those schools that are struggling. The school in Collarenebri, identified as one of the third most disadvantaged communities in New South Wales, with its science lab in a demountable, had its funding pulled because of the overspend. So for those kids now it is a question of whether they will get through their education in secondary school with second-rate facilities with no prospect of improvement.

Mungindi Central School, which had its funding pulled under the Building the Education Revolution Program, has one boy doing the HSC this year. Can anyone in this place imagine what it is like doing your Higher School Certificate when you are the only child in the class, where the nearest person who you could consider a peer is 120 kilometres away in Moree and where there are no fellow students who you can ask for help with your homework? I take my hat off to that student and to the teachers at that school. They have had their funding cut.

Many of these people spend an hour to an hour and a half, morning and night, on a bus to get to school. They get a UAI that gets them to university and their parent, like the parent who came and saw me in one of these towns, might be the manager of the local ag supply company. That parent I am talking about—who is not only the manager of that ag supply company but is also on the P&C, in the show society, in the local Rotary Club and helps run the music festival—is looking for a job in Toowoomba or Brisbane because that is the only way his children are going to get an education.

So this is much more than just students missing out on an opportunity to go to university. That is serious enough on its own. But the impact throughout rural Australia of entire families evacuating to educate their children is catastrophic. I urge the minister to reconsider. I actually think we need to go a bit further and look at how we are going to educate our young people from rural Australia, because they are the ones who understand rural Australia. They are the ones who are not frightened to go back as a doctor, a teacher or a plumber or after they have done ag science at university and implement what they have learned, combining the knowledge of their parents with the education they have gained.

Why do we need this to happen? We need it to happen because the world’s population in 2050 is going to be 9 billion. They are going to need food. They are going to need the people who grow the food, and those people are going to have to have an education especially in the tough economic environment that we work in now, the global environment for agriculture and, indeed, if we are have an effect of climate change. This is all going to get tougher. Farmers can adapt to these things. They have been doing it for some time. But they need everything at their disposal. One of those things is an education. We need not only the education of the farmer but also the education of the people who are going to come back and educate the farmer’s children, who are going to provide the services that are required in order to have some sort of standard of living in those places.

The people who live in those communities in my electorate love those places. That is why they are there. But that does not mean they should be taken advantage of and treated as second-class citizens, and that is exactly what this bill does. That may not have been the intention. It may have been out of ignorance. I notice that the members from the more rural areas of the Labor Party are not on the list of speakers, but they would have had the same number of people come through their doors as I have.

Two weeks ago I went to Dubbo Senior College to speak to the kids, as we all do as members. They were a great bunch of kids. I should not say ‘kids’—they were young adults. I expected that we would have a discussion about climate change, about Copenhagen, about the economy—things that may have worried them. The No. 1 issue was youth allowance. They wanted to know how they could go to university with the change in these rules. Their parents will probably make every effort to enable them to go to university, but these young people did not want on their conscience a deterioration in their parents’ lifestyle for the sake of their own education.

One of the kids said: ‘Mum and dad have cancelled the idea of a car next year. They’ll just patch up the old one because we’re going to need every cent we’ve got to get me to go to university.’ Parents do that willingly; that is what parents do. But I ask the minister to reconsider this legislation or to at least consider the coalition’s amendments. Personally I think we need to go right back and have a completely fresh look at educating kids from rural Australia, but the minister should at least look at the amendments the coalition has put up. They are economically viable and they will protect the kids who are now in their gap year. I think we should also have some consideration for the thousands of students who are undertaking their higher school certificate as we speak, this week. Where will they be? How can they be concentrating on their exams when they do not know whether they are going to have the financial wherewithal to get an education? Education is the key to everything we do. If we look at everything in our society, in our electorates, that needs fixing—whether it is social disadvantage, education, health, productivity or agriculture—education is the key.

I will mention another failure of this government which was one of their grand promises, and that was that every preschool child over the age of three or four would receive 20 hours a week of preschool. Well, not if you live in rural Australia. I brought a delegation down here to see the parliamentary secretary. They had a wonderful scheme to expand their mobile preschool, where they take facilities out to the children in isolated areas so that they get some sort of socialisation and will at least be on a par with their counterparts from town when they go to school. The delegation was told it was ‘a wonderful idea’—but there was not a cent for it. No-one would look at it.

What we have to do in this place is get past the rhetoric, get past the politics and start looking at what the real issues are. Education for the people in rural Australia is a real issue. I ask the government and I ask the minister to look at these amendments and at least give these kids half a chance of getting an education.

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