Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak this afternoon on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009 and particularly to support the amendments being proposed by the shadow minister for education, the member for Sturt. I follow the written speech delivered by the member for Dawson, who is one of the few Labor members from outside metropolitan areas of our country, and it is a shame he did not address the great inequity of this bill and its attack on regional students that live in his seat. Obviously he will need to go back to the hollow men who draft the speeches over there and, next time, get some of that inserted into the speech.

It is important that we deal with the two major issues in this bill, as many members from our side of the parliament have so far in their contributions to this debate. The two most significant issues we deal with in this bill are the retrospective nature of the changes made—which we oppose and we seek to amend—and the changes to the structure of the youth allowance and the independent arrangements, which we think discriminate very much against those who come from regional and rural areas of Australia. They particularly discriminate against those who come from farming families and regional small business families, benefiting those people who live in inner city Labor seats. That is very much always the modus operandi of the Labor Party—to make changes that benefit the Labor Party constituency against those of us who sit on this side. The Labor party does not have many members in outer metropolitan and regional seats. They have representatives such as the member for Dawson who obviously are unable to articulate the issues well enough for the minister to understand.

The youth allowance was introduced in 1998 by the previous Howard government as a means to replace what were then five or six different allowances. We recognised—through the Bradley review—that there were some issues about how the youth allowance was being accessed by different groups in the community. The shadow minister for education has articulated very well how we support some of the changes suggested in the Bradley review and proposed in the budget. However, we do not support two aspects of the change. The first one—and probably the most contentious, publicly, thus far—is the retrospective nature of the changes to the youth allowance. That was a particularly nasty aspect of this bill, which would have initially impacted on the 30,000-odd young Australians who were undertaking their gap year this year.

The minister has since made some changes to that provision. She had a press conference a couple of months ago where she had a group of students around. She acted like she was listening to their concerns and made a slight change which benefited some students but not all. So in this bill we seek to make the additional change, to catch up, to ensure there is not a retrospective element to this bill.

The second and more important issue, which is an ongoing issue about how the Youth Allowance will be structured, relates to the number of hours a young person will need to work to qualify for the independent youth allowance compared to the dependent youth allowance, as the government have changed the structure of the wage levels and so forth. This will particularly impact on regional areas such as in some parts of my electorate like Kangaroo Island, which is further from the city and has the water gap so you could not live at home and travel daily to a city university. You would need to up your life and move to Adelaide or, indeed, whichever capital city you wish to attend university. That has the kids at the Kangaroo Island school extraordinarily concerned. I saw them a couple of months ago. We had a meeting with year 12s and a lot of them had been planning on their gap year to raise funds to give them the opportunity to go to Adelaide, attend university and make a start to their career. Many of them hope to return to the island and undertake employment in the area that they had studied.

The students are deeply worried about the changes the Deputy Prime Minister is seeking to make. Those changes very much funnel assistance to those that the Deputy Prime Minister likes in society as against those that she does not like, and that is the obnoxious bit of this bill. I am thankful to the Parliamentary Library as per usual in their Bills Digest for encapsulating what this change will do. It says:

Under the current work participation requirements for independence, a person must have:

• worked full-time (at least 30 hours a week) for at least 18 months in the previous two years, or
• worked part-time (at least 15 hours a week) for at least two years since leaving school, or
• have been out of school for at least 18 months and earned at least 75 per cent of the maximum rate of pay under Wage Level A of the Australian Pay and Classification Scale (that is, $19 532 in 2009) in an 18 month period.

Under the change announced in the budget all but the first criteria, ‘worked full-time (at least 30 hours a week) for at least 18 months in the previous two years’ will apply. It is, of course, extraordinarily difficult in regional areas to find that sort of work in that period to qualify for the allowance. It is going to make things very tough for young Australians in regional areas, particularly those from farming backgrounds and others as well.

I have a constituent, Sarah Hemming who comes from Echunga, which is a beautiful part of my electorate, who has written to me about just how concerned and upset she is at the treatment being dished out by the Deputy Prime Minister. I forwarded this letter to the Deputy Prime Minister some weeks ago now and I am still eagerly awaiting a reply. I am sure it is on the way to my office as we speak. I will quote some of Sarah’s letter because I think it is very important to understand:

Are you aware that the government recently has decided against increasing the earning threshold for youth allowance students. This is absurd. I work a 6 hour shift a week, which is 12 hours a fortnight at a wage of 19.40 for a Saturday. This amounts to $232.80 per fortnight in my independent earnings and the threshold for income per fortnight for Youth Allowance Students is $230 a fortnight. So for working this I am already over the income threshold and my payment is reduced.

Sarah goes on and explains how difficult it is to live independently on those sorts of amounts. I have great sympathy for what she is saying about the changes being made. She is very clearly saying that the changes being made by this government impact more on regional students and regional people than on those who live in inner city, Labor held seats. What this Deputy Prime Minister will seek to do again on most occasions is to use the politics of envy, the politics of Medicare gold and the politics of the school hit list, focusing on who the government believe will benefit the most in their constituencies against those who live in areas that do not generally vote for the Australian Labor Party.

This bill has elements which we will seek to amend. The Manager of Opposition Business, the shadow spokesman on education, will be seeking several amendments. They are amendments which will make the bill a better bill and will make the system a better system going forward. They are cost neutral amendments to ensure that the Deputy Prime Minister cannot allege that we are trying to spend more money. They make a lot of sense and they will reduce the heartache which exists at the moment in regional communities.

As I said at the start, we are not opposed, per se, to changes to the Youth Allowance that have been suggested by this government, however we are opposed to the changes which particularly impact on regional kids. Again, I think the Bills Digest sums up exactly what the Deputy Prime Minister has sought to do in this legislation. On page 12, under the description of the measures, it says:

However changes to the parental income test and the introduction of new scholarship payments will mean that many more dependent students qualify for a higher rate of assistance than they would have received under the current arrangements.

It is a change in the bucket of money. Basically it is a change to how it is accessed at the moment by people in regional areas, who need some additional assistance, to those who largely live in lower-income areas in our major cities. What the Deputy Prime Minister does not understand is that living in regional centres makes university that much more difficult to access. I agree in part with what the member for Dawson said about regional universities. There has been an increased presence in regional universities in the last 20 years. In fact, when I grew up in a regional area 400 kilometres from the nearest major centre, we had the beginnings of some university education through the TAFE and, as it grew, through Latrobe University. However, inevitably for most kids in regional areas to get the skills required to go on and do whatever occupation they want to undertake, either in the city or in their regional communities, requires attendance at a city based university.

The fact is that young people from regional areas who go away and study are more likely to return to their rural and regional areas to undertake the important jobs of trained professionals like doctors, teachers, accountants and so forth. It is therefore important for the very survival and health of regional communities that we make it as easy as possible for those young people to have the opportunity of an education, whether through city based or regional universities. Unfortunately this bill does the exact opposite—it changes the way that youth allowance is paid. We are seeking to amend the bill to make it a much fairer system. This issue has driven quite a deal of community outrage. I have had quite a bit of correspondence through my electorate office and I know other members further out in the state, the member for Barker and the member for Grey, have had quite a deal of correspondence on this issue. It is a policy mistake by the Deputy Prime Minister. We just hope that she is not too stubborn to recognise that she has made a significant error by trying to implement what would be better for the Labor Party than for regional kids and their opportunities going forward.

I do not think the minister understands that the value of many farm are at such levels as to render those students ineligible although the available income is inadequate to support them. There is an old saying that farmers are asset rich but cash poor, particularly in the last few years of significant droughts. I understand that someone coming from Unley High School might not necessarily know what it is like for a kid from Murray Bridge, Mount Barker, Victor Harbor or Kangaroo Island.

It is unfortunate that the Deputy Prime Minister does not understand the very nature of regional Australia and the challenges that we face. My seat is a mixed outer suburb-regional seat. It is a vast seat with large areas. My constituents are not as affected as those of many other members in this place; however, this is a bad policy change. The Deputy Prime Minister will have an opportunity to vote for appropriate changes to the retrospectivity of this bill. It is a disgraceful policy move in any parliament to apply a policy retrospectively. She has done a half backflip. She is halfway round the full backflip. We hope that the full backflip happens soon. She particularly needs to address how youth allowance is paid and how it is structured in order to address the concerns of so many young Australians, particularly those in regional areas. On that note, I conclude.

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