Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is certainly a pleasure—an almost unkind pleasure—to be speaking on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009. I can remember going to university. I did my university course as a mature age student at 32 and did not get one bit of help from the government. I struggled. I have always lived in a rural area and did over 100 kilometres of travel every day. Of course, I had to pay for my fuel and my Higher Education Contribution Scheme fees on top of that. I struggled, but I got through it. But, unlike most of my constituents, I did not have the problem of having to pay for accommodation to be able to attend. In fact, I have moved since I went to university. If I tried to go to university now, I would have to move back home, like most of the students in my electorate.

I was very pleased in 1998 when the Howard government first introduced measures to assist rural students to pay rent as part of the Youth Allowance program. It was very warmly welcomed, but it was not enough. I was elected in October 1998, after that legislation was enacted, and in the 11 years that I have had the honour of representing the electorate of Barker I have sought and been able to secure some changes that were more beneficial to rural students. One of the first changes we made, not long after I got elected, was increasing the assets test for farmers—it was virtually doubled, I think, and later we doubled it again. It enabled those cash poor but asset rich farmers in my electorate to get some help for themselves and their student children. When the Hon. Brendan Nelson was the Minister for Education, Science and Training, I and my colleagues were able to convince him that further scholarships were needed to help some of those rural people get accommodation help when they had to leave home to go to university.

Of course, those measures have now been scrapped by the Rudd Labor government and the replacement is, frankly, not going to help very much at all. We are talking about $1,000 a year in accommodation allowance from the second year onwards. If you can find accommodation in a capital city for $1,000 a year, I think you would be well advised to grab it. A $20 a week living allowance does not get you very far when you have to leave home.

I took quite a bit of interest in the contributions from the member for Capricornia and the member for Dawson. They all seemed to be singing from the same hymn sheet as the Minister for Education. I have some advice for them: they should follow what the member for Lyons did during the 2004 election, when he took on his then leader, Mark Latham, and kept his seat. Other members in electorates that support forest industries around Australia did not do that and they lost their seats. This is a huge issue in my electorate and other rural electorates. As a psephologist, I am sure there will be some studies done on this by other people who are interested in voting patterns. If you look at rural and regional electorates like Leichhardt, Capricornia, Flynn, Dawson, Page, Richmond, Corangamite, Bass, Braddon, Wakefield, Bendigo and Ballarat—there might be a couple of others—it will be very interesting to see the swings that could occur against Labor at the next election. I have no doubt in the least that that will happen, and I suspect that coalition held rural electorates will see a swing towards them on average based on this appalling decision by the government. So my advice to those Labor members in rural and regional seats is: do not get sucked in. Do not be sacrificed by this minister’s poor decision.

As I said, I rise to speak on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009. I have spoken out previously on behalf of rural and regional students concerning this unfair legislation that the government introduced regarding youth allowance, and I will continue to lobby the government on behalf of these students until I am satisfied that they are being treated fairly. I support the amendments foreshadowed by the coalition to the bill to get a fairer deal for those students who would be severely disadvantaged under the bill as it stands. In my 11 proud years of being a member of this parliament I would have to say that this issue is the biggest I have come across, with the greatest response from my constituents. My office has been inundated with correspondence and I suspect—I am quite sure—that rural Labor members would have had the same response. We have been inundated with correspondence from concerned rural and regional students, parents and school councils, who all believe that the proposed changes by the Labor government will be detrimental to the future of the students.

So strong has been the response from my constituents that in August this year I submitted a 2,000-signature petition to this parliament. The anger and frustration expressed by the community over the government changes was massive. In an electorate like mine 2,000 signatures is huge. I have never seen anything like that before in my time in parliament. After the huge public outcry and continuous lobbying by me and my coalition colleagues, Minister Gillard is beginning to back-pedal. She needs to back-pedal a lot more. The government have already done one backflip to try to dig themselves out of a friendless hole on youth allowance and now they must go the rest of the way and fix rural and regional students’ future before they take it away completely.

The coalition’ proposed amendments offer rural and regional students a better deal and encourage them to strive for higher education and achieve their best. I am proud of rural and regional students. I want to see them with the same opportunities that students from the city have. One of the problems we have in rural areas face is retaining doctors and other professionals. When parents are faced with these sorts of changes they often make the decision to leave their rural area for the sake of their children’s education and move to the city. That is a brain drain from rural areas that we can ill afford. Unfortunately, I think these changes will have an even greater effect as to that happening in the future.

The government was set to treat these students second-best and that would have seen them struggling to find work and missing out on university places. It is fair to say that all students would have been worse off under the government changes. But one particular group that would have been a lot worse off would have been gap year students who were working this year to earn an income before embarking on university in 2010. Currently, students under the age of 25 can assess youth allowance as being independent of their parents by the following three workplace participation routes: if a student earns $19,532 in 18 months after finishing school; if a student has worked part time and this accounts for 15 hours per week for two years after finishing school; and if a student has worked full time and this accounts for 30 hours per week for 18 months in the two-year period after finishing school. The problem with the two-year criteria is that we can no longer have a ‘gap year’, so we have a ‘gap two years’. Many universities have simply not made the changes necessary to allow that to happen without a reapplication. It is going to be a lot harder for schoolstudents to work out how they can fit in a gap of two years from their school days to actually become part of the university system. The logistics are a lot harder than with a single gap year, which we had under the previous administration.

The government’s reforms were set to abolish the first two of these three criteria. However, following Minister Gillard’s backflip, it is about students living further away than 90 minutes by public transport, which is Centrelink’s definition. In my electorate we have not got public transport that goes to a university so how does that come into it? There is no public transport for 99 per cent of my electorate. Where there is it would be the one bus a day, I think, from Murray Bridge down to Adelaide, and the times would probably not fit in very well if you were doing a full university course. So how does this definition fit in? That criterion also says that those who have undertaken a gap year in 2009 will be eligible as long as they commence their higher education in the first half of 2010. This backflip would help approximately 5,000 current gap year students. I welcome that. But about 25,000 or 26,000 current gap year students would miss out in 2010, and from 2011 students would only be able to access youth allowance if they were above the parental income threshold as independents, if they were to reach the age threshold of independence or if they were to work full time for 18 months after finishing school. These gap year students would be far better off under the coalition’s proposed amendment which will grandfather students currently on a gap year by proposing they fall under the old workforce participation route to youth allowance, which they assumed they were when they entered the gap year. Many of these students commenced their gap year on advice from their school counsellors because they were looking at the existing legislation. They also got advice from parents and Centrelink. The coalition’s proposed amendment will let this group continue on the path they were promised.

Many rural and regional students in my electorate will find it harder to attend university with the removal of the workforce participation for youth allowance eligibility as an independent. These students will have to move to the city in pursuit of higher education, therefore incurring additional living costs that students from the city who are attending do not carry. It may not be an option for these students to rely financially on their parents as many rural and regional families are feeling the effects of drought, especially farming families. Some of the rural and regional students that come from farming families may also be deemed ineligible as youth allowance dependants due to the value of their families’ farms exceeding that required as to the level of assets in the test. So they are getting squeezed from every direction.

Their families do not have the thousands of dollars needed to set up their children in the city with suitable accommodation and to help with living expenses. These students would have been able to gain eligibility under the workforce participation route of earning $19,532 within an 18-month period, but the government is seeking to abolish this criterion. One of the problems with the new criterion of 30 hours a week for at least 18 months in a two-year period is that these sorts of employment positions are not available in many parts of my electorate and in rural electorates all around Australia. They are simply not available, so that criterion will be absolutely meaningless. What an employer is going to say is this: ‘We’ll employ this person for 18 months but we know they are going to leave, so it’s bad luck. We want someone who is going to stay in the area and keep working for us. We want to invest in that person’s future because they have got the loyalty to stay around.’ So that option is going to be taken away from a lot of rural students.

In small pockets of my electorate I have been able to get medical studies up and running, in Renmark and in Mount Gambier. That is only a very small part of the education at universities, but I welcome that. The previous speaker, the member for Herbert, representing the seat of Townsville, has said he has the same sort of thing up there. They have been great and there is a much greater chance that those students when they become doctors will actually come back and work in rural areas, which is what we want. But the criteria that the government is putting up are going to make it almost impossible for parents, except for the very rich, to support their students going to university if they have to shift home. We already have a lower participation rate at university by country students than by city students. That is not because they are dumber; it is because it is so much harder for rural students to go to university because of the extra cost.

The government proposes that the only option for these students is to work full time for 18 months in a two-year period, which means that these students would have to find employment that equates to 30 hours per week in rural communities. As I said, that is not very easy. It is not achievable for many students as on leaving school they have limited skills and are not able to fill all available positions. Many rural and regional areas have only a few avenues of employment for a school leaver to fill, and hours may not be guaranteed for 18 months or may only be seasonal—that is the way of rural life. Most rural and regional communities in my electorate do not have endless amounts of fast-food outlets, shopping centres and the like where school leavers can seek employment and possibly receive traineeships and guaranteed hours. In fact, there are only three towns in my electorate that have fast-food outlets: Murray Bridge, Mount Gambier and Renmark—and there are about 400 kilometres between each of them, so there is a lot a space in between where students do not have that option. It is time that the government treated these students fairly and offered them a level playing field with their city counterparts.

The coalition realise that it is equally as important for rural and regional students to attend university and have the help that they required to get settled away from home. We were doing that. We needed to do more, but we were doing that. In fact, under the Howard government we offered Commonwealth scholarships that assisted students with relocation. Regrettably, the Rudd government abolished this, as they have done with much important funding for rural and regional Australia. The coalition’s proposal is that these students that are not eligible for youth allowance be offered a rural and regional scholarship program worth $120 million to help them relocate to the city and attend university. This is the sort of positive enforcement that rural and regional students deserve to help them get on their way to higher education. We as a coalition are not saying we should pay all the expenses, but we should at least give them some help. The scholarships that we had in place amounted to about $5,500, perhaps $6,000 in today’s terms. That is probably, on average, about half the cost of living away from home for 12 months, but at least it would be a help. Parents and students would know they would be able to get through some of the hard times with that sort of help.

I want to encourage rural and regional students to seek higher education if they want it and I want to see them achieve this without being disadvantaged because they have to leave home. The coalition proposes amendments that will pave a clearer path for these students rather than hinder them, as the Labor government has done. I am proud to represent a rural and regional electorate. I have been passionate about this issue from the start of my term as a member of parliament and I will be there for these students until the government cuts them a fairer deal.

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