Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening with great concerns. I support everything said by my colleagues on this side of the House. It is untenable that we should be confronted at almost the last moment, in my opinion, with this imposition of a limitation of $150,000 of household taxable income for students wanting to attend tertiary institutions. Students who fall outside that limit are to be denied access to independent youth allowance. It goes against the grain.

Has anyone in government, even from the Labor side of politics, ever suggested that a student’s access to HECS be means tested? No, they have not. Whether you are from a wealthy family or from a very poor battling family, no-one has suggested that you not be entitled to access HECS. When we have devised this independent youth allowance, why should a student that has qualified to be independent suddenly be saddled with the imposition of the income of their parents? Why should my students from families living in Port Hedland and Karratha where both parents are forced to work because rents are somewhere in the vicinity of $2,000 a week and the disposable income is on a par with the disposable income of families living in metropolitan areas be denied the opportunity to qualify for independent youth allowance and have an income whilst they relocate to a capital city to attend a tertiary institution?

It is an untenable proposition. I believe the minister has not realised the consequences of such an imposition. My students in Karratha, Port Hedland and in the remote areas of Western Australia are hardly living in the leafy suburbs of any of our capital cities. They are living some 1,600 to 2,000 kilometres from a suitable institution. It is not an easy move to shop in the city. It is not an easy move to take up opportunities such as are offered by large populations as far as cost-of-living reductions are concerned. These students need to be able to qualify to receive the independent youth allowance and paddle their own canoes independent of their families. That is what I thought independent youth allowance was all about. Now we are suddenly being confronted with a situation where the minister decides if your parents earn too much. We are moving here into the politics of envy, I am sure. This policy, I suggest, is just to appease Labor voters and for it to be seen that the Labor minister is doing something to stop these incredibly wealthy people from having their children attend tertiary institutions with assistance from the government.

The whole thing is based on the fallacy that $150,000 for a household taxable income in the Pilbara is somehow some vast amount. Labourers are being paid nearly $100,000 a year and out of that is a margin that allows them to live and save. Is this minister denying students from those sorts of families the opportunity for any government assistance to attend tertiary institutions? The whole situation is untenable. This government, I thought, operated in the interests of all people. I would not have expected them to promote policies that distinguish between one sector of the community and another. Surely our children, our future, have a right to be treated as individuals, especially if they are going to have a crack at qualifying for an independent youth allowance. But they cannot apply for that because they are being saddled with a classification according to their parents’ income. To have a situation where we are demanding more and more professional people move to the country and operate and not have the opportunity—(Time expired)

See this speech in context