Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

In May last year the opposition first raised its very real concerns about the government’s reforms to youth allowance and the Commonwealth scholarships, which subsequently became a problem because of the mishandling of this matter by the Minister for Education in abolishing the Commonwealth scholarships before she had replaced them with the new scholarships. We raised these problems in May, we raised them throughout the last calendar year, and right through to the end of the year the minister refused to negotiate with the opposition. I think this was under the misapprehension that somehow the opposition was not committed to its decision and its position of supporting rural and regional students in particular and removing retrospectivity as a fundamental principle.

We did stick to our guns throughout the entire year. The minister refused to discuss this with us, in spite of the many offers I made to meet with her. I told her my door was open and I would be happy to speak to her last year between about August and December. At no stage did the minister make any effort at all to speak to the opposition. That is why we are still here, in March, with students missing out on their scholarships and missing out on their improved youth allowance. It is because the government did not negotiate. We asked for three things. We asked for all retrospectivity to be removed from this bill. We asked for a pathway to higher education to be included in this legislation for people from rural, regional and remote Australia, who are already a disadvantaged group in terms of higher education and would have been more disadvantaged by the government’s changes. We also proposed a savings measure to pay for those amendments that was to reduce the start-up scholarships by whatever cost was necessary in order for this change to be budget-neutral. In February the minister said that that was impossible. All of those changes were utterly impossible. They were out of the question; they simply could not be done.

Something changed between February and March—it might perhaps have been the new interest and heightened view of the Deputy Prime Minister as the replacement for the Prime Minister—and in March this year the minister decided that in fact these seemingly impossible changes were all utterly doable. We met twice last week and got impossible changes apparently accepted and now doable. As a consequence, this bill has been amended in the Senate to remove all retrospectivity and to ensure that there is a pathway to higher education for students from rural, remote and regional Australia in three of the categories that the ABS uses to determine remoteness, and we believe the government could have gone further and should have gone further. We have committed, if we are elected at the end of this year, to reviewing the entire youth allowance from the ground up to ensure that there is a proper pathway for students from regional areas. The coalition achieved this—not the member for Flynn, not the member for Dawson, not the member for Braddon, not the member for Capricornia, not the member for Bendigo, not the member for Ballarat, not the member for Leichhardt. None of the Labor members stood up for their constituents.

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