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

I rise today to speak on the appropriations bills, particularly Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2010-2011, because I want to revisit the subject of the youth allowance changes the government has made over the last 12 months. I will just give the House a potted history. The House would remember that the government introduced changes, which the opposition opposed, to the independent youth allowance some time ago. We held out against those changes for a good 12 months and then, finally, struck an agreement with the government to ensure that money flowed to students in rural and regional areas who might otherwise not have been able to access tertiary education because of their financial circumstances. We said at the time that we believed that the government had not gone far enough, particularly in including inner regional students in the new criteria—in fact, the old criteria which became the new criteria we had agreed with the government. We said at that time that we would be revisiting the subject and, in fact, Senator Nash put forward a motion in the Senate to highlight the plight of inner regional students.

If you then fast forward to more recent history, the Senate passed the Social Security Amendment (Income Support for Regional Students) Bill 2010, sponsored by Fiona Nash, which would have allowed inner regional students access to the old criteria for youth allowance, which in turn would have meant that money would have been able to flow to thousands of students who would not otherwise have been able to access tertiary education. That bill was transferred to the lower house and members might remember that, last Monday in the House of Representatives, we had a debate about that very bill. The opposition’s view was that we could consider and pass the bill and that it would then be up to the government to present it to the Governor-General.

The government, under the great pressure that the opposition were applying, struck a deal with the Independents. That deal, from what we could gather, was to agree to a review of the independent rate of the youth allowance, that review to commence on 1 July with new guidelines to apply from 1 January 2012. The very strong impression that the Independents had was that they had struck a deal with the government that would include inner regional students, allowing funds to flow to those students. There were tumultuous scenes in the House of Representatives when the government realised that the opposition had the votes to carry, or at least to achieve consideration of, the opposition’s youth allowance bill in the House of Representatives. At that point, the Leader of the House inveigled the member for Lyne to leave the chamber to go into the Chief Government Whip’s office to meet with the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. He emerged only to vote against an amendment that he had already seconded and spoken in favour of in the debate in the previous two hours.

Clearly, as far as the member for Lyne was concerned, he had a deal with the government that satisfied him that inner regional students would be catered for. In fact, the Independents went out of the House—one of the Independents is in the House today—and indicated that they had had a breakthrough win. They indicated that they had a deal with the government that meant they did not have to vote to consider the opposition bill and did not have to vote to pass that bill because the government had heard their concerns and inner regional students were to be taken care of.

So you can imagine the shock in the opposition when the minister for tertiary education, Senator Evans, said in estimates on Thursday:

The answer isn’t as some people seem to think … from the 1 January next year inner regional students will get the same conditions as outer regional students and they will be the same ones as the ones that exist currently …

This quote makes it absolutely clear that what really happened last Monday was that the Independents—present company excepted—were duped into believing that they had a deal that would cover the concerns of inner regional students and the Independents voted in the House of Representatives—almost all of them—with the government to ensure that the government did not have to consider the Senate bill and therefore not vote on it. They did so on a false premise.

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