John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the amendment to the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Election Commitments and Other Measures) Bill 2011. You just heard the comment made that this is a social issue and an equity issue. It is also an issue about the future of regional Australia. It is a very well-known fact that when Australian kids go to a place like the UK they have no trouble getting a job, because their work ethic is recognised. It is also a well-known fact that when country kids go to the city they have no trouble getting a job in Australia, because their work ethic is recognised. We do not have a problem in the bush and regional Australia about having kids with a work ethic and the desire to use it. But we do have a problem in that the professionals we need and who we retain—the medical profession in particular—tend to be the ones who were born and grew up there.

Most of the occupations to which I refer require further education after year 12 in high school. By and large, they cannot get that in regional Australia. It is a very real issue, even in an electorate like mine is now—almost small, as opposed to before; it is a mere 30,000 square kilometres—which does have a university at Bathurst and various outreaches. The chances are that even in that area either students cannot get into the course they want to do or the course does not exist where they want to do it.

As you have heard others say, the Prime Minister only backed down on the youth allowance in the outer regional and more remote areas of Australia when she had no choice politically. What is the difference from living in Cobar and having to travel to Sydney? You still have to live away from home. They are great people in Cobar; I know them very well. However, if you live in Orange, Bathurst, Lithgow, Forbes or Parkes the chances are that you will not be able to do your tertiary education locally unless you are lucky enough to get into Bathurst—and most cannot. You have to go to Armidale, Canberra, Sydney or one of the other universities in Australia. You certainly cannot go there and live at home. So I am rather puzzled as to why—quite correctly—the decision was made that the more remote areas should have the old system applied of one year in which you had the opportunity to earn the $15,000 when those who live in what is now termed as ‘inner regional’ do not.

It is extraordinarily important for our future and for the ability of regional Australia to stand on its own two feet and not to have up to 45 per cent of our doctors foreigners brought in; not to have professionals from outside; and not to have to go away when you need to get a medical service done.

Mr Deputy Speaker, you just heard my colleague make comments about thanking people for what they do. I remember when the original Senate inquiry was held; four students from Orange and Cowra gave evidence to that Senate inquiry. They had never done anything like that before, and these were kids who were still at school. I have never seen a school community—teachers, parents and students, including ones who had already left school—combine on an issue like it in my life. I have never had so many calls on an issue from desperate and frightened parents in my life. The need for their children, and for their own community, to get that extra education, university opportunity or whatever is just enormous. I keep coming back to the fact that if you have to leave home then you have to leave home. Quite correctly, outer regional areas have that ability now to have the one-year gap and not to lose their places as the two-year gap does, making it almost impossible for them.

I am totally puzzled as to how any bureaucrat or politician could sit there and say, ‘The outer regional people have to leave home but the inner regional people do not’—of course they have to leave home. It is a very real and serious matter. It is not as though most of them can leave home and go to the regional universities that are easier and cheaper to live in; to do things like medicine there is absolutely impossible. They have to go to the metropolitan areas.

I think this is simply an issue of fairness. The cost of children going that distance is just prohibitive. Australia needs the people who probably have the best work ethic of any young people in the whole country. They come from an area where they totally know and expect it—as most do. In country Australia it is just accepted that that is what you do. We should give those people the opportunity to have the education to be whatever we and their communities need them to be. I always say when I go to schools, ‘Go away, as you have to finish your education and your training—but come home to practise it.’ It is the kids who are born out there who will come home to practise it, but mostly they cannot obtain the qualification that they need, that we need, that the community needs, that regional Australia needs and that the whole of Australia needs them to have.

It is an issue about the future of regional Australia. It is an issue of justice. I can only say to the previous Minister for Education, the current Prime Minister, that this is not something that will go away. It is not something that all those people who believe so strongly in it will let die. It is something that is incredibly necessary. Please think about this from the point of view of the people who live out there.

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