Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Higher Education Support Amendment (No. 1) Bill 2011 seeks to streamline measures to the Higher Education Support Act 2003 by simplifying administrative arrangements for VET providers and managing provider risk. We need to ensure that quality providers apply for and are able to offer income-contingent loans to students in the form of VET FEE-HELP. This bill is intended to increase access to the VET FEE-HELP, which of course, if you are able to gain this help, removes some of the financial barriers to higher education—I stress 'some' of the barriers.

It is a concern of both this government and the opposition that there seems to be much more potential to increase the numbers of students taking up VET FEE-HELP, and it is a concern for me personally that rural and regional students are under-represented when it comes to undertaking either tertiary education or vocational education and training options. A lot of that, as we know from our research and surveys, is to do with the costs of leaving home to study, so there is not much point in just offering help with fees at your university, TAFE or registered training organisation if in fact you cannot afford to feed yourself or pay the rent when it comes to living away from home to undertake that course.

In 2007, income-contingent loans were extended to the VET sector to ensure that students wishing to pursue a trade or vocation were provided with financial assistance similar to that on offer to university students through the old HECS, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. The intention of FEE-HELP and VET FEE-HELP was to ensure greater equity between students in the tertiary sector and those studying for a vocational qualification. Why should there be any difference or discrimination between students guiding themselves into those different career pathways? After all, the incomes for those who undertake a trade qualification may be much higher than for those who complete a tertiary degree or postgraduate study. Certainly in our community you cannot argue that one career is of greater value to the economy or the community than another. So it is, I think, very important that we have equity of access to government funded support between those who go into the tertiary sector and those who go into the vocational streams. VET FEE-HELP loans were introduced by the then coalition government, and the coalition has remained and is today strongly supportive of the program.

FEE-HELP is available to eligible full-fee-paying higher education students, and VET FEE-HELP is available to eligible full-fee-paying and certain state-government-subsidised VET students who are studying in higher level education or training. It provides a loan for all or part of a student's tuition costs. Under FEE-HELP you can borrow up to the amount of the tuition fee being charged by your provider for your study. However, over your lifetime you can borrow only up to the FEE-HELP limit. Eligible people may borrow up to the FEE-HELP limit to pay tuition fees over their lifetime. In 2011 the FEE-HELP limit was $86,422, unless a person was undertaking medicine, dentistry or veterinary science which led to an initial registration as a medical practitioner, dentist, vet or veterinary surgeon. If they are in those areas of work, the FEE-HELP limit is increased to $108,029, and of course FEE-HELP is indexed on 1 January each year.

VET FEE-HELP is a student loan scheme for the VET sector that is part of the Higher Education Loan Program, or HELP. VET FEE-HELP assists eligible students to undertake certain VET courses of study, diplomas, advanced diplomas, graduate certificates and graduate diploma courses with an approved VET provider by paying all or part of the course. Students are required to repay their loan once their income exceeds the minimum repayment level of $44,911 for 2011.

The problem I alluded to in my opening remarks is that, regrettably, too few students are accessing VET FEE-HELP. DEEWR figures show that in 2009 only 5,262 students received income-contingent loans under the VET FEE-HELP scheme. They are the most recent figures; we do not have figures since 2009, which is in itself a problem, and I have to wonder why we do not have more recent figures. Only 50 registered training organisations, or RTOs—including 20 TAFEs—were eligible to offer their students VET FEE-HELP. Victoria, my home state, had the highest number of approved VET providers at 27, and 18 of those were TAFEs.

Unfortunately, the Northern Territory and Tasmania had no approved VET providers in 2009. This has to be of great concern to the communities of Tasmania and the Northern Territory, where there are skills gaps and enormous shortages of tradesmen and tradeswomen and where the costs of leaving to study elsewhere are very substantial. We need to do detailed work to understand why we have a shortage of RTOs, or indeed TAFEs, in those places. Governments need to consider the circumstances of places like the Northern Territory and Tasmania because the future skills availability in those parts of Australia is a major problem. Given that there is a great deal of unemployment in those areas, as well as skills shortages, we must do better when it comes to assisting students to access these income contingent loans.

In 2009, 5,262 students accessed VET FEE-HELP, as I said, including 78 Indigenous Australian students—just 1.5 per cent. I am very pleased that 78 students with an Indigenous background were able to access this assistance, but clearly there is enormous scope for additional Indigenous students to access trades and vocational education in areas like Northern Australia where their proportion of the population is way above 1.5 per cent. I have to say that 788 students who accessed VET FEE-HELP were from regional and remote areas, only 15 per cent of the total, and there were only 890 students of low socioeconomic status, or 17 per cent. Clearly this potential assistance to students is not being used effectively. We have a long way to go before a student can rule out the cost of their fees being a barrier to them going from their year 12 studies onto a pathway for their preferred career.

The On Track report of 2010—and I am referring here to the Goulburn-Murray Local Learning and Employment Network, or GMLLEN—found that a substantial number of completers, some 25.1 per cent of year 12 or equivalent completers, were not in education or training. Some 19 per cent of them were employed either full or part time, which left us with a significant number who were looking for work but were unemployed. There was another one per cent not in the labour force, education or training. I find it very sad that at the end of year 12 a significant number of our students are not stepping immediately into a career or into education and training, particularly in rural and regional areas where the costs of living can be substantial and the costs of going to be educated elsewhere are substantial. We have to do better and make sure there is not a two-speed economy—one where, in a metropolitan area, you can access education easily and the costs are diminished because you can live at home, and the other where students may only be two or three hours away from a capital city or a big regional centre, as in my electorate, but where students are constrained and substantially discriminated against when it comes to access to a career through further education and training.

We found deferral of tertiary studies was much more common for VET in Schools participants from rural areas—11.7 per cent compared with 7.1 per cent in metropolitan locations. Why is it that we have almost double the number of students deferring in rural areas compared to metropolitan areas? The answer, again, is pretty simple—it is about costs. I guess the government has been waiting for me to raise the issue of independent youth allowance. This has been one of the biggest problems, compared to any other factor, affecting the capacity of rural and regional students to take up tertiary studies. This also extends into the VET sector, where you do not have big TAFEs offering a range of courses within commuting distance of your home. If you cannot afford the $20,000 or so to live away from home then you simply defer your studies and, despite your offer, try and get work and try and match, if you are in the inner region, the new criteria that this government is insisting upon. But, of course, those new criteria for the inner regions make it impossible for you to gain independent youth allowance.

When you have nearly double the number of students deferring from rural and regional areas, the tragedy is that as each year of deferral goes by the proportion who do take up studies again diminishes drastically. It is a very serious problem right throughout northern Victoria, where we have the lowest rates of enrolment in bachelor degrees, particularly in the Hume region. Only 31 per cent, or less than a third of students, in the Hume region of Victoria are enrolling in bachelor degrees. That is slightly below the Gippsland region at 31.3 per cent.

Compared to any other developed country, I would suggest that, if only less than a third of the population from a rural or regional area only two or three hours from a capital city like Melbourne is enrolling in university courses, we have a serious policy problem. It is a policy problem which should be addressing the costs of having to leave home to study, and this debate we are having today is in part driven by the fact that we have not enough uptake of VET FEE-HELP. Of course, we have had numerous debates in the House and in this committee chamber about the policy failures in relation to independent youth allowance.

A nation is as good as its next generation of skilled people; it is about human capital. If we fail to invest in education—whether it is for a trade, a skilled occupation or a university occupation—and fail to give our students that opportunity then we can expect to fall further and further behind in productivity for our nation and in our competitiveness compared to those that we try and keep step with in terms of our own domestic economy and in our exporting. While we of course support the administrative changes that this bill is ushering in—after all, as a coalition we were the architects of a program to bring VET students into the mix when it came to fee assistance—we are concerned that not enough students are taking up this option, that there are very limited options for students in the Northern Territory and Tasmania.

I am hugely concerned, as a rural and regional member, at the declining rates of participation in higher education in my local rural population. We have a very serious problem with our own socioeconomic status in northern Victoria. After seven years of drought, a flood and the impacts of government policy in relation to water access, we have families who are getting more and more stressed financially. We need this support for our students to have a chance in a career of choice and in a career which will add to the value and the wealth of the nation.

It is therefore the situation that I support this bill but I condemn this government for not understanding the proper policy initiatives that are needed to do away with the discriminations that currently exist between metropolitan student access and rural student access to higher education and training. We cannot have enormous numbers of deferrals—in fact, double the number of deferrals—for year 12 students when you compare metropolitan and non-metropolitan uptake. I mentioned those figures before. We cannot have the situation where students have to walk away from a training opportunity because their families cannot afford to pay for their being and studying away from home. That is a nation that is squandering the human capital that we depend on for our futures.

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