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

I will, Mr Deputy Speaker, but that is an example of why Labor are failing students in my area. They just fail to understand the drivers for early school leaving, failure to be employed, teenage pregnancies and incarceration rates of adolescents, all of which are part of an extraordinary environment of disadvantage. This bill, I am sad to say, does not home in on the very serious issues of structural disadvantage that are now affecting much of regional Australia. That is why I stress those statistics.

For example, since 2006 more than 50 per cent of the dairy farmers have exited the industry in the Goulburn-Murray region. They all had children. They had small schools that the local dairy community supported. There were 50 children in those schools; now there are 10 or the school has closed. A school with three teachers can offer better educational alternatives and options than a school with one teacher, but this is what is happening in the declining populations in rural and regional Australia, particularly in northern Victoria. At the Heinz factory, 146 jobs were lost and went to New Zealand. At SPC Ardmona in Mooroopna, part of Coca-Cola Amatil, another 150 jobs were lost. Rochester Murray-Goulburn has lost all of those jobs.

The problem is that our school students once aspired to work in local manufacturing and local agribusiness. They now, quite reasonably, feel they will have to look for alternative occupations and have to train elsewhere. But I am saying that we should have those training options right there in those rural and regional communities.

This bill does not give me much hope that we are going to see funds directed to better regional funding models. It does not give me any hope that our rural and regional teachers will receive better career counselling support so they can direct our students to alternative occupations in agriculture and food manufacturing. When I look at this bill, I think to myself: it is purely a feel-good set of motherhood statements. It should have really driven into the growing distance between the life experiences of metropolitan Australians and rural Australians. It should have looked at the disadvantage that we know exists with Indigenous students. It should have looked at the life experience now of so many refugees, who settle in a place like northern Victoria only to find that the schools do not offer support in English as a second language and the towns do not offer parents the sort of work they would have had even five years ago.

So I am not saying this bill is fantastic. I am saying that the goals expressed in the bill are fine, but the detail is missing. In fact, I wonder if the heart is missing from Labor when it comes to looking beyond the tram tracks and beyond its own electorates. When will you look at rural and regional Australia and understand that the people living there are Australian citizens too? Without decent education they cannot realise their genuine life prospects or opportunities, and that is just not fair.

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