Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Highly unlikely—because they are very good at saying one thing before an election and another thing after an election, but it would be good to see a little bit of consistency in approach, and it would be good to see that incredible excitement about what we are offering, because it is very, very important for our young people.

As we have seen recently, youth unemployment in this nation is an issue that we need to address. It is over 13 per cent; it is more than double the national average. It is an issue that we need to focus in on and target. What we are doing with these reforms—and, in particular, what we are doing when it comes to providing HECS and HELP into the tertiary sector—is a significant development in helping us address that youth unemployment problem.

As we know, if we can have our young people either earning or learning then that is the best way that we can ensure future paths into proper employment which will give them the type of start in life that they need to make sure that they can lead fulfilling lives—and this is what these reforms will do.

These reforms will also help those students from regional and rural areas and those from low-socioeconomic areas by giving them the chance to be able to afford to go to university. So the scholarship system which has been set up has been deliberately set up to mean that those students from low-socioeconomic areas and from regional and rural areas can afford to go to higher education—another significant aspect of these reforms.

I will also take a moment to note here that the government is going to look, when it comes to rural and regional students in particular, at dealing with the costs associated with having to move to take up a higher education place. Both the Minister for Employment and the Minister for Education have had a working group, chaired by Senator McKenzie, that has been grappling with this issue. The Labor Party made draconian changes to the independent youth allowance. Fortunately, after a lot of community unease and protest about those changes, that draconian decision was overturned, but they still did not go far enough in fixing and addressing this issue.

The Minister for Employment and the Minister for Education have committed to looking at this issue—how parents deal with the costs of sending students to get an education in rural and regional areas—which is so vital to rural and regional students. That is a major development and I look forward to the task force that has been set up in this area reporting back with options that the government can take forward and which will be another component of these important reforms that are here before the House this morning.

In conclusion, I just want to reiterate once again how important the higher education system is to the social wellbeing of our nation and to the economic wellbeing of our nation. I want to reiterate that our higher education system in Australia no longer operates in a vacuum; it operates in a globalised world. It must compete. It must innovate. It must do everything it can to attract students. It must do everything it can to make sure that the degrees that they are offering are the best in the world; if they do not, Australia will be all the poorer for it.

What we inherited was a system which was broken. It was a demand-driven system that did not deregulate the fee base. You cannot have a demand-driven system where government is cutting funding out of the system—and that is what the previous Labor government did—because all you do is cripple your higher education system. We want to unshackle it. We want to free it. We want to give it the opportunity to be the best higher education system in the world. This will enable us in rural and regional areas to expand the higher education presence and the higher education footprint around the country. If you compare our higher education system to that of the US and the UK, ours is predominantly based in capital cities while those in other countries are spread right across those countries, and in rural and regional areas in particular.

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