Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I believe that supporting our younger generations to access higher education is one of the great investments we can make in our future. At a very personal level, this is an issue I care about deeply. I was a country kid who was lucky enough to go away to university and do three degrees. As for so many other country kids, that was an opportunity that was life changing, and I want to see that passed on to the next generation of children growing up in the bush.

I have also been involved with one of the residential colleges at the University of Sydney that, in recent years, has given out millions of dollars in scholarships to kids wanting to go to university to give them every opportunity to participate in education at one of the world's leading universities.

The benefits of education to country communities cannot be overstated. Not only is access to good education life changing, it can be absolutely transformative for the communities themselves. It fosters leadership, it encourages enterprise and innovation, it brings new skills to a region and, importantly, it helps keep our country towns vibrant and viable. It is true that many of these people who go off to study outside their home town may not come back, but many do come back. Whilst it might not happen immediately, it certainly happens over time. For too long, though, rural students, including many from my own electorate of Hume, have been disadvantaged when it comes to accessing government support while they are studying. That is why I am so supportive of this bill.

What is the problem we are trying to solve here? As a country, we know that education is central to prosperity and to innovation, but we need to confront the relatively low tertiary education levels in rural areas. My colleague Senator Bridget McKenzie has been a very strong advocate of these changes in her own quest to ensure that regional students get fairer access to education. She showed me some ABS figures from 2011 showing how regional and remote areas account for just 21 per cent of domestic undergraduate higher education enrolments. These students also tend to have lower year 12 completion rates than city students, which often affects aspirations. Not only are enrolments lower, as I said, but completions are lower. We saw this in a Joining the Dots briefing released this year from the Australian Council for Educational Research which found that 74 per cent of all students who commenced university in 2005 had completed but for regional students the completion rate was only 69 per cent and for remote students it was 60 per cent. It was even lower for Indigenous students. So we can see a strong correlation between completion rates and where students come from. At the same time, we know that youth unemployment and underemployment is unacceptably high in parts of regional Australia and in parts of my electorate. We know that with younger people the problem is not just unemployment, which is sitting at 14 per cent and higher, but also underemployment, which is not always as clear from the figures.

Why do we have this problem in rural areas? In a national tertiary access research survey conducted by the Isolated Children's Parents' Association in 2013, 93 per cent of members found the cost of tertiary education for their children was a huge challenge. The cost is a huge challenge. More than half of the families surveyed were living 500 to 2,000 kilometres from the nearest university offering the required course. The expense of tertiary study is not the study itself and this is a mistake that is often made. People think the real issue is the cost of the university tuition. It is not; it is the living expenses, which most kids or their families struggle to afford.

The Deferring a University Offer in Victoria report last year concluded that financial stresses and travel-related costs are the biggest barriers for rural and regional students. University of Melbourne researcher Professor John Polesel says, 'Factors such as money, university location, travelling long distances and a desire to stay at home are more likely to affect non-metropolitan students.' Hear, hear to that! We know that is absolutely right. Under existing legislation for accessing youth allowance, students from the bush often need to work a few jobs to make ends meet, leaving little time to study. They also find it harder to secure part time work after re-locating.

The pressure of the work-study overload is often too much for some students who withdraw from study and move home to work or find a full-time job before completing their tertiary qualifications. That accounts for the lower completion rates which I talked about earlier. Until now, students from rural and regional areas have endured a significant handicap as their city-based contemporaries often have the benefit of completing their tertiary studies while living at home with their parents.

So what are we doing about it? The government recognises the need to make it easier and fairer for country students to access youth income payments so they can complete their studies. As a government and as a nation we are committed to supporting productivity gains and innovation. This means removing those barriers to vocational and university study and supporting our young people to develop their skills. We know that there is a strong link between tertiary study and expansive employment opportunities and that it is much more pronounced in rural and regional areas.

This amendment bill provides more generous means testing for youth payments and will enable more generous and consistent support for families with dependent young people who qualify for certain youth income support payments. Among some of the very welcome changes is the removal of the family assets test and the family actual means test from the youth allowance parental means test arrangements. This will mean that farm assets are not counted towards the means test for their dependent children who are claiming youth allowance.

Removing the family assets test for youth allowance will allow around 4,100 additional dependent youth allowance claimants to qualify for the first time. They will access average annual payments of more than $7,000 a year. Removing the family actual means test will see around 1,200 more people receiving youth allowance for the first time and that will also mean increasing payments for around 4,860 existing students by approximately $2,000 a year. The bill is focused on boosting assistance for working families, particularly in rural and regional areas. With a financial commitment from the government of $263 million over the forward estimates, the bill will bring extra support to some 30,000 families as their children move into young adulthood.

To qualify for youth allowance, many rural students, especially those from farms, defer their study and work for a year or two to qualify for independence from their families. For farming families, part of the reason for this is that family farms were considered in the means test for dependent children. By removing that test, we can send a message to rural students that we want them to acquire new skills, expertise and training. From my own perspective, I hope those skills and expertise flow back to the bush.

I want to say a couple of things about the importance of creating jobs as part of this. We hear often that, with the burgeoning number of people going on to tertiary education, particularly to university, we are struggling to find work for all of them, particularly work that is relevant to the study they have done. Through complementary social services legislation, the government is introducing a series of measures to encourage job service providers and job seekers to comply with mutual service obligations and most importantly to help them to get into work quickly.

There is a very simple story as to what drives jobs growth. There is the demand side and the supply side and there is matching the two together. On the demand side, the key is to control government consumption and to strongly encourage investment. For instance, just outside my electorate tens of thousands of jobs will come from the construction phase of Badgerys Creek airport, the EIS for which was released a few weeks ago. Depending on how the redistribution unfolds, that may ultimately be part of the newly formed electorate of Hume. We understand the demand side of the economy does not need a jobs plan; what it needs is good, hard-headed economics and a very strong focus on investment and driving infrastructure investment from the public sector.

The supply side and the matching is all about getting potential employees into a position where they can find work and they have the skills to do that work. It is partly about industrial relations, but it is also about welfare and the job search system. That is exactly what we are focused on in much of the work the government is doing. Many of the researchers and experts in labour market economics tell us that the unemployment benefit system and job search system are absolutely crucial in influencing unemployment and getting people into work. This is particularly so for countries with a relatively generous level of benefit, like Australia.

We are investing $5 billion in employment services to better meet the needs of job seekers, employers and employment providers. Our real objective is to promote strong workforce participation by people of working age and to help more job seekers move from welfare to work. To do that we are providing much stronger incentives for employment providers to deliver high-quality services. Part of that is paying them for outcomes, which would seem like an eminently sensible thing to do but was not part of the previous setup. We are also seeking to take away a lot of the red tape from employment providers—they have been wrapped in red tape up until now. Much of the training we are looking to do through the employment service providers is much more targeted and we are not seeking to do training for training's sake.

Job seekers need to understand that our system requires mutual obligation—they have to do their bit—and we are simplifying and extending the mutual obligation framework to ensure job seekers remain actively engaged while looking for work. It is not about box ticking; it has to be far more fundamental than that.

The government's new jobactive program and related programs are providing real assistance to people looking for meaningful work. I was recently at Young meeting with a group of local people who had signed up for one of a number of local Work for the Dole projects. Work for the Dole is being run through jobactive providers. At Young, the jobactive providers include the Salvation Army, MBC, Max Employment and Employment Services Group. The Work for the Dole team at the Young showground has been doing a tremendous job fixing up showground buildings and grounds, preparing the grounds ahead of the recent show—which was a huge success. Much of the work on the grounds that led up to this most recent show was being done by this Work for the Dole group.

One of the participants, Cassandra Gendle, who has been on the team since August, said she has 'learnt a lot and is getting a lot more confident working around other people'. That is a great endorsement. Team leader Mick Alexander said he is seeing a lot of positives from the project—including teamwork, mateship, self-pride and higher self-esteem for participants. Jobactive is all about delivering outcomes, not just ticking boxes, and I am really backing it.

Returning to the bill before the chamber, country families are all too familiar with the reality that a good education is often about leaving home, and personal family sacrifices are made to make that happen. My wife, Louise, and I have become strong supporters of the Country Education Foundation of Australia. It does invaluable work helping disadvantaged rural students access grants and scholarships. The work of the CEFA is an investment in the future of rural and regional Australia. It is a model of locally based grants, and it is proof of the sound return on investment when it comes to supporting rural students.

In 1993 a group of people from Boorowa got together to support and encourage their school leavers to pursue tertiary education. They started raising funds, and in the first year raised $5,000 and provided scholarships to five students. The idea soon spread to the nearby communities of Yass, Cowra and Harden, all towns in the Hume electorate. In 2003 the foundation went national and it has since grown to a network of more than 40 local education foundations across Australia.

This year CEFA has given out over 400 grants—nearly half a million dollars. CEFA is funded through private and corporate philanthropy and receives no government funding. Research by Social Ventures Australia indicates that, for every dollar invested, a social return of $3.10 is generated. That is an extraordinary return on investment. This bill, similarly, is a downpayment on our nation's future. It is about boosting assistance for working families, particularly in rural and regional areas. It is about better supporting young people into study, to build their careers, develop economic opportunities and contribute to our economy across Australia and particularly in regional areas. I absolutely commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context