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

I too rise to support the Social Services Legislation Amendment (More Generous Means Testing for Youth Payments) Bill 2015. In fact, this is legislative change that I have advocated for for a very long time. We have had workshops; we have had demonstrations; we have had our young students signing petitions; we have had them meeting in the mall in the city of greater Shepparton—all arguing that it is not fair that rural and regional students—who have to pay so much more to live away from home for tertiary education—should be held back because the legislation did not properly reflect their family's circumstances. They have been denied the support that metropolitan students receive by virtue of their families living near the tram tracks or living a short distance away from the place they need to attend for their education.

This bill introduces one of the changes outlined in the 2015 budget and it is going to provide much better support for our young people. The aim is to align the parental means-testing arrangements for youth allowance with the arrangements for family tax benefit part A. The changes will in particular remove a family assets test and the family actual means test from the youth allowance means-testing arrangements starting from 1 January next year. They will align the parental income test exemptions for youth allowance with current arrangements for family tax benefit part A, and that will also occur from 1 January 2016.

The changes will not include maintenance income paid to parents in the youth allowance parental income test assessment from 1 January 2016. The changes will introduce a new maintenance income test as part of the youth allowance parental income test to assess child support paid to a parent from 1 January 2017. The changes will include all dependent children who qualify for family tax benefit in the family pool for youth allowance parental income test not just those children who are senior secondary schoolchildren aged 16 or more, and that will commence from 1 January 2016.

These changes to the family assets and income assessment are going to mean in particular that people in rural areas will have a better chance to access higher education in Australia. Removing the family assets test will allow around 4,100 additional dependent youth allowances for young people to qualify for the first time. Around 1,200 families from regional and remote areas will be eligible for an increase in payment by the removal of the family actual means test. They are also expected to benefit from the removal of the family assets test.

In addition, these measures will also increase the payments for around 4,860 existing students by approximately $2,000 extra per year. That is very important. We estimate it costs a rural student on average about $20,000 to live away from home. That is in addition of course to the fees and charges and equipment that other students will also pay. If you have more than one family member in tertiary study, you can imagine how that soon mounts up to a situation where students do not even apply for tertiary education entrance because they are aware of the distress, perhaps even embarrassment, that a parent will have when they literally cannot afford for that young student to go away and follow a career with a tertiary education.

Young people from rural and remote areas are, therefore, not surprisingly underrepresented in higher education enrolments. The 2011 ABS census found that 27 per cent of 15 to 64-year-olds live in rural and remote areas, but students from those areas only accounted for 21 per cent of the domestic undergraduate higher education enrolments. This is particularly concerning in my region, which is officially called Hume for the east of the electorate and Loddon Mallee to the west of the electorate. My area is suffering from drought, particularly in the west of the electorate—in fact, there are food parcels now supporting many families.

I met with the Salvation Army in Bendigo just last week. They are concerned that they have such a run on food distributions to farm families that they haven't the resources to continue and that their regional rural counsellor, who is dealing with the emotional distress of being so impoverished at the moment due to the seasonal conditions, will run out of money for his support in June next year. They are most concerned about what will happen when there is not even that locally based financial and emotional counsellor available to support the families.

You can imagine those families contemplating the cost of $20,000-plus for their student to live away from home to study. It is an extra distress and a real sense of loss and disappointment when a family in such straitened circumstances cannot afford to have their student realise their opportunities when they do have their results at the end of year 12, because they may be accepted into a course but the course is elsewhere.

There is the cost of relocation for a rural student plus the cost of accommodation, their travel to and from their home, communicating back home, mobile phone use, the possible need to own a car, textbooks, computers and other needs when they are studying. All of these pose a barrier for rural and regional people to undertake higher education. Young people from rural and regional Australia are more often faced with these higher costs than lower-income people in metropolitan areas, because there is often no local university they can access or, if there is a local university, they only offer the first year of a course in the local regional city or town. They are expected to travel in their second or subsequent years to a campus which again will require them to live away from home, so it is only deferring the cost for one year. When the student and their family look at that situation, they are still faced with the fact that they cannot even afford to apply for university in the first instance.

When there is a university course available locally, there are often no alternatives other than having private transport to the place. There is very little public transport in most regional areas. It is also very often the case that these students need additional assistance because they are the first member of a family who has had university education. In my city of Shepparton, the population who attends university for the first time often also needs English as a second language support—extra cost for the university and the student.

The rural and remote higher education students are more likely to be from a lower-middle-SES background compared to metropolitan students. In 2013, 35 per cent of regional students and 43 per cent of remote students were from a low-socioeconomic-status background, in comparison with only 13 per cent of metropolitan students. That is a very stark difference indeed. In the state of Victoria, the Greater Shepparton children report of 2014 found there were 24.6 per cent who were disengaged school leavers—meaning those not involved in work of study at all—compared to the Victorian average figure of 15.4 per cent. It was getting close to double the number of disengaged school leavers in the City of Greater Shepparton compared to the Victorian state average. You will not be surprised, then, that there is over 26 per cent youth unemployment in the City of Greater Shepparton. Many of those young people did not even apply for higher education options, knowing that their families simply could not find the funds to support those young people living away from home.

While deferral of studies by students ranged from 5.8 per cent in the western metropolitan Melbourne region to 9.3 per cent in the southern metropolitan region, deferrals in non-metropolitan areas—for example, in the Loddon-Mallee region—were 12.6 per cent, again substantially higher than metropolitan. The deferral rates were 17.2 per cent in the Hume region, which includes the City of Greater Shepparton. That 17.2 per cent of deferrals compares with just 5.8 in the western metropolitan region of Melbourne. So you can see that even the deferral rates are substantially higher. This is very often students seeking to do a gap year in the hope that after a year of working they might gain independent status, which was important under the old system, or be able to save enough to support themselves at least in their first year of away-from-home studies.

Among young people from non-metropolitan regions of Victoria, 43.6 per cent said they were waiting to qualify for youth allowance to finance their studies. That is just under half. That is substantially higher than deferrers in Barwon and south-western regions. Those saying they were trying to do a gap year to be able to finance their studies in the future in the Hume region rose to 57 per cent. One of the concerns when you take a gap year, of course, is that you do not return to your studies. There is a very significant proportion of those students, even with the very best of intentions for pursuing the career of their dreams, who will find they are not able to pick up those studies after that one year of deferment. There are a number of reasons, chief amongst those lack of financial capacity.

As I said, it can cost up to $20,000 to live away from home. If you are depending on food parcels literally to put food on the table on your dried-off dairy farm in the Dingee area, you are not going to be able even to contemplate your student applying for university.

This bill introduced by the coalition should give young people in rural and remote Australia a far better chance to achieve their career goals and aspirations, and that is only fair. It is un-Australian to do anything else. Given the huge difficulties now being faced by families in drought throughout eastern Australia and the man-made water insecurity and price hikes in northern Victoria and southern New South Wales, we are now seeing farm family distress like never before. With farm career futures less likely for the sons and daughters of many farm families, it is essential that they can afford to live away from home to study an alternative career in an alternative life. Unfortunately, if there are cost barriers in the way, there are few unskilled or semiskilled jobs that they can look to if they cannot move from the region to gain some real career qualifications. With those qualifications they can return to that area as professionals. Ironically, studying agricultural science is one of the surest ways to be employed after graduation from your university course. There are said to be two or three jobs for every agricultural science graduate in Australia. But given the general reputation of agriculture at the moment as an occupation that is too high risk, with incomes being too low for the investment required even to commence becoming an independent, self-sufficient farm, too many students out of rural areas are not choosing to pursue agricultural science as a career, even though the job prospects after study are so enticing.

One of the issues there is that better career counselling is needed in rural and regional secondary schools. I am most concerned that in a very recent survey undertaken in the City of Greater Shepparton area, many of the students, even with career counsellors in their schools, were unaware that such support was available to them. Numbers of students had no idea of what prospects there were in the region in terms of employment or what higher education or training or, indeed, tertiary studies could lead to. In addition to this legislation making it more possible for rural and regional students to attend university, I am hoping that the innovations that our Minister for Education is only too aware are necessary for our rural and regional students include better, professional career counselling. This would not be from a teacher who has been in the local system for very many years—many decades often—and who has no knowledge about what is available beyond her own classroom or the confines of the school grounds.

We have a situation in inland Australia of a real hollowing out of opportunity and income. Our rural communities too often look with envy at the metropolitan life experience in those places that cling to the sea shores—the fertile crescents around Australia—particularly, in eastern Australia. We have got to make sure that the great value in Australia of equality for all in fact plays out for rural and regional students when it comes to their access to higher education. We know that a tertiary education can lead to much better job prospects. It can lead to much greater mobility—both socially and occupationally—across the country for a lifetime. I commend this bill to the House. It has been a long time coming and a lot of work has been done by so many from this side of the House. I commend all of those who have worked so long and hard and have been around the regions. It is an excellent bill and it is time for it to become the law.

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