Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was the first politician in this parliament to speak out against the proposed youth allowance changes. That was on the day after the budget, and since then I have lodged a 2,000-signature petition in this parliament. I have asked Deputy Prime Minister Gillard and her Labor government to withdraw the changes to youth allowance which would make it harder for rural and regional students to move to the city to attend university. Now the Labor government has done a backflip that supposedly helps 5,000 current gap year students but makes it harder for 61,000 future students to access youth allowance. That is some win, I say with some irony.

These changes do not go far enough. They will see some current gap year rural and regional students able to qualify for youth allowance but do nothing for the current year 12 students. To make it worse, Minister Gillard has deferred the beneficial changes of the legislation for 30 months, making rural and regional students scapegoats. The budget estimated over 30,000 young people would miss out on the youth allowance with those original changes, but Minister Gillard says her backflip will help just 5,000 students. What about the other 25,000? Even if a country student who has to leave home to attend university does qualify for youth allowance, the accommodation allowance of $4,000 in the first year and $1,000 for the years after is pitiful. Who can get accommodation and live on $20 a week? This is a joke and shows how much the minister is out of touch.

For these mostly regional students, the changes that were to come into effect on 1 January now will not apply until 30 June 2012. It will cost the budget $150 million. To pay for this, Labor has delayed the most generous earnings threshold by 18 months. The earnings threshold at which youth allowance would be reduced was to rise from $236 a fortnight to $400 a fortnight from next year, but now that will not happen till July 2012. In total there are 272,840 students receiving youth allowance, of whom about 61,000 are estimated to earn above the new threshold each year.

Labor is making rural students a scapegoat, pitting them against working students. I give the Labor government notice that my campaign for the interests of students and their families in rural and regional areas is not over. Labor will be responsible for the biggest disaster affecting rural students in Australia’s history. This is not Labor’s mantra of a clever country; it is more like a dumb government.