Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I continue my speech in the second reading debate on the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011. Education is the greatest gift that we can give our children. Education in the year 2011 should be something that is equitable throughout Australia. Sadly, this is not the case.

Regional Australian students are finding it very difficult to attend university. We are just seeing the changes to the social security amendments for inner regional students. Those change have not returned things to the way they were prior to the changes made by the now Prime Minister when she was education minister, but they have returned some form of equity into the system.

There is a case to be made for a regional student access scheme available to all regional students. If regional Australia is going to take its place and continue to grow and prosper, it is going to need young people with suitable qualifications in agriculture, food production, agronomy, engineering, mining and health—all those vitally important professions. Regional Australia is in desperate need of professional workers in those areas. We are going to make sure we can keep up the supply in the years to come, and the best way to do that is by growing our own, encouraging regional students to gain proper qualifications, enabling them to return to the regions and grow regional Australia.

In closing, it needs to be pointed out again that the reason these amendments needed to be made was because of the thoughtless, uncaring actions of the Prime Minister when she was education minister, ripping the ability for regional students to attend university. From seeing in other government departments the farce that was the RDA, Regional Development Australia—regional Australia was ignored in that funding—it is clear that this government has very little understanding or compassion for the people and students of regional Australia.

The Prime Minister brought in these changes when she was education minister, and in my time as a member of parliament I have never seen an issue cause such heartache and so much grief. I have had thousands of people sign petitions; I have had school students manning stalls in the main streets of towns right across my electorate trying to gain support to have youth allowance restored. This is a victory for the coalition, and I pay tribute to my colleagues Fiona Nash, Darren Chester, Christopher Pyne and Nola Marino, who led this charge. But it is a hollow victory when this change should have been made in the first place.

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before calling the honourable member for Gippsland, I would remind the member for Parkes that he ought to refer to other honourable members by their titles and not by their names.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In joining the debate on the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011 I commend the member for Parkes for his contribution and support his comments that this is a hollow victory in many ways. It is a hollow victory because over the past three years we have put regional students, their families, their teachers, their careers counsellors, their parents and even their grandparents through enormous heartache as they have struggled to understand exactly what this government has been trying to achieve in its reform of student income support.

I have been one of those who has advocated since I got in this place three years ago for the need to provide a fair and equitable system for student income support for regional students. I have argued that case very strongly on the basis that, if we are not going to provide universities in every regional town—which we all acknowledge would be impossible—then we are going to need to provide some assistance for those students to achieve their full potential.

In 2009, the current Prime Minister, who was then the education minister, announced significant changes to student income support, creating an enormous amount of uncertainty and stress throughout regional communities, for very little gain. From day one, members on this side of the House pointed out the problems with the changes being put forward by the minister, and we were ridiculed. We were ridiculed in this place and we were ridiculed publicly. We were accused of being political opportunists and we were accused of being negative, when in fact we were raising legitimate concerns on behalf of regional families.

Surely anyone with half an ounce of common sense, when they receive petitions signed by thousands of people and are inundated by emails from students, teachers and parents raising concerns about the reforms to student income support, would think: 'Maybe we've got a problem here. Maybe I should start listening to members from regional communities who are raising concerns on behalf of their constituents.' Instead, we were badgered and pilloried in this place and described as people who did not care about the education of our students.

I rejected all of those assertions at that time, and today, as I said, is bit of a hollow victory, because finally the government has recognised that it made a mistake. Finally the government has admitted that, in particular with references to the workforce participation criteria for independent youth allowance as applying to students in the so-called inner regional and outer regional boundaries, it made a mistake. This legislation aims to amend that mistake. My concern is, once again, that the changes being put forward in this bill not only are long overdue, after causing enormous angst over the years, but simply do not go far enough in addressing the fundamental concerns of equity in regional communities. This is a massive backflip by the government, but the problem has not gone away. One of the biggest issues facing regional families is the issue of supporting students when they are forced to move away from home to attend university. Members on this side have fought for a better deal for regional students over many years and on many occasions in this place.

I want to thank the many people who have supported this fight to get a better deal for regional students. In the other place, Senator Fiona Nash was at the forefront of the fight on behalf of the coalition. In this place, the member for Sturt, the member for Forrest, all of my National Party colleagues and all the Liberal regional MPs have spoken out, and I understand that many Labor regional MPs have also spoken out in their caucus, to try and make it clear to those opposite in positions of power that the changes that were made were detrimental in many aspects.

I am also one of those members who at the very outset pointed out that some of the changes that the former education minister was making in terms of the income thresholds for the dependent youth allowance were very good changes. So I do not think anyone was out there continually attacking the government in that regard. We came to this discussion in good faith and tried to make the case to the then education minister, the current Prime Minister, that, whilst some of the changes were going to benefit regional communities, those relating particularly to the independent youth allowance had been mishandled. It has taken until now, three years later, after all those years of uncertainty and confusion in regional communities, for us to get some long overdue changes.

I also want to put on the record my public thanks to the many thousands of people in the electorate of Gippsland who rallied to this cause and assisted me in my efforts to bring it to the attention of the government. Again, it was the students themselves, the teachers and careers counsellors, and, as I said before, the parents and grandparents who were concerned about the future of their young people.

I also want to thank people who made submissions to Professor Kwong Lee Dow's review of student income support reforms. I would like to thank the professor for the work he did in helping to compile this report. I had the opportunity to have a chat with the professor when he was in Traralgon, and highlighted the particular concerns we had at that stage about the boundary classifications in regional areas. I have had the chance to read the report and I think there are some good messages in there for both government members and members on this side of the House. I will briefly quote from the section called Notes from the Chair. Professor Kwong Lee Dow said:

An underlying tension has persisted throughout the consultations and the submissions to this review. Simply put, it is how to reconcile the competing needs of those on low incomes and those from rural, regional and remote communities.

Some argue that the most fundamental issue is to adequately provide for students from low-income families. They are the ones in greatest need, and whom the Review of Australian Higher Education (the Bradley Review) and the Australian Government seek to help through the student income support reforms. The top priority is to build the numbers and the proportion of these students within the Australian higher education student mix.

Professor Kwong Lee Dow goes on to say:

Others point to this review being established primarily to consider the needs of rural and regional students. They remind us that rural students are handicapped, relative to their metropolitan counterparts, by more limited schooling opportunities, smaller cohorts of peers with whom to collaborate and to compete and less specialist teaching in the critical final years of secondary education.

He went on to say:

They remind us as well that, for regional and rural communities to survive and thrive, more professionally educated people will be called for, and it is disproportionately from young people returning back to those communities with which they identify and feel affection that the future of regional Australia can best be assured.

I commend Professor Kwong Lee Dow on this report and recommend it to other regional MPs with an interest in this issue. He makes the point that while there are budget limitations that have restricted him in his work, he has highlighted the key point of equity for rural and regional students.

While I have acknowledged there are some positives to come out of the reforms before the House this afternoon, I still feel that we are tinkering around the edges of the student income support issue. I believe there needs to be a complete overhaul of the system. I take up the comments from the member for Parkes. He said in this place, that we can do better than this, that we can genuinely work together in a bipartisan way for all those members who are interested in this issue of regional education opportunity for young people right throughout Australia. He said, 'I believe we can do better in this place in the future and provide more support for young people who are forced to move away from home to achieve university dreams.'

It is well understood that young people in regional communities face additional barriers compared to those in metropolitan areas. Some of those barriers are aspirational, I acknowledge that, but there are also economic barriers which have been referred to many times during contributions to this debate. When I visit schools in my electorate, I talk to many students about this issue of aspiration and about the need for young people in Gippsland to aim high to achieve their absolute best. It is up to all of us in this place, as leaders in our communities, to help overcome that aspirational barrier, to keep reminding young people in our community that they should never sell themselves short, that they have the opportunity in this great nation to achieve great things.

We also have to deal with that fundamental economic barrier. That is a key issue for so many of our young people in regional areas. It is young people from regional areas forced to move away—sometimes eight and 10 hours away from their family home—who have these additional costs of accommodation, and transport when travelling back and forth to home when the opportunity presents itself, and the additional stress of being away from their support network. We need to do whatever we can to give those young people a greater opportunity to succeed once they make that big decision to move away from the family home and pursue their university dreams.

This is an issue of equity. It is a point that Professor Kwong Lee Dow canvasses in his report. I quote again, this time from the executive summary on page 11. He says:

Many young people from regional and remote Australia have no choice but to relocate away from the family home if they are to access educational opportunities (generally, higher education) comparable to those available to students in metropolitan areas. Relocation poses a significant additional financial impost on families. This underpins concerns about the changes to the arrangements for accessing full assistance as an independent person. For this reason, many have argued in the consultation and submission process that just as different arrangements are in place to support students from low-income families in comparison with those from higher income families, so there should be a similar acknowledgment of the circumstances of regional students in comparison with metropolitan students. This is a major issue, perhaps the most important issue, for this review.

I stress that point. In the executive summary, Professor Kwong Lee Dow says, 'This is a major issue, perhaps the most important issue for this review.' He goes on to say:

… these factors support the argument on equity grounds that different support arrangements for regional young people and metropolitan young people might reasonably be made available.

I am trying to make the point that there is much more work to be done in this place on student income support.

While today we are talking about legislation, which I believe will at least provide some clarity to those ridiculous arrangements we had—with inner regional and outer regional—for the purpose of qualifying for independent youth allowance, we still have a long way to go to achieve a fair and equitable system.

In my own electorate of Gippsland there are people who live on average two to six hours away from Melbourne, so it is difficult for those people to attend university if they have to go to a suburban campus. I recently undertook a survey in my electorate to try to gauge how big an issue this is, along with a range of other issues. It alarmed me that only 22 per cent of Gippsland families said they could afford to send their child to university. That survey also found that 85 per cent of families in my electorate who responded to this survey wanted the federal government to provide additional funding to regional students, in particular, to cover the cost of relocating to study at university.

At a recent Nationals federal council meeting, here in Canberra, a motion was passed that supported the introduction of a tertiary access allowance which would support all regional students. This would replace the confusing mess we have now where students have to qualify under increasingly complex criteria, which has been the subject of much debate in this place on many occasions. The overwhelming majority of people living in my community of Gippsland do not believe they will be able to support their young people when the time comes, if they qualify to go to university. They do not believe they will be able to support them economically. I believe there is an expectation that we can do more as members of this place to support students in pursuing their tertiary studies.

When this debate began three years ago there were those opposite who accused members on this side of being opportunistic, of playing political games and of not representing the views of regional communities. The overwhelming number of people who signed petitions would surely be an indicator that they were off track on that. I have a whole host of people who have written to me on this issue to raise their concerns. I give them the opportunity to put in their own words what they think about the current system. In the Latrobe Valley Express on 12 September this year, Zara Dyke said:

I just think the whole eligibility criterion needs to be completely overhauled and changed.

The former school council chairman of the Yarram Secondary College told last year's award ceremony:

Rural communities need to continue to get a message to all levels of government that we are at a disadvantage in sending our year 12 onto tertiary study and that if more rural people are going to be able to study at tertiary level, we need better living-away-from-home allowances and financial support for our students.

I urge those opposite to understand that this legislation we have before us today is not going to solve all the problems. I do acknowledge that it will help, but it does not solve the problems of equity and fairness which I have talked about for regional students and it does not resolve another key issue relating to the eligibility criteria. It relates to students fulfilling the expectation of the government's regulations on achieving independence, where they go off and do the required amount of work only to be told by Centrelink that they still do not qualify for independent youth allowance because their parents' incomes exceed the threshold.

There is a real contradiction here. We are telling young people that if they go out and earn the amount of money required—I think it is about $19½ thousand over an 18-month period—we will say they are independent but that when it comes to assessing their eligibility for independent youth allowance we are going to refer back to their parents' income. We cannot have it both ways. We cannot be saying to these students that they are independent—they have achieved $19½ thousand—but then tell them that their parents' income threshold will also be included. I have another email here which refers specifically to this and the confusion it is creating in the community from a young lady named Megan in Paynesville:

Currently I've spoken to three Centrelink personnel and have been told three different stories. I've been told that if I earn the required amount in my gap year then I will receive the independent allowance, where another person has told me that, despite my income, it will be means-tested against my parents' income. I am very confused at the moment. I will meet all the criteria for the youth allowance/gap year allowance.

She goes on to say that she would be helped greatly if we could get a clear answer on this issue.

There are many sticking points still with the system of student income support and I have just highlighted a couple of them. Students right now are trying to make decisions about whether they will go to university next year or whether they will take a gap year, and they are very confused about the advice they are getting from Centrelink. We have such a long way to go and I believe that it is up to this place to commit itself to working harder to introduce a tertiary access allowance to remove the existing confusion and to make sure that regional students who are currently vastly underrepresented at our universities are given the opportunity to achieve their full potential. (Time expired)

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I associate myself with the comments of the member for Gippsland, particularly in relation to the National Party's policy of a tertiary access allowance. I think that will happen eventually in this country and we will get a better deal for regional and rural students. Speaking of regional areas, I come from one, the electorate of Dawson, and so I think it is only right that I speak on this Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011, which affects regional students. Once again, we are debating the inequities that this government forced onto regional students, and it is not the first time I have had the opportunity to speak on this matter. The inequalities that this government created are really a form of student apartheid and the Liberal-National coalition has been trying to correct that for a very long time. We have been trying to correct the issue since this Labor government took a perfectly good system and broke it in 2009. What the government demonstrated at that time, and up to this point, is that it has no understanding of regional areas. It simply does not appreciate the difference between regional centres and metropolitan centres.

Independent youth allowance aside, regional centres face a whole range of inequities on a daily basis. Regional centres do not have access to the resources and facilities that are available in many cities. Regional centres do not have access to the same goods and services that their city cousins use every day. Regional centres experience the tyranny of distance firsthand. Regional centres often cop a higher cost of living. There are many things that are more difficult in regional centres, and one of them is tertiary education. There are lower tertiary education participation rates from regional centres, and there is a reason for that. There are even more obstacles in this field.

I use two towns in my electorate of Dawson as examples. The main population centre, Mackay, was once a sugar town but is now predominantly a mining town. The cost of living in Mackay is placing enormous pressure on families. Mackay is considered an inner regional centre—it is a thousand kilometres from Brisbane. There is less distance between Brisbane and Sydney. There is less distance between Sydney and Melbourne. Somehow Mackay has been classified as inner regional. There is no university that is primarily based out of Mackay. We do have a subcampus, I would call it, of Central Queensland University. It is a very good campus; it has the potential to be, and will soon become, the main campus of CQ University. At the moment it is still a subsidiary campus of a university that is based in another town, Rockhampton. Some students wanting to go to university can study some of the courses at the Mackay campus of CQ University and others can at least do their first year of study at the Mackay campus before having to relocate to Rockhampton. Many more students who want to do other subjects that are not on offer at that university have no choice but to relocate to a capital city. They have no choice in this matter.

In contrast, Townsville—some of which is in my electorate of Dawson—is classified as an outer regional centre. It is in fact further away from Brisbane than Mackay, but it is a larger centre with more facilities, more population and more services, including the main campus of James Cook University. James Cook is a fine university and attracts students from many other centres, including capital cities. Townsville students wanting to undertake tertiary studies have many more opportunities than their counterparts in Mackay to do so without having to relocate, yet it is easier for them to qualify for independent youth allowance. This is the kind of student apartheid that this government has introduced in regional centres throughout this country. The problem that we have faced since 2009 is that we have a government that refuse to listen and refuse to admit that they were wrong on this count. It is the same attitude that we have witnessed with so many other debates and issues. It is the same attitude that we have witnessed with that e asylum seeker policy. They took something that worked perfectly well and they undid it. Then they stubbornly refused to admit they were wrong and tried everything they could think of to fix it—except to put it back to the way it was. The Liberal-National coalition have been trying to fix this independent youth allowance program since the then education minister and now Prime Minister created the problem. A coalition notice of motion last year sought to make independent youth allowance fairer for regional students. And guess what? Labor opposed it. The coalition then tried to introduce an amendment in February to fix the problem. Guess what happened again? Labor opposed it and they disallowed debate on the matter. The coalition gave them another chance. We proposed another amendment to the appropriations legislation in March—which again would have fixed the problem. Surprise, surprise: Labor once again opposed it. Another amendment later in March, to the families, housing, community services and Indigenous affairs legislation, could also have fixed the problem. Again, Labor opposed it. In June, another notice of motion was opposed by Labor. All the way through this process, we have seen the so-called country Independents, the member for Lyne and the member for New England, siding with Labor on this matter, to the detriment of regional Australia and regional students. The government have been consistently good at saying 'no, no, no' to regional students on this front.

Finally, we have an admission. Finally, the government are now saying, 'We got it wrong.' Finally, there will be a rebalancing of student income support towards students in regional areas. But, very sadly for some students, it is going to be far too late. For some students, going to university was not viable because of the discrimination that was imposed by this Labor government. They have been forced to take a different path in life because there was no viable financial option for them; and that is an absolute disgrace.

Some students have incurred large debts, having been forced to take out large loans, because they could not get the same support that was given to students in other areas who actually had more choice. What a bizarre set-up. Some students from regional areas with lower populations and more choice got better provision of income support than students in places like Mackay—simply because of their postcode. They were students who were lucky enough to live in a town that had a different classification—outer regional not inner regional. But not Mackay students. Under this government, it will be forever remembered that Mackay students and many others in areas deemed 'inner regional' were treated as second-class citizens.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Since March 2010, students living in inner regional areas have struggled to qualify for independent youth allowance because of changes the Labor government made to the eligibility criteria. However, on 21 September 2011, after a hard-fought campaign of more than two long years, the Labor-Independent-Green government performed a backflip with regard to independent youth allowance—a backflip on legislation, on poor policy of its own making. It was a backflip they needed to do. Embarrassed into their change of heart because of the dogged determination of the shadow parliamentary secretary for regional education, Senator Fiona Nash, and many other members of the coalition—in fact, I would say all members of the coalition, as we were united on this front—the Labor government have at long last brought fairness to the table and thousands of regional students have secured a much-needed reprieve with regard to their independent youth allowance criteria. This followed a review report conducted by Professor Kwong Lee Dow which recommended allowing inner regional students to apply for independent youth allowance under the exact same rules as outer regional, remote and very remote students—in other words, what it was originally and what the coalition has been demanding all along. The cities and towns in my electorate whose students fall into this inner regional category include Wagga Wagga—the largest inland city in New South Wales—Junee, Gundagai, Tumut, Coolamon, Mangoplah, Batlow and Adelong.

In 2009, the then education minister, Julia Gillard, proposed tightening the criteria. This meant that students in inner regional areas had to work an average of 30 hours a week for 18 months over a two-year period. This was yet another example of how little the then education minister and now Prime Minister knows and understands about regional communities, because securing close to full-time work in regional Australia is difficult. Some students were forced to defer their studies for up to two years and those who opted to go straight to university would have undoubtedly struggled to meet their work and study commitments. It was a bizarre move for someone who said, in her 1998 inaugural speech in this parliament, that 'not only economists but ordinary people understand that the future of Australia and the future of themselves and their children is tied to educational success'. We all agree with that, so why was there such unfairness when it came to independent youth allowance? Why was this of Labor's own making? It was grossly unfair and the changes were devastating to students and their families. Coalition MPs and senators were swamped with emails, letters and telephone calls, and there were countless examples of inner regional students missing out on much-needed assistance to afford tertiary study. But I am sure it was not only coalition MPs and senators who were being swamped with calls; I am sure Labor members, regional Independents and the Greens member were receiving similar sorts of calls about how palpably unfair it was. I know the member for Maranoa, who sits beside me, also received a number of calls about how unfair the independent youth allowance criteria were.

In forums, personal one-on-one meetings and constant correspondence with parents and guardians, I was told about the difficulty of having to choose which of their children they could afford to support at university. In some cases, they were not able to afford to help them at all. Some families were left to tell their children that they could not go to university, simply because of these unfair rules foisted on them by this Labor government.

Many families were struggling to make ends meet after years of drought—a decade of drought—followed by devastating floods. Other students gave up on their dream of a further education, an education that the Prime Minister acknowledged in her maiden speech as being so important to future success and prosperity. It was blatantly obvious that once again this government did not understand the trials, tribulations and hardships the people in regional Australia already were facing—the weather, commodity prices—and now this foisted upon their children was another blow.

A government's role is to govern for all—for the people, by the people, not 'to hell with the people'. This is what was happening. It was not just those in metropolitan areas or those in areas deemed eligible by arbitrary lines on a map as has been the case with this sorry story. The inner regional map which deemed those who would receive youth allowance and those who would not was actually a health map; it was not even meant for determining which students should and which should not receive assistance. That map was drawn up for health purposes. A Senate inquiry in December 2010 heard similar, disturbing evidence. On 21 October 2010, during Senate estimates, department officials confirmed that the changes targeting inner regional students was a cost-saving measure. What an insult. What a disgrace.

To restore the equality between regional students the coalition introduced a bill which both Labor and the Independents—despite having many inner regional students in their electorates—deemed unconstitutional. The government instead opted to bring forward a review of student income support reforms, including youth allowance, which was to report by 1 July this year and for any changes to be in place by 1 January 2012. The irony is that, had this government not changed the independent youth allowance criteria in the first place, it would not need to spend money on more changes to the detriment of other students. It is yet another example of this inept Labor government's hopeless economic management.

From 1 January 2012, students from inner regional areas will be able to access independent youth allowance under exactly the same rules which apply to students from outer regional, remote and very remote areas—and it is about time. Any employment undertaken over the period since a student has left school will be counted towards the independence test, even if that work was done prior to 1 January 2012. School leavers of 2009-10, if they have been working during the period since they left school, will be able to count that toward the workplace criteria to qualify for independent youth allowance in 2012.

But, as I said, this has been a whole sorry story from start to finish. Labor MPs and the regional Independents, the member for Lyne and the member for New England, have been trumpeting the government's changes when in fact for months and months they hardly said a thing about the matter. The irony is that money will be taken away from other youth allowance measures or will be delayed, which will affect many students. The regional Independents and Labor MPs could have made these changes a whole lot sooner had they supported the coalition's effort to restore fairness on a number of occasions.

I will just go through those occasions for the benefit of Hansard and for the benefit of those people who may not have been following this whole sorry saga. There was a coalition notice of motion in the House of Representatives last October to make independent youth allowance fair for inner regional students by reinstating the same fair criteria which applies to other regional students, and it was supported by the members for Lyne and New England but opposed by the Labor MPs. There was the coalition's Social Security Amendment (Income Support for Regional Students) Bill 2010 introduced in the House of Representatives in February this year, which sought to reinstate the same fair criteria that applies to other regional students. The debate was disallowed by Labor, with the support of the members for Lyne and New England. There was an amendment to appropriations legislation in the House of Representatives in early March, again to reinstate the same fair criteria for inner regional students from 1 July 2011, immediately after the review into student income support reforms rather than waiting until next year. But, again, this was defeated by Labor MPs with the support of the regional Independents, the members for Lyne and New England. There was a similar amendment to Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs legislation later in March, which was again defeated by Labor with the support of the members for Lyne and New England. There was a similar notice of motion in the House of Representatives in June this year—and what do you think happened there? Again, it was defeated by Labor, again with the support of the members for Lyne and New England.

The government and the Independents claim the number of regional students receiving youth allowance has increased by 26 per cent, or an additional 7,400 students. They fail to say how many are actually receiving independent youth allowance compared to those on dependent youth allowance. Nor do they mention that many students receiving dependent youth allowance are only receiving a part rate of that payment.

The coalition has persisted through amendments to legislation and notices of motion for the government to act after the review finished in July, but they were all delayed and defeated by Labor and the two regional Independents. Whilst all this was happening, every time it was brought up in the House Labor backbenchers from regional areas were voting against the wishes and the whims of their people; they were saying nothing outside the House and they were saying nothing inside the House. But they certainly chirped up and in parrot fashion followed the Prime Minister and the minister for education when they decided to do the backflip—not before time. Speaking of the minister for education, on 21 September this year, when moving that the bill be read a second time, the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth said:

The Australian government is committed to reforming higher education and, in particular, increasing students' access to university.

That, as I say, is an admirable course. He went on:

Higher education is central to achieving the government's vision of a stronger, fairer and more productive nation.

'Hear, hear,' I say, and I am sure everybody else would agree too. He went on to say:

The impact of the reforms has been measurable with more students qualifying for assistance, especially young people from low- to middle-income families.

The reforms have also had a positive impact on families from regional and remote areas of Australia with more young people who need to live away from home being able to access student income support.

So why did Labor change the rules in the first place? Why did they make it so unfair for regional students—students, as I say, from my electorate and, as we have heard, from the electorate of the member for Dawson? I know that the member for Maranoa and the member for Gippsland have been affected—members of the coalition in regional areas—and, just as importantly, Labor members with electorates in regional areas have also been affected. Not only were their electorates affected; their families were also affected. The students in those families were affected, yet many Labor backbenchers chose to remain silent whilst all this was going on and then they chose to walk the distance from there to here to defeat. Our sensible moves and our sensible amendments were deemed unconstitutional every time.

Here is a Labor government which does not listen. It is another example of a Labor government which did not listen during the water issue. It is a Labor government which has not listened in the asylum seeker issue. It has foisted a carbon tax upon Australia which it did not want. It is time this government started to listen to the people. As I say, this independent youth allowance farce was brought about by this government. It was foisted on the good people of Australia, the good people in regional areas who I often think of as real Australians. They are the real Australians who grow the food and grow the fibre. It is tough enough to carry out that job without having unfair youth allowance criteria placed upon them by a Labor government which refuses to listen and which refuses to care, especially by Labor members who know full well that what the coalition has been proposing all along has been fair and equitable.

This parliament should be all about fairness and equity, but certainly with the independent youth allowance it has not been. It has continued to ignore the wishes of the people, and it has continued to ignore the wishes of regional students who have a difficult enough job as it is to gain tertiary education. They are behind the eight ball all along when it comes to getting university degrees, yet they had this unfair independent youth allowance criteria put upon them which made it so much more difficult for them. For the life of me, I cannot understand—and I know my colleagues cannot understand either—why students in metropolitan areas were treated differently from students in inner regional areas. I ask again: why was there so much unfairness? Why did it have to take Senator Nash and others on this side to pull this government kicking and screaming to the table of fairness in this and so many other issues? Why won't this government listen? As I say, it has not listened during the water issue. Fortunately, Griffith was not in the inner regional area, but Griffith and Leeton are certainly very much affected by the issue of unfairness when it comes to the water debate. As a whole the Riverina has also had this unfair independent youth allowance to deal with and to put up with. It is not fair. I am glad that it has taken this for the government to finally see reason and to finally bring about change. I welcome it. Hopefully it will be the start of many things to come where the government finally does start to listen to the people of Australia. (Time expired)

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011. I note that the speaking list is devoid of anyone from the other side of the House who is to speak at any great length. It is only this side of the House that has a great interest. When I look at the speaking list it shows that members of this side of the House have a real interest in regional Australia, the welfare of those families and the students who have been adversely impacted in terms of access to post-secondary education.

For two long years the coalition has been fighting this issue with the Labor government and their unfair tightening of the criteria for youth allowance. All we ever got from the other side of the House when we put up amendment after amendment through whatever means we could find, or a private member's bill, was no, no, no. That happened every time we put up a sensible amendment or a sensible private member's bill, one that would address this anomaly and also help so many families out there in regional and rural Australia who have been impacted by this very, very unfair measure implemented by the then education minister, now Prime Minister.

Since March 2010, students living in inner regional areas have struggled to qualify for the independent youth allowance because of the changes that were made to the eligibility criteria by this government. As I said a moment ago, the then education minister, the now Prime Minister, first proposed a tightening of the criteria in mid-2009. What it meant was that inner regional students would have to work an average of 30 hours a week over a two-year period. What we have seen here is the government—finally—listening to this side of the House, and we will now see these changes being made.

This whole debacle is really just another example of this government's lack of understanding of regional Australia, yet when this government was formed we heard that it was going to be a government for regional Australia. A firm and solemn comment and commitment by the now Prime Minister was that it would be a government listening to regional Australia. If the government knew anything about regional Australia, they would understand the tyranny of distance and how it adversely impacts on regional students, particularly in Queensland because of its diversity and decentralised nature. My own electorate of Maranoa covers 42 per cent of the landmass of Queensland and three particular towns were considered inner regional Australia—they were Dalby, Kingaroy and Warwick. In the electorate of Maranoa there is no university, but those towns are considered inner regional Australia for the criteria for eligibility for youth allowance.

Not having a university in Maranoa or the three largest towns of my electorate, Kingaroy, Warwick and Dalby, means that students from right across the electorate, including those three towns where the biggest impact was felt, have to leave home to gain access to post-secondary education. The closest university to Dalby, for instance, is the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba. That is more than 80 kilometres away. Warwick is about the same distance from the University of Southern Queensland. The same university is the closest for people in Kingaroy but it is 150 kilometres away. As you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Slipper, the University of the Sunshine Coast is almost 200 kilometres from Kingaroy. Yet these three towns, under Labor's unfair criteria, were considered to be even more metropolitan than the city of Cairns—would you believe it—which has an international airport. Townsville also was considered to be more outer regional than Dalby, Kingaroy and Warwick and it is home to the James Cook University, yet Dalby, Kingaroy and Warwick were considered more inner regional than Cairns or Townsville.

The cities of Townsville and Cairns are considered outer regional Australia. This means that those students in Cairns, which has a population of about 150,000 people, who would like to become eligible for independent youth allowance can work just 15 hours per week to meet the work test for this allowance. But in Dalby, Kingaroy and Warwick, which have populations of around 10,000 to 12 000 people respectively, young people were forced to work an average of 30 hours per week because they were considered more inner regional than those students from Cairns or Townsville. It is just unfair what this government imposed on those students from rural and regional areas.

One classic example of the anomaly was that these lines drawn on maps used the access to health services map—nothing to do with education, but they were the criteria. We looked at those lines on the map. Just north of Dalby there is a little town called Kaimkillenbun. There is a little state school, a hotel and a welding business as well as people living in town. It is a lovely little community of about 150 people. The railway used to come into Kaimkillenbun from Dalby. It is disused now. If you lived on the eastern side of the railway line, you were considered inner regional Australia; if you lived on the other side of the railway line in this town of 150 people, you were outer regional Australia. That is how absolutely ridiculous these lines on maps were and how little this government understood the impact it would have and how it would even divide communities.

This also posed a significant problem for employers in these towns. Where was the incentive to hire a young person and train them only to watch them take those skills away should they qualify for independent youth allowance—once they had worked 30 hours a week over a period of 18 months? I had many calls from these students, their families and some employers, who said: 'Why would we take these people on for 30 hours a week? It's almost full-time employment. We would lose them should they qualify for youth allowance in 18 months to two years time.' It was plainly wrong and quite divisive and it impacted families who wanted to do the right thing by their young people who were desperate to gain post-secondary education.

For those young people, if they got a job it was almost the equivalent of a full-time job—30 hours a week is eight hours short of a full-time job. It may be that those students will then say: 'I've got a job and that's important. I've got job security. I'll bypass further education because I've got a job.' They will be part of that generation, because of this government's decision, that will not take up post-secondary education because it costs money to leave home. They would not qualify for independent youth allowance as they would have under the Howard government and they may never take up post-secondary education. That was one of the great tragedies of this legislation that this government imposed on these families and communities.

People from regional Australia, if they have grown up there, gone away—and been assisted to go away, as we would want—and gained post-secondary education qualifications, are the ones most likely to come back and practise with those qualifications in their communities. For instance, we are short of doctors in regional areas; we need pharmacists; we need people in law firms in regional areas. If they have grown up there and their extended families are there, they are the ones most likely to come back. Yet these students are the ones, because of the legislation introduced by this Prime Minister when she was the education minister, who were going to be denied that financial support or were unable to meet the criteria that was becoming so arduous that they may decide not to go on with any education beyond high school. I now welcome the government's decision to abolish the unfair inner regional classification. Now, at long last, after saying, 'No, no, no, no,' to every amendment and every private member's bill that we introduced to this place and the upper house, they finally accepted what we have been saying and fighting for all along: that regional students be considered for the youth allowance under the same classification.

It is a small victory for the families of Maranoa, who have supported me and the coalition and urged us to continue this fight and not give up the first time we got a 'no' from the Labor Party—and from the Independents, who sit to our left on the crossbenches and supported the 'no, no, no,' to the amendments and the private members' bills that were put up by this side of the House. I say to those families out there: thank you for the continual support that you have given us. Thank you also for the fact that you have waited long and hard and for your desire, which you expressed to me on so many occasions, to save whatever you can and put money aside to make sure your children were not denied, during the period leading up to this bill, the opportunity to gain a post-secondary education.

The Labor government has missed the opportunity to completely overhaul the system. Access to post-secondary education should not be a privilege for those who live outside of easy access to university, as the other side of the House and those on the crossbenches obviously think. In the crossbenchers' support of the 'no' case of the Labor Party they are saying, 'It is a privilege and you should move your whole family to a capital city or a regional centre that has a university.' It should be a right for all Australians, regardless of whether they live in a regional or metropolitan area.

Labor has had the chance to completely rework the student income support system and help regional and rural students meet the increased cost associated with attending university because they have to leave home to gain access to university. As I said in my opening remarks, the electorate of Maranoa makes up over 40 per cent of the landmass of Queensland and yet there is not one university. So, effectively, all students who live within the boundaries of Maranoa and want to go on to post-secondary education have to leave home, with all the costs associated with that.

Many of us in this place—I have and I imagine many on the other side have—understand the costs associated with post-secondary education and the cost of moving away from home to live in a flat or in a college at university. It is enormous and often families are unable to meet that cost and their children are unable to attend post-secondary education. That is why the independent youth allowance has been so vital to support students in gaining basic access to a university for post-secondary education qualifications.

Our plan for a tertiary access allowance will address this issue of inequity. It levels the playing field so that all regional students who are forced to relocate to undertake university studies receive support for accommodation and living away from home costs. Regional, rural and remote Australian students and their families deserve to be treated the same as their metropolitan cousins, who have access to university, can live at home and can maintain a part-time job at the same time, which is another way of helping the family with the costs associated with tertiary education even in the cities.

I welcome what, at long last, the government have done to the independent youth allowance. They have been dragged kicking and screaming to the realisation that they got it wrong, just like so many other things they have got wrong. I am certainly looking forward to talking to families at the start of next year who will be able to access this independent youth allowance because of the fight this side of the House put up. We have never given up on getting fairness and equity into the independent youth allowance criteria.

Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to follow on from the member for Maranoa, who has very effectively highlighted the stupidity of what this government had done to students in regional and rural areas, but I very much welcome the effect that this new legislation will have on many families in my electorate of Cowper and throughout many areas of regional and rural Australia. It will end more than two years of unfairness, uncertainty and hardship for young people trying to plan for their higher education future. To many, the changes to the test for independent youth allowance in this bill will make the difference between attending university or not.

We have all seen evidence of the difference to earning potential that a university degree can make. To deny young people that opportunity on the basis of geography alone—that is, on the basis of the definition of an inner, as opposed to an outer, remote or very remote, area—showed an ignorance of the conditions in regional Australia and an arrogance in that the government failed to listen when the huge flaw in its own legislation was clearly pointed out time and time again. It was Labor's failure to listen, and the support offered to Labor in this House by two people who know regional Australia well, the Independent members for Lyne and New England, that resulted in, as I said, two years of uncertainty, unfairness and hardship.

I will turn to the role of the Independent members later, but first let me say that it came as no surprise when the government refused to listen to critics of its youth allowance changes. It did not listen when it was told that rushing through its home insulation program would result in a distortion of the market with newly formed and inexperienced companies taking advantage of the opportunity to earn a fast buck and leaving a trail of shoddy and dangerous work in their wake. We all know the consequences: fatalities, house fires and a repair bill that ran to $1 billion to put right a $1.5 billion scheme. It did not listen when it was told that its bank deposit guarantee scheme should be capped. We all know the consequences there: a run on deposits in non-authorised deposit-taking institutions, resulting in savings being frozen and income streams drying up. It did not listen when it was told that a ban on live exports would cause grave problems for cattle exporters, but it went ahead just the same.

And the then Minister for Education, now the Prime Minister, did not listen when she was told that imposing a 30-hour-a-week work requirement for independent youth allowance for inner regional areas did not reflect the reality of life in those areas. She did not listen when she was told that it was unfair to differentiate between inner and other regional areas. The reality is that work is hard to find in regional Australia where the unemployment rate is typically above the national average. With the exception of the areas enjoying the mining boom, businesses generally are just getting by or doing it tough. The reality is that a would-be student would be very lucky to find one employer alone who could offer 30 hours a week or more and would usually have to find two or three employers. That then raises the difficulty of juggling the competing demands made by the employers. I might remind members that this was at a time when changes to the award system prevented employers from offering the short shifts that might have helped would-be students in such a position.

She did not listen to the fact that work in regional and rural areas can be very seasonal, which makes achieving the 30-hour-a-week milestone increasingly difficult in times when seasonal work is unavailable. There is also the problem of physically getting to work. Regional towns do not have urban transport systems, as most of us know. Young people trying to finance their university education find it difficult to run their own car. And in regional areas many families live some distance from centres of population and sources of much-needed employment. As for differentiating between inner and other regional areas, that would suggest that there was a substantial difference in terms of the ease of finding work and transport, but the reality is that there is little or no difference, and drawing a line on a map never made any sense. Children attending the same school would end up being treated differently because they lived on different sides of a line, one with a home in an inner regional area and one with a home in an outer regional area.

For instance, in my electorate, those living in the communities of Urunga and Repton, a mere 10 kilometres apart in the same labour market, were divided by the ruling on independent youth allowance. Those young people living in Repton and Urunga would also be faced with the fact that to pursue the university course of their choice they would inevitably have to move away from home. Driving 10 kilometres up the road would not open up a whole new range of courses. Ten kilometres up the road, the range of courses would be exactly the same, yet under the government's proposal they would be treated entirely differently.

All of this should have been crystal clear, but apparently it was not to a minister who did not know, or did not care to know, what life is like in regional Australia. We tried to tell her and asked her to split the original bill as we wished to support other measures it contained, but, no, the minister just would not listen. The consequences were as predicted. Many inner regional students were forced to delay or scrap their plans or missed out on the assistance they should have had. Parents were forced to choose which of their children they should support. Many were not able to support them at all.

As with many other Labor policies, the changes left confusion, heartbreak and anger in their wake. More than 50 parents came to a youth allowance rally in Coffs Harbour to make their views known and many contacted my electorate office. Of course, this could all have been avoided. It could have been avoided if Labor had been willing to listen. It could have been avoided if two members with an intimate knowledge of regional Australia had not supported Labor's ill-informed plans. I refer, of course, to the member for New England and the member for Lyne, whose records on this issue amount to a betrayal of regional interests. We have seen recent research by Newspoll which has shown plummeting support for these two members, due in no small part to the decisions that they make in this House and the fact that they are perceived in their electorates to be selling out their constituents.

When the coalition put forward a bill to provide fairness for inner regional students, the Independent members sided with Labor and claimed the bill was unconstitutional, despite advice from the President and the Clerk of the Senate. Instead, they opted for a review. When the facts were clear, they opted for a review, which further delayed resolving the issue and ensured that students and their families were left in limbo. Time and time again we had the member for Lyne and the member for New England voting with the Australian Labor Party and against the interests of regional and rural students. Time and time again we had the member for Lyne and the member for New England selling out their electorates. This was despite voting with the coalition in October last year on a notice of motion that would put inner regional students on the same footing as other regional students. Clearly, they then decided it was in their interests to dance to the government's tune, as they usually do, and voted against our measures which would have restored fairness far sooner.

This has been a sorry episode which has thrown the life plans of many young people into disarray. I welcome the changes that will come into effect in January, but the problem could have been avoided and the remedy could have been put in place far sooner. That is what happens when you have a government that refuses to listen to advice and you have Independent members who vote for the ALP rather than truly represent the people who sent them to Canberra.

We heard the member for Lyne in this place today seemingly blaming the whole matter on the major parties. Apparently the major parties were the cause of the problem in which regional and rural students found themselves. But the reality is that the people in his electorate are growing tired of his rather worn-out song and excuses. The reality is that the problem we have today exists because the member for Lyne continues to side with the Australian Labor Party instead of standing up for the people in his electorate. The students in the electorate of Lyne wanted relief from this ridiculous government plan, but what did the member for Lyne do? He was just like a puppet. He toed the government line, as he does. It was interesting to travel to Port Macquarie recently. We had our National Party conference there and the word on the street from everyone we talked to was utter disgust about the decisions being made by the member for Lyne on their behalf, concern that the member for Lyne was not representing their interests but the interests of Labor and that he was turning his back on the needs of regional and rural Australia.

I certainly commend this legislation. It is long overdue. It will make some welcome improvements for regional and rural students, but unfortunately a cohort of students will miss out. They will miss out because of poor decision making by the government, because of the government's failure to listen to advice and because of the unswerving support of a couple of country Independents who should know better.

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

I rise to speak on the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011. Students from regional areas have had their lives put back on track after this government finally decided to go back to the old rules for youth allowance, as the rest of Australia had been begging them to do for over two years.

I want to tell the House about the youth allowance story. It was a disgrace. It took this government so long to fix the discrepancies—and, yes, they have been rectified, but for 2½ long years it was a disgrace. Back in 2009, after the Labor government handed down their budget it was discovered that the budget harboured a huge discrepancy for regional students. The government, in their wisdom, had decided that students hoping to receive vital youth allowance funds to assist them on their journey to further education would have their fate pinned on a map designed for health services—not education services, health services. It was just ridiculous to use a map which was based not on educational criteria but on medical criteria relating to the availability of doctors. And this was deciding the future of our young people.

The sorry example of how regional students were being unfairly discriminated against by this government was in Mt Gambier in the south-east of my electorate. Mt Gambier is about 450 kilometres away from Melbourne or Adelaide universities, their nearest universities. It is a long way, and obviously there is no way students can actually go to university every day from home. Under the old criteria, students had the opportunity of getting youth allowance if they were away from the workforce for 1½ years. For two years in Mt Gambier if you lived in the city—450 kilometres away from Adelaide or Melbourne—you were treated like a student in Adelaide or Melbourne, but if you lived outside the town boundaries you were treated as if you were under the old Howard government conditions.

One Mt Gambier student's story unfolded in the local paper. Had their family home been built on the opposite side of White Avenue, a main road in Mt Gambier, it would have been classified as outer regional. But because they were on the other side of the road they were classified as inner regional. If they had been classified as outer regional then, under the old Howard government rules, which this government finally accepted, they could have gained financial support immediately after graduating. Instead, this student had been working four jobs during her gap year to satisfy the current 30-hour commitment.

A local school principal said that families were confused by the existing youth allowance eligibility criteria and that families needed to plan well in advance for their child to move away from home for study. These regional students were forced to find 30 hours of work a week, and anyone who has any idea about regional communities would know that this is very difficult. Communities such as those in my electorate do not have endless retail outlets and fast food eateries for young people to work in for 30 hours per week. Small businesses were already feeling the labour pinch, and then the Labor government wanted them to supply jobs for 30 hours per week for an 18-month period with no guarantee that their investment in those children's futures would actually be returned to them. It just did not make sense and, in most cases, was not possible.

I received a huge amount of letters, phone calls and emails from concerned students and parents over the length of this debate. This was a genuine problem that needed to be fixed, and we gave them the answer, but for 2½ years the government ignored the coalition on this issue. As the representative of a large rural electorate where parents are faced with huge costs to fund their children's university studies hundreds of kilometres away, I was extremely concerned by the government's arrogant dismissal of the very sincere problems that were caused by their careless changes to the support arrangements for rural and regional students.

Over the length of this debate the calls I received were all different, but the stories were similar: the students were very keen to attend university but could not afford to do it without the support of youth allowance. Obviously, they had the cost of shifting to Adelaide and setting up residence in Adelaide, and that was not covered by the youth allowance. A councillor for Mt Gambier had been lobbying the federal government to urgently rectify the independence criteria for Mt Gambier since early last year. He said that the independence requirements were unreasonable, unfair and impractical, particularly during university, and that regional students needed more support to compensate for the expense of moving to the city.

I am glad that the government is finally giving students in Barker a fair chance of furthering their education, but why did it take so long? The government had half a dozen chances to change the criteria for youth allowance: why did it take so long to fix an issue that was so obvious? The coalition continually pushed for the government to make the criteria fairer for inner regional students. We tried to give a voice to those students who were being treated so unfairly, but the government did not seem to want to listen. We introduced motions and legislation, we tabled petitions, we held roundtables and we spoke to the media over and over again, but this government is so arrogant that it took 2½ years for Labor to see the error of its ways. So arrogant was this government that members on the other side voted against the coalition's private member's motion on youth allowance criteria, to the detriment of students all over Australia.

During several debates on this matter members on the other side suggested that we were ignoring the government's announcement earlier this year about the increased numbers going to university. The coalition does not have a problem with that; it welcomes that. We support that, but there was still the problem of the criteria for the so-called inner regional students not being based on educational criteria but on medical criteria and the availability of doctors. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the ability of students to attend university.

We were trying to address the problem, which was caused by the government, but it took the Labor members 2½ years to come to their senses. The government claimed that the number of inner regional students receiving youth allowance increased by 4,250 students, or 20 per cent in 12 months. The problem is that the government did not disclose that there are many students receiving only a part rate of allowance. The truth is in the details once again.

During Senate estimates it was revealed that some students could be getting as low as a few dollars a week of dependent youth allowance, compared to the full rate of $388. I would challenge anyone to be able to afford to attend university on a few dollars a week or a fortnight. These students have packed up and moved to the city to attend university because obviously they cannot attend on a daily basis from 450 kilometres away. Not too many of them own a private jet, I can assure you, and I do not think we would be giving them youth allowance if they could afford to fly to university.

It is an obvious problem. They cannot go to university on a daily basis so they have to move from home, and that costs money. During Senate estimates questioning, departmental official Marsha Milliken said that it would be a varied mix of students, some receiving the maximum rate and some receiving the part rate. To claim that 4,250 extra students are getting youth allowance, which we would welcome, denies the fact that many of them are only on a very small portion of that allowance.

Even more concerning are the government's plans. Senator Evans was recorded as saying:

… we are committed to removing those distinctions between the various rural and regional areas, but we’ve also made it clear that there is not an endless bucket of money and I think people need to be aware that does not mean that everyone will move to the outer regional rules.

Basically, this is the government admitting that students would miss out under its watch, and now we have another Labor backflip. After all this time has elapsed since the government was first made aware of the original discrepancy, it has finally fixed the problem.

I heard the member for Braddon speak. He is a good friend of mine, and he talks a lot in this chamber. But he referred to the 2½ years as 'a period of review'. I am embarrassed for him and I am embarrassed for members on the other side, because they have to use lines such as that to cover up the big mistake that this government made. After all the pressure from angry students and parents, even after the coalition reminded the government time after time and week after week that this was just not good enough—and that was just in the period of review—it is hard to believe.

Members and senators from the coalition did a great job of keeping up the pressure on this issue. The member for Sturt in his role as the shadow minister, the member for Forrest, Senator Nash and many others were fantastic advocates for this cause. It was disgraceful that it took 2½ years for the government members to stand up and show the sort of support for students that this side of the House displayed all along. Regional students were stymied by a stupid ruling, a stupid line on a map, that is not based on educational criteria or on the ability to go to university. It is based simply on the availability of doctors in a town, not on the ability of students to go to university—which should have been the first principle.

With my remaining time I wish to raise another important issue. During the 2½ years the problems with youth allowance raged on, I took many calls from students and families who had contacted Centrelink to speak about their eligibility. I understand that it can be difficult to make every single person fit into a single criterion as set out by legislation, but time after time I received calls from frustrated students and families who had been given incorrect advice. Obviously the people in Centrelink had not been instructed to give the details on what is inner regional and outer regional and they did not understand the difference.

On 13 May this year I wrote to the Minister for Human Services, Tanya Plibersek, to make her aware of my constituents' difficulties with Centrelink advice. In my correspondence I highlighted the need to adequately train staff and suggested that problems families are facing with incorrect advice had been made worse by the youth allowance discrepancy for students from Mount Gambier. That incorrect advice suggested that they would be treated the same as those at, say, Naracoorte or Penola in the outer regional areas. They were given the wrong advice, had their hopes raised by the suggestion that they would be eligible for youth allowance and then, when it finally came back, were told they were not, so that was even worse.

Senator Nash also very kindly wrote to the minister and raised the concerns of my constituents in budget estimates on 1 June this year. In response to my correspondence, the Minister for Human Services stated that the issue was complex and apologised for the unsatisfactory service. The minister for tertiary education, Senator Evans, refused to accept any responsibility for the unfair treatment of regional students and the resulting difficulties for Centrelink staff in giving correct advice. Unfortunately, this is what I have come to expect from this government. Ministers seem oblivious to the problems that exist within their own legislation and are largely unwilling to correct them.

Sadly, that example was not the only one I heard. I had contact from other families who had also been given incorrect advice. It beggars belief. If Centrelink staff cannot understand the legislation then how are families and students meant to? This has been the case with many programs under this government. Look at the examples: pink batts, BER, computers in schools and green loans. As with all of those programs and many others, youth allowance fell victim to this government's hopeless management.

The more worrying factor is what it takes for this government to realise the errors of its ways. We all know the sad stories of pink batts. We all saw the rip-off with BER. It took 2½ long years of constant lobbying by the coalition and relentless efforts from all members before this government decided to do a backflip. We welcome that backflip, but we have to ask: why did it take so long, why did they get it wrong in the first place and when are they going to apologise to the students in rural areas who have been disadvantaged by such a shocking decision of this government?

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

It is with mixed emotions that I rise to talk on the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011. They are mixed emotions because, as the member for Barker has so eloquently outlined, the government has finally decided to do a backflip, listen and make the changes that we have been asking for for 2½ years. The problem is that it has left students for 2½ years in limbo. To start with I would like to see the government coming in here and sincerely offering an apology to those students who were left in limbo for the last 2½ years.

This afternoon I would like to outline the cases of two of those students to whom the government might consider making that apology. They are two students who have been left in limbo because of this government's tin ear. It is a tin ear that this government has—and I hate to say it, but it seems to be the Prime Minister in particular who has the tin ear, because let us not forget that it was the Prime Minister in another guise when she was the Minister for Education who brought in these changes and heralded them as fair and delivering to students more access to tertiary education, not less. It is the Prime Minister who ultimately should be the one who apologises to all those students in regional Australia who have missed out on accessing a tertiary education over the last 2½ years.

I want to place on the record just two examples of students who have had difficulty because of the changes the Prime Minister brought into this chamber when she was the minister. This is a letter I got from Anna Zebra:

I have been increasingly frustrated with the Youth Allowance situation and the fact that it directly disadvantages country students. I am more than happy for you to use our situation as an example. and will outline our story:

We have four children, and at this stage two have chosen to pursue a tertiary education, which in both cases involves them moving over two hours from home to do so. We live about 10 minutes from Hamilton in a small town called Tarrington. Unfortunately we are not in a financial position to support two children living away from home.

My daughter Jaz completed year 12 in 2008 and took a year off in 2009 to work and travel, then comenced her tertiary study in Melbourne in 2010. She qualified for Youth Allowance as an independant having satisfied the requirements, and is continuing to study and support herself this year.

My son Tyler completed year 12 in 2009 and also took the following year off to work so that he could also qualify for Youth Allowance. Unfortunately the requirements were changed in this period so that now due to the "zoning" rule he cannot recieve the payments and will have to try to support himself in his sudies at Ballarat University. I will outline his situation in point form below—

and she goes on. In the end, Tyler decided not to attend Ballarat University and deferred his position for 12 months—a prime example of what happened as a result of this government's changes.

I will also read out the case of Michelle Jansen, and hers is even more tragic. She grew up in a family living outside of Hamilton and had decided that once she finished year 12 she was going to attend RMIT in Hamilton for the nursing course. She decided that she wanted to move out of the home, so she did this and incurred all the expenses which go with that: purchasing her own fridge, washing machine et cetera. She started working in the local McDonald's and started racking up the hours she needed to qualify as independent. Sadly for her, the rental accommodation that she was living in burnt down, and she lost everything. As she says in the letter that she wrote to me, 'That night was the worst night of my life.'

She had a small amount of contents insurance coverage that did not cover all of her possessions, which then just meant that she had to work even harder to pay for new contents. She says, 'This disaster put me back to square 1.' But with persistence she recovered and was heading along to being able to do her nursing course at RMIT in Hamilton. Then, sadly, RMIT in Hamilton could no longer offer their nursing course. As she writes in the letter to me, when she heard this news:

I was balling my eyes out!

I couldn’t believe that one of the things that kept me going through the house fire incident, was cancelled on me. I was very frustrated and hurt for a second time in a period of a year! I didn’t know what to do.

She explored whether she could go to Warrnambool to do nursing there. There is a very good course offered by Deakin. Fortunately for her, someone else was trying to look after her and was able to point her in the direction of accessing a full Commonwealth fee scholarship—without her knowing—at Bundoora in Melbourne. Delighted by this news, she thought, 'Okay, now I will look and see how I can qualify to get my independent youth allowance.' As she said:

I worked it out that I had earned more than enough of the 75% with independent youth allowance and that I would be able to afford uni down in Melbourne possibly after all.

I had decided to go down to orientation week, have a look around and see what it was going to be like. It seemed so out of my comfort zone! I was used to the quiet country life and had only been to Melbourne approx. 7 times in my life that I can remember. The big city was too busy and I hated it there! It was a place I was avoiding when deciding where to go to university for nursing.

I thought if I went, I had the option of withdrawing before 31st of March if I disliked it, could fill in a leave of absence, or transferred possibly if I made it through the whole year.

While all this decision making was going on for her and she was deciding whether she should go down to Melbourne for what she has explained would be a huge move, she started inquiring at Centrelink as to when and how she would get her payment for independent youth allowance. Sadly, she was told after two or three weeks that she would not be able to get any independent youth allowance at all. She goes on in the letter to describe her sadness at having her house burn down, of having her two courses in Hamilton and Warrnambool not available to her, and then having being able to go to Melbourne taken out of her grasp. Her sadness turned to pure anger at the mishandling and bungling of the independent youth allowance issue.

Those are just two examples—and I have received many more—from students in my electorate who have suffered as a result of this federal government's bungling of this issue. I would hope that at some stage someone from the government—and it should be the Prime Minister because it was her legislation—would come into this place and offer an apology. Students in inner regional areas have suffered for 2½ years as a result of the changes made by this Prime Minister.

I could think, 'Okay; this is explainable,' if it were a unique example of the incompetence and bungling that we have seen from this government. But, sadly, it is not. Sadly, the lessons do not seem to be being learnt. One only has to look at the live export issue, or the turmoil that the Australian population has had to endure over the last 48 hours or the problems with the BER program. I was at a school in my electorate only four days ago; they have been looking at their brand new gymnasium for two terms, but the students, sadly, cannot access it. It is just story after story after incompetence. It is sad what it is doing to the Australian population. I think that they are looking to government and wondering how incompetent a government can get. How can it do this to these people? How can it do this to these students in inner regional areas? How could it come up with a policy which it said was providing fairness when, in fact, it was doing quite the opposite? It is not a good situation.

As we have seen, the government had 2½ years to fix this. For 2½ years we have tabled petitions in this place, for 2½ years we have put forward private members' bills in this place and for 2½ years we have written to ministers about letters from students who are being impacted upon. Yet the government would not act. Why wouldn't it act? I hope it was not out of malice towards these students from regional and country Australia or that they were out of sight and out of mind and were not cared about. If that is the case, it is sad beyond belief.

I hope that the government has learnt from this sad case which has occurred over the last 2½ years and I hope that now it will seek to address the whole issue of providing proper financial assistance to tertiary students from country areas. There are two things which the government could do. It could say that we need a complete review of how the system works. We have to look at ways of ending the decline in the participation of students from regional and rural areas. That is the first thing—a complete review of the funding is required. The second thing required is that the government could provide assistance for universities in regional and rural areas. We have to ensure that those universities have the support that they need to offer the necessary courses. That way, we can not only get country students accessing those universities but also get city kids going to regional and rural areas to attend university. You could get a crossover which would work really well for Australia as a whole. We are seeing the continued urbanisation of Australia, which is a growing issue that we are continuing to grapple with. By putting more focus and more resources into our universities in regional and rural areas it would help with the growing issue of urbanisation in Australia today.

As I said at the outset, I rise to speak on this bill today with sadness because of the impact it has had on regional and rural students for 2½ years. I also rise knowing that, finally, the government has acted, and I ask, once again, for the government to admit that it got it wrong and that it has caused a lot of angst for students in inner regional areas. I hope that the government has learnt from this. I hope that, in future, it will look at the consequences that come from changing legislation and implementing something which in the end hurts, in particular, our country areas.

It might be all well and good to have decision making which improves the lot of those in urban areas, but the government should always remember that there could be unintended consequences for those living outside urban areas. That is exactly what the legislative changes made 2½ years ago by the government did, and they caused an enormous amount of angst in inner regional areas. The 2½ years to fix them was far too long. I am glad that the government has finally owned up and admitted that it got it wrong. An apology from the government would be appreciated by us on this side. I do not expect it, sadly, but it would be good if it did come. I hope now the government will move to improve the lot of country students who want to access a tertiary education and will look to review the whole funding system.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As an MP who represents a regional seat and regional students who aspire to going to university, I am very pleased to speak on the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011. From the outset, let me congratulate Senator Fiona Nash whose focus and persistence drove this issue and led Nationals and rural Liberals to persist with this issue for 2½ years. The government have finally capitulated and, hearing the speeches today, you know why they had to.

The bill, as we see it today, has been a long time coming. The government's delay in seeing common sense in the issue of students in regional areas qualifying for the independent rate of youth allowance has caused untold heartache for thousands of families living in regional Australia. Over those 2½ years, how many kids did it deprive of or drive away from tertiary education? That is the real crime. Finally, after these 2½ years of lobbying by students, parents, educational stakeholders, communities and the coalition's rural members, the government has introduced legislative changes to make accessing independent youth allowance easier for students classified as living in inner regional areas.

The government has, at long last, agreed to ditch the 30-hour-a-week work rule for inner regional students and apply exactly the same and fairer criteria that apply to students in outer regional, remote and very remote areas. This may appear a complex issue, but in fact it is really quite straightforward—all regional students deserve to be treated the same when it comes to accessing independent youth allowance.

Under the government's original scheme, virtually every student in my electorate was classified as 'inner regional'. The only exceptions were students living in a wedge of sparsely populated country. In fact, the map used to decide the various classifications is actually one used by the Department of Health and Ageing in deciding the remoteness of areas of regions throughout Australia. What that has to do with tertiary education bewilders me. The absurdity of this arbitrary boundary is demonstrated by the fact that students living on the eastern side of Goodwood Road—Goodwood Road being an artery through my electorate—were classified as 'outer regional' whilst those on the western side were classified as 'inner regional'. Students in this situation could wave to each other from their bedroom windows, but one of them would have work 30 hours a week for 18 months over a two-year period to qualify for the independent rate of youth allowance whereas the other could simply work for a lump sum of $19,500 over an 18-month period.

The quandary was exacerbated by the fact that finding paid employment in regional Australia has become increasingly difficult under this government. In the Wide Bay Burnett region it has been particularly hard, as the region's unemployment rate has risen consistently since Labor came to power. When the coalition left government in November 2007, the region's unemployment rate was 3.5 per cent. Since then it has climbed to more than 10 per cent, and in August it hit 12.3 per cent.

We all know how hard it can be for young people to get their foot in the door when it comes to getting a job. This is proven by the unemployment rates for young people in the Wide Bay Burnett area. The full-time unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 24 in the Wide Bay Burnett region paints a stark picture of what I am saying. In November 2007, the full-time unemployment rate for this age group in the Wide Bay Burnett region was 9.2 per cent. If you have a look at July of this year, it is up to 28.9 per cent. That is almost one-third of young people in the region without any form of paid work. As you can imagine, the pool of jobs for kids who want to work part time is not going to be real bright either.

Just what sort of government expects its young people in such a poor employment environment to find a job and then work three-quarters of a full-time load before they can qualify for educational assistance? I could never see the sense of this. On the one hand, we of all parties run around saying: 'We've got to keep our kids in tertiary education. We've got to be the smart country. We've got to be ready to have lots of well-educated people at the end of the mining boom. We've got to have all these things.' We know how tough it is for kids to get a job in country Australia. But despite all that, we have put a totally unrealistic measure on this inner regional group which makes it almost impossible for them to qualify. What we should have had is a simple measure of—over 12 months that covered one gap year of the student, not over 18 months—a demonstration that they could live independently. That is all that was needed. It did not have to be the bureaucratic nightmare which it became.

I take you to the case of Cairns and Townsville. I am not critical of Cairns and Townsville as communities—they are marvellous communities, but I am using them as a basis of comparison. They did not have to suffer this inner regional classification. Townsville has a population of 186,000 people and Cairns has a population of 151,000. They have university campuses of 11,000 and 4,000 students respectively. In other words, there are lots of opportunities for kids in those towns, a) to get jobs and, b) to go to university, and yet they had to meet easier criteria. Their students could qualify for the independent rates under these easier criteria and only have to contend with the maximum youth unemployment rate, in Townsville's case, of 17.6 per cent. As I said before, the rate in the Bundaberg and Harvey Bay area is 28.9 per cent. So those students living in much larger cities serviced by jet aircraft, fully fledged university campuses and fair employment opportunities have a much easier lifestyle than kids living in Childers or Bundaberg or Hervey Bay or Bargara—students in my electorate who are forced to jump through higher hoops. Statistics already show that young people living in regional and remote areas have much less chance of obtaining a university degree than those living in the cities, and throughout this saga the government has made it even more difficult for them. I did a little bit of research on this and I found that the population of regional Australia is approximately 25 per cent of the total population of the country, whereas the tertiary student participation rate in regional Australia is 18 per cent—18 per cent against a total population of 25 per cent. In other words, regional Australia was at a disadvantage before all this nonsense the government participated in commenced.

Back in 2009, more than 700 local residents signed a youth allowance petition I sponsored, protesting Labor's decision to make retrospective changes to the scheme's qualifying criteria. Their concerns were entirely understandable. It costs families between $18,000 and $20,000 each year to have a student away at university; it is very different, of course, if they live at home. Many students from my electorate aspire to attend capital city universities—not for any self-aggrandisement but rather to get to certain courses that are not available on regional campuses. Under the government's former manifesto, either those kids had to work full-time hours whilst studying to have any hope of qualifying for the independent youth allowance or their parents had to subsidise their living costs. Either way, it made their lives, and the lives of their parents, very difficult indeed.

Labor and the Independents have continually thwarted the Coalition's attempts to fix the problem and make the criteria fairer for the thousands of students affected. While perhaps you can understand the indifference of the members for Melbourne and Denison in this matter because of the sorts of electorate they come from, I was surprised that my colleagues the members for Lyne and New England should have made it difficult. I would have thought they of all people, with University of New England and Southern Cross University campuses in their electorates, should have been at the forefront of that.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Now you're just like the rest of them.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, I am not like the rest of them. We have to be answerable for things, and I think you guys have to sometimes as well. Anyhow, earlier this year the Senate passed a coalition bill that would have made it easier for students living in inner regional areas, including Bundaberg, the Coral Coast, Childers and Hervey Bay, to access the allowance. The bill required fair and equitable treatment for regional students in accessing independent youth allowance, and it was something families in my electorate, as I said, were crying out for. Unfortunately, the government reacted by saying the bill was unconstitutional, and in a matter of days the four Independents voted with federal Labor in favour of Labor's then commitment to 'review' the student income support scheme sometime in the future. That was hardly the solution. At that time, the review was slated to report by 1 July of this year, with changes to be operational from 1 January next year. The coalition pushed for the government to act immediately after the review concluded, but the two regional Independents again voted with Labor, which ensured that the time frame between the recommendations and actual changes was not shortened. For the life of me, again—these are two people I respect and get on with—I could never understand why.

The delay, of course, caused great frustration for families living in regional areas. They had to wait until September to hear the fast-breaking news that the government—surprise, surprise—had decided to let inner regional students apply for the independent allowance under the same rules as outer regional, remote and very remote students—in other words, what it was originally and what the coalition had been demanding all along. Specifically, to be able to qualify for the independent youth allowance, students from 'inner regional' areas will have to earn at least $21,009 over an 18-month period or have worked at least 15 hours a week for at least two years after leaving high school. That will be achievable; the other measure was very difficult. So in a nutshell, after to-ing and fro-ing, public debate, legislative changes and the heartache of regional families, we have come right back to where we started from.

What I am pleased to see though, is the ability of 2009 and 2010 school leavers, if they have worked and met the requirements, to qualify for independent youth allowance when these changes come into effect. But to achieve all this, of course, the government has to find savings to offset the costs of the changes, and they come in at around $265 million, comprising: (1) wind-up of the Rural Tertiary Hardship Fund; (2) deferral of measures to extend youth allowance eligibility for masters by coursework students from 1 January 2012 until 1 January 2014; (3) reducing the value of start-up scholarships from $2,194 a year to $2,050 a year from 1 January 2012; and (4) adjusting the amount of the relocation scholarship. Of course, the irony here is that, had the government not changed the independent youth allowance criteria in the first place, they would not have been put in the position where this $265 million was necessary.

That having been said, I return to my original theme. I congratulate Senator Fiona Nash. She did a persistent, well-measured and careful job on this. She led the coalition's National Party and rural Liberal members to a very successful outcome, and I must say I am delighted for all regional Australian students.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I rise to speak on the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011. I made a few notes for my speech. At the top of them I have noted that I am very disappointed in the road just taken by the member for Hinkler, for whom I have great personal regard. It highlights the way in which the National Party in particular have turned this issue on its head for political advantage. I was not going to do this today but, given the comments I have heard, I now think I will. I will place on record some of the Senate Hansard from when the previous arrangements were put in place. The member for Hinkler may not have known about this but I think he should know, and it is something that members who are really interested in the youth allowance debate should be aware of. I am very proud of the role that I have played, and I congratulate the member for Lyne, Rob Oakeshott, in terms of the arrangements that have been put in place since the hung parliament—the review was expedited by 12 months—and the final agreement to review the disparity between inner and outer regional students. Obviously, this has been of concern to a lot of young people and their parents, and that would seem to be a bit of an indicator that the opposition in this parliament appear to be very keen to create fear amongst people. Even in recent months, when they were very well aware that this issue was going to be resolved through the budgetary process et cetera, they have gone out and continually created that fear.

The genesis of the issue between inner and outer regional students actually came out of the last parliament, and I think most of us would remember that. I was involved in the debate at the time. With the nature of the Senate at the time, I was attempting to negotiate on the final night with Steve Fielding—in fact, the current Prime Minister was the minister at that time—to come up with a regional package that would overcome some of the issues we are still talking about today and which have been resolved through the injection of $265 million.

People who have followed this debate or who have been taken in by the guilt process that the National Party in particular have been trying to cover up should know that one of the reasons those negotiations with Senator Fielding were not able to get through was that the government of the day and the National and Liberal parties had done a deal whereby inner and outer regional students would be treated differently. So rather than being the bastion of good against evil, the National and Liberal parties were in part the creators of this difference between inner and outer regional students. It was based on a sum of dollars rather than a long-term policy in relation to country students. Both sides of parliament were complicit in the arrangement.

I will read from some previous documentation. The deal struck by the coalition with the government in the previous parliament, which enabled students in outer regional and remote areas to apply under the old eligibility rules, excluded students from inner regional areas such as Tamworth. The amendment referred by Senator Nash at the time to include inner regional students under the old criteria was very much political trickery to cover up their botched deal with the government. This was particularly highlighted by Senator Fielding during the debate in the Senate regarding the amendment. Students of this particular issue should have a good look at this. Senator Fielding, on 17 March 2010, noted:

It was very interesting to hear Senator Carr say that the coalition, which is the National Party and the Liberal Party, did not include inner regional in their agreement with the government. That is interesting. Where was the National Party when you were sitting down with the minister agreeing to a deal that cut out rural and regional areas? Where were they? They are here now. But where were they when the minister said that they did not include inner regional in the deal? That is funny. The National Party did not seem to want to stand up then.

That is the genesis of the problem we face. A deal was struck on behalf of the coalition—and Christopher Pyne does not deny this because he was a signatory to the deal—that inner and outer regional students would be treated differently when the legislation went through the Senate. The National Party had a bit of a panic and the guilts in the Senate at the time even though their shadow minister had signed off on the deal. Suddenly they thought: 'This doesn't look good for us. We have not stood up for our people. We'd better run an amendment in the Senate—which we know will fail because our shadow minister has already signed a deal on it—so that we can refer to it as a valiant attempt to stand up for country kids if anybody ever reflects on this grubby deal between Christopher Pyne and the government minister at that time.' And that is what the member for Hinkler has just done. So that is the genesis of the issue that we are dealing with.

I remember being involved at that time in getting a retrospectivity issue removed from that particular piece of legislation, which in fact had been agreed on by some members of the coalition at the time. Marching forward to the new parliament, I remember that this issue was raised in the decision-making period when we were working with both Mr Abbott and Ms Gillard on the formation of a new government. Given that a great number of regional students were now able to gain access to youth allowance through new criteria based on their parents income rather than through the work test, it was decided that there needed to be a review: how do you put in place something that actually embraces the income of the parents—so that some students are not encouraged towards a gap year; they can go directly to university and access youth allowance on the basis of the parental income—and takes out the disparity between inner and outer regional students?

The member for Lyne and I had a number of meetings with the Prime Minister and others—the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs and Workplace Relations, Senator Evans, and many staff members—in the formulation of the policy after the review had taken place. I am proud of the role that I have played in that. But people should remember that the genesis of a lot of this stuff was in a parliament where Christopher Pyne, on behalf of the coalition, signed off with the minister of the day and agreed that inner and outer regional students would be treated differently.

There has been prancing about and the gnashing of teeth in here today about how this has all been created because of Senator Nash. I congratulate Senator Nash because she has talked about this issue, but she did not stand up in the Senate when the time was right to stand up. She agreed to the deal and then found this might be used against the coalition at a future time, so they resurrected this mickey mouse arrangement to make it look as though they had stood up when they had not and when their shadow minister had already signed off a deal.

This year there have still been some in the Senate who have been guilty about the distancing of the inner and outer regional students. So suddenly we started to see some legislation which was obviously tailored towards country Independents in this chamber. They were political pieces of legislation rather than attempts to do anything meaningful about a real issue. I have been in a hung parliament before. I have seen it before. It was the Labor Party back then trying to do it when I was supporting a Liberal government. The Labor Party would dish up what we used to call these embarrassing country Independent issues almost daily.

Senator Nash and others decided, 'Let's introduce some legislation into the Senate and we can reverse order it back to the lower house.' The member for Lyne and I looked very seriously at those pieces of legislation and I sought legal advice from the clerks. I also sought legal advice from outside the building as to the constitutionality of those money bills. I know the general public does not fully understand that, and I understand that they do not, so it is easy for people to play politics and say, 'We tried.' Senator Nash has been saying for months, 'We tried, but the dreadful country Independents would not support us and isn't it terrible,' having forgotten what happened on 17 March 2010 when the coalition sided with the very amendment that took out the inner regional students. They were complicit in that deal.

So we had this run of bills that were unconstitutional because they were money bills and there were all sorts of threats to test that in various places. I take notice of the clerks. I think the clerks in this parliament are a credit to our democratic processes. All of us in this building from time to time have had a need to talk to the clerks about various private issues or complex pieces of legislation. Irrespective of political persuasion, the clerks give extraordinarily good advice and their confidences are kept. I think all of us would agree with that statement. I have talked to the clerks on a number of occasions. I got written advice as to whether the Senate legislation could go through the House of Representatives and, if it did, whether it would be accepted by the Governor-General. That advice was that they did not think that it could, they thought it was unconstitutional, and that even if the House did pass the legislation it probably would not go anywhere. There was a whole range of other machinations that I will not enter into.

I also sought independent legal advice from outside the parliament. That was not to check on the clerks—I have the utmost faith in their views—but I thought it was worth getting an outside opinion. Similar opinions were given. I am quite disappointed in the member for Hinkler. I do regard him as a friend and I think he is a very good member of parliament and a good representative of his community, but he is running this nonsense that the country Independents—as he calls them—did not support the coalition's attempt to change the legislation over the confusion between inner and outer regional students. The member for Lyne and I worked diligently on getting this done. It is done, it has been done and it has been fixed. We have maintained the very real advantages that were not in the original Howard legislation and were not in the butchered arrangement between Christopher Pyne and the minister in the previous government. We have maintained the parental income arrangements as well as gained the capacity to remove the differentiation between the inner and outer regional students.

The conga line of people coming into here today trying to create an old type of history demonstrates the guilt they must have felt from when they signed off on the deal they argued against for the next two years. They then introduced these country Independent mickey mouse pieces of legislation in the Senate to make it look in the public arena that country people were voting against their own people. One of the things we all have to have regard for in this place, irrespective of politics, is the Constitution. That is the process that I went through in determining the constitutionality or otherwise of the bills that were coming out of the Senate. So I congratulate the minister, I congratulate the government and I congratulate all who have been involved in a constructive process to rectify a problem that was created five years ago. (Time expired)

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to provide some concluding remarks in relation to the Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011, and table a correction to the explanatory memorandum as I do that.

Higher education is central to achieving the government's vision of a stronger, fairer and more productive nation, and the government's commitment to increasing access to university for students is a key element of higher education reform. The Social Security Amendment (Student Income Support Reforms) Bill 2011 will amend the Social Security Act 1991 to remove distinctions between students from inner regional Australia and those from other regional and remote areas in accessing independent youth allowance. It also ensures that young people from outside the major cities, who are dependent on their families for financial assistance and need to relocate for their university studies, will receive additional financial support in the second and third years.

Following last year's reforms to student income support, many more young people particularly those from families with low income, are now accessing youth allowance while they study at university. Overall, from March 2010 to June 2011, there has been an 18 per cent increase in the number of students accessing youth allowance. The reforms have also had a positive impact on families from remote and regional areas of Australia, with more young people who need to live away from home to study being able to access assistance.

Through this bill the government will deliver a fair and equitable package of additional measures that provides additional support to young people from regional areas, while maintaining an emphasis on assisting students from low socio-economic backgrounds. From 1 January 2012 students from inner regional areas will have access to the more generous part-time earnings and workforce participation for independent youth allowance currently available to outer regional, remote and very remote students who need to live away from home to study after completing secondary school and whose parents earn less than $150,000 per annum.

The new independence arrangements will be available to young people from inner regional Australia from 1 January 2012 subject to them meeting the eligibility criteria. Employment since leaving school will be taken into account when assessing whether a young person meets the criteria, even if that work was done prior to 1 January 2012 by a young person who left school in 2011, 2010 or earlier.

To assist in resolving any confusion about whether work undertaken prior to 1 January 2012 can be counted towards the independence test I have tabled corrections to the explanatory memorandum for this bill that clarify this matter. The government is also resetting the value of relocation scholarships to provide extra support for eligible dependent students from regional areas. These scholarships will generally be $4,000 in the first year the young person is required to live away from home to study, and $1,000 in subsequent years of study in an approved scholarship course.

For eligible dependent students from regional and remote areas the relocation scholarship amounts are doubled to $2,000 in the second and third years of living away from home to study. These amounts will be indexed from 2013 and there are no changes to eligibility criteria. In any year there will be around 15,000 students who will benefit from this change over the period of their degree. The amendments to the explanatory memorandum also clarify that the new relocation scholarship amounts will apply from 2012 for all eligible recipients.

In addition to several technical amendments the bill includes amendments to offset the cost of the extra assistance for regional students from within existing funds. This fiscally responsible package reflects the government's ongoing commitment to open doors to higher education for young Australians.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.