Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to speak on the announcement in the budget that the government has addressed a longstanding sore for rural and regional parents of students. By getting rid of the family assets test and the family actual means test from the youth allowance parental income test, the measure will base the assessment for the young person's access to youth allowance on the same criteria as the family tax benefit part A.

Representing a large regional area, this has been a longstanding bone of contention as far as I am concerned. Yes, it is true that people choose where they live, and of course there are penalties for living in certain places. But I have always argued that the children never choose where they live. If they are disadvantaged by the fact that their parents have chosen to live, in this case, hundreds of kilometres not only from a senior secondary school but also from tertiary education, then that is not their fault. In many cases, a family—particularly farming families, but small business people as well—can be what we call 'asset rich and income poor'. The issue with that is they may well have substantial assets that mean they are rubbed out of the potential for their children to apply for youth allowance.

As I said, this is a long ongoing issue. The previous government changed the rules in 2009 and made it far more difficult for many of these potential students to access the independent stream of youth allowance. Since that time, we have seen those numbers accessing that stream fall dramatically. There has been a bit of an increase in the number of rural and regional students attending university, but at the same time we are seeing a larger increase again in those who are attending from metropolitan areas. That effectively means the gap between country and city is becoming greater, not smaller.

This is still an outstanding issue for this government and any government that should follow us, as far as I am concerned. We need to be able to make sure that children from rural and regional areas get the same kind of equal access to education as those from the cities. It is much cheaper and easier to stay living at home in your parents' place and just hop on public transport that might drop you off at the university in 20 minutes. There is considerable cost in relocating to the city, possibly 1,000 kilometres or more away, setting up a new home and setting up a new life separated from family. I congratulate the government for making this very good first step. (Time expired)