Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

And we are bringing down the age of independence—and you do not talk about that either—and creating new scholarships. That is the third thing that you do not talk about when you try to discuss this issue. You want to focus on one aspect, not four aspects. This will mean that parental income will now be the primary measure for eligibility. So, in fact, what your parents earn and their threshold will be the primary measure. For many students, this means that they will no longer have to prove their eligibility for youth allowance by working. I would have thought that is what you would want to achieve, because more students than ever will be eligible for youth allowance automatically under the raised parental income test.

This reform will allow 67,800 young people to access income youth allowance or ABSTUDY to support their participation in post-compulsory secondary education, vocational education, higher education, Australian Apprenticeships or a combination of activities. In addition, 34,600 existing recipients who currently receive a part payment will receive an increase in their payment—I don’t hear you talking about that either, Senator Nash—often to the full payment rate. Those who have worked full-time and are independent of their parents can still access support in this way.

Under Labor’s system, a family from the bush with two kids at university, who might be aged 17 and 21 and living away from home, will now be able to automatically receive some support if they have a family income up to $139,388. That is up from the previous cut-off, for this type of family, of around $75,324. That is a major increase in the eligibility criteria for parents’ income. But I do not hear the coalition talking about the benefits and gains from increasing the threshold. Under our new system, families who receive one dollar of student income support will be entitled to the entire Student Start-up Scholarship, worth $2,254 for each year—not once but each year—the student is in university and is eligible for student income support. This new scholarship is equivalent to an increase in payments of around $43 per week.

Under existing arrangements, a young person on youth allowance or ABSTUDY is considered to be dependent on their parents until they turn 25, unless they establish their independence through other means. The package of student income support reforms will progressively lower the age of independence to 24 in 2010, 23 in 2011 and 22 in 2012. So we will lower the age of independence to ensure that the age of independence accurately reflects when individuals become independent of their parents.

These reforms are a major achievement. They will increase access to student income support and provide stronger and more equitable assistance for the students who need it most, including students from low-income backgrounds, those from rural and regional areas and, of course, Indigenous students. Of course, what this whole issue does is to remind the electorate what a mess the coalition left us with with regard to student support and tertiary education. You sat on your hands for 12 long years and did nothing to address the situation when it comes to supporting students who try to study.

The Nationals will have you believe that these reforms disadvantage regional and remote students. However, they clearly have not read the detail of the policy. The changes actually provide for more regional and remote students to be able to access Youth Allowance. But the other side does not want to hear about the good news and the positive changes in this. They just want to focus on a single issue without looking at the whole package.

A 75 per cent discount will now be applied to the parental income test when considering business assets, including farm assets. I do not hear them talking about that part of the package. This means that Youth Allowance and Abstudy can be received by dependent young people from small business and farming families with assets up to the value of $2.286 million. In addition, more regional and remote students will now be able to apply for the new relocation scholarship. The relocation scholarship provides $4,000 in the first year and $1,000 in subsequent years. In comparison to the old Commonwealth accommodation scholarship, the relocation scholarship represents a 28 per cent increase in the number of accommodation related scholarships that will be available to students living away from home.

After years of neglect, the coalition have prepared a range of half-baked amendments to our policy before the legislation has even entered the Senate. The coalition aim to delay the implementation of the new saving measures for a year and will pay for this by slashing scholarships for 146,600 needy students. They also want to create a targeted scholarship pool for rural and regional students, whose scholarships would only amount to a small portion of the money they intend to rip out of scholarships for all students, regional and metropolitan alike.

The coalition is leading a concerted misinformation campaign, which has caused much anxiety for students who are undertaking a gap year and their families. They suggested students who are currently working and who might previously have been hoping to access Youth Allowance under old workforce participation criteria—that is, earning about $19,000 over 18 months—will now no longer be able to access Youth Allowance. What you do not tell many of the students is that, in some circumstances, many of those students who are currently in their gap year will not need to work any more, because they will automatically become eligible for Youth Allowance under the changes to the parental income test.