Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely—as Senator Adams said, asset rich and income poor. To address the income issue, the only way you could do that would be to sell the asset down. And the more the asset is sold down, the less the opportunity to support the family that is coming through. So that is a nonsensical option for everyone.

I just do not know what has driven this. It could be a class based approach: a jealousy of the fact that certain groups of people have been abusing this. But if it is a class issue, we actually agree that it has been abused, and we agree with the requirement to change things to make sure that rich city families are not accessing that. We agree with the Labor Party in that regard, so if it is a class thing we think there is an issue that has been identified and we are quite prepared to support changes in that regard.

If, as I fear, it is ignorance based, then that, perversely, is even worse. I know that Senator Mason has referred to this, and I know that the shadow minister, Christopher Pyne, has—and I would be very surprised if Senator Nash and those speaking after me do not mention it—but it was interesting that the Victorian parliamentary education and training committee—chaired by a Labor member who, funnily enough, is actually the member for my home city, Ballarat East, Geoff Howard—was a committee with an effective Labor majority. They were concerned about this, and I will read into Hansard again the committee’s comment, which was unanimously supported by all participants, in relation to the disadvantage that would be caused by this legislation:

… the Committee believes that the removal of the main workforce participation route will have a disastrous effect on young people in rural and regional areas.

And again, that same committee found that the changes:

… will have a detrimental impact on many students who deferred their studies during 2009 in order to work and earn sufficient money to be eligible for Youth Allowance.

Again, the Senate committee recommended—and this is one of their many recommendations:

… that the workforce participation criteria in proposed section 1067A(10)(c)—

which is the fixed amount in 18 months aspect of the bill—

be extended beyond a transition measure, and be retained for students who are required to leave home to pursue their chosen course.

The Senate committee also found:

… the tightening of the workforce participation criteria has caused a high level of anxiety in the community, particularly to those students currently on their gap year, and those students who are completing Year 12 (or the equivalent) this year.

The committee went on to say:

The committee would like to put on the record that it believes the Government has handled the implementation of this policy reform poorly.

Poorly? Appallingly, I would say, has been the treatment in this regard. There are a whole lot of kids—and I will call them kids because they are kids—who are finishing their schooling this year who, on the back of discussions with Centrelink and on the back of discussions with their school, believed that they would be able to access a gap year, going forward. There are a whole lot of kids at the moment who are in that gap year who believed that they would be able to access that gap year and then get onto the independent youth allowance. So you have a whole group of kids who were going to study next year and who are taking the gap year this year and a whole group of kids who quite reasonably assumed when they were planning the next two years that this would continue. The minister has made absolutely minimal changes, which I think, from recollection, affected remote students only. Of about 30,000 students, five have been offered some relief. But the younger brothers and sisters of those people are in the same position as the other 25,000. There is an acknowledgement of an issue but not an acknowledgement of a long-term issue. How absolutely crass is that?

We have proposed, in my view, very sensible amendments. The minister, in her second reading speech on this bill, said that it would:

… make a difference for country kids—for rural and regional kids.

Truer words were never spoken. Will it make a difference? It will most certainly make a difference. It will make a diabolical difference to these regional and rural students. I thought it would be interesting to look through some of the submissions to the Senate committee. I will go through a couple of them. They are public documents and I am sure these people will not mind. There was a submission from Alexis Killoran, who wrote:

Due to the combined factors of my rural location and the current economic crisis I found it extremely hard to obtain a job for the first three months of my gap year. The local IGA supermarket, the biggest employer in the town closest to me, were uninterested in training someone who would shortly be leaving to attend uni. Other employers either shared the same opinion or offered only cash in hand jobs to an inexperienced young person such as myself.

Another student, Danielle Sinclair, said:

I collected papers over the last two months to see what jobs I could apply for. I come from Orange … I circled nine jobs in four weeks that I could apply for and that gave me 30 hours a week. There are another 300 kids graduating. There are just not enough jobs.

The stupidity of these new work arrangements is that there are simply not the jobs in the country towns for these kids. All of these kids who are coming out of high school are going to be going for the same minimal jobs. It is ridiculous. The lucky ones will pick up one of the very minimal jobs that are there and the rest cannot possibly comply with these requirements. Of course, they can comply if they are required to go off all over the country in search of work, but that surely was not the intention of these changes. Surely the intention was that they would be able to stay in their own area and meet these requirements and then go on and study from there.

What we quite rightly are going to move in this place is that if a student is required to move away from home to complete their studies then they should come under the old rules. Senator Adams and Senator Nash, who are in the chamber, are both country women. They know how important this is. They are mothers and they are senators. They are parents. They know what is required to give these kids the opportunity, and I think it is utterly bizarre that we are going to have a two-tier system of opportunity in this country. It is hard enough for country kids to make it in the city. The dropout rates are appalling, and they are appalling because they are kids who are away from home and they are kids who have had very limited experience with cities. So what we are going to do is take these kids out of the country and have them potentially scrounging around to put a bob together to educate themselves, when the person they are sitting beside in the classroom probably does not have that same disadvantage.

I will start to put some of these numbers into perspective. We are not talking about a couple of hundred bucks a week. We are talking, on average, about between $20,000 and $25,000 a year to have a kid living away from home. There are a lot of country people who do not have family or friends in the major capital cities, and we are potentially going to throw these kids who come from the bush into the big city. We are going to potentially put these kids into boarding houses and put them, in my view, at risk. If you want to put these kids into a university college then you can add about another $5,000 on top of that.

I want to talk in the time left to me about some who, quite frankly, I would have thought would know better. I want to talk about the current member for Corangamite, Mr Cheeseman—and I use the word ‘current’ advisedly, because he is only the current and will not be the continuing member for Corangamite after the next election. He is someone who in the truest sense of the words is Canberra’s representative in Corangamite as opposed to Corangamite’s representative in Canberra. He just plays the party line with every single issue that confronts him. He wrote an op-ed in the Geelong Advertiser. He described the bill as providing a ‘helping hand’ and as ‘positive for students and families, particularly those coming from country areas.’ What? A ‘helping hand’? ‘Positive for students and families, particularly those coming from country areas’? Where has this man been? What planet is he from with such complete and utter drivel?

I took the opportunity with Sarah Henderson, the next member for Corangamite, to have a couple of fora in both Geelong and Colac. I will tell you what: there are not too many people in Geelong or Colac who think it is positive for students and families, that they are getting a helping hand or that those coming from country areas are positive about it. Everyone who came to those fora was in exactly the situation of the couple that I referred to back in 1992.

I will finish as I started. If there is one person in this place who thinks it is reasonable to have an education differential between city and country kids in 2009 then, quite frankly, I do not think they deserve to be in this place. We have provided Minister Gillard with the opportunity to make this reasonable. We have provided her, via our amendments, with the opportunity to make sure that the legitimate concerns that she had about rich city kids abusing this are addressed without taking out the future hopes and aspirations of country kids, without taking away from them the right to share in the education experience in this country that every kid who lives in the city can have. It is an obscene piece of public policy, and I urge the Senate in the strongest possible terms to adopt what I believe are reasonable amendments which will make a poor bit of legislation a far better piece of legislation.