Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009. I am sure there would be nobody in this chamber who would not want to see young Australians given the opportunity to realise their potential through education, including tertiary education. As a young person from rural Western Australia, I would have had no opportunity at all to go to veterinary school in Queensland had it not been for opportunities given to me. Additional to that is the fact that I taught for some 14 years in rural universities. So I have a very keen interest. I can assure Senator Joyce that the trip from Brisbane back to Perth was only once a year if you were lucky.

Therefore, I have concerns about the move and the direction taken by the Minister for Education in her attempts to reform Youth Allowance. It lets down young people who have made decisions based on advice from Centrelink and their advisers and counsellors in schools. They have started the process of their gap year on the conditions they understood, only to see them changed. It is a fact that they have changed back as a result of the minister examining this more closely—for a limited number, but not for the lot. About 4,000 to 5,000 students will be advantaged by the changes the minister was forced to make as a result of pressure placed on her by the coalition, but there are still about 25,000 students who will miss out, particularly those students from rural, remote and regional areas. It is those about whom I have the greatest concern.

We heard our colleague Senator Sterle mount a very cogent case for the need for support for rural and regional students. He made the point about city students, urban students, and you only have to look where all the universities are in our cities—they are in higher socioeconomic areas and, therefore, obviously those who reside in the cities are going to have the greater opportunities. That will always be the case. But Senator Sterle was in fact trying to make the case—although he did not realise it—for greater support for rural and regional students. And that is the case that I want to see. Of course we want to see greater participation by lower socioeconomic youth in this country in higher education, and of course Indigenous youth. We know that the way forward for the Indigenous youth of this country is primary education followed by secondary education and, where possible, a greater participation in tertiary education. But we need to see far more of that.

Basically, the changes, as they have been suggested, will impact severely on rural and regional students. I want to address some of those impacts. We have heard in committee meetings about students in their final year at school who have gone to their principals requesting applications for scholarships, but on the basis that their parents not be told whether or not they were successful—because, if they are unsuccessful, they do not want the pressure to be put on their families to try to get them to university or higher education. There are instances in families, farming and other rural families, where guilt is a real issue for these children. Maybe others in the family will not be able to afford the sorts of education that they want. Maybe because the family farm has been affected through drought or other conditions, or because of the high value of the Australian dollar—for whatever reason—they actually do not want to put their families through this sort of burden. How terrible is that for young Australians at that stage of their lives—high achievers, often, who have overcome the natural disadvantages that often occur in Australia, where educational opportunities in rural areas are not available to the extent they are in the city? And then, having achieved well, they simply cannot realise that potential. Basically, that is what we need to see change.

It starts with parity for all Australian students, regardless of where they reside. In the main, you cannot go to university from rural or regional areas; you have to move to cities or to larger regional centres. What is absolutely essential is that we move to a circumstance in which there is parity in terms of accommodation before we look at any other issues. In other words, if you come from a rural or regional area, you cannot travel to that institution each day. The 90 minutes by public transport is one that I accept. But, if you cannot achieve that, then in this country we must have a circumstance in which every student is equal in terms of their accommodation before they start their higher studies. Whether that is residing at home, whether it is residing in rental accommodation, whether it is residing in university colleges or whatever, it is absolutely essential that we achieve that.

I have had a lot of communication coming from Western Australia from the Isolated Children’s Parents Association, a group that is naturally highly concerned that their children have the opportunity to participate in tertiary and higher studies. They are seeing very strongly the fact that their children are being denied this. The recognition of the costs of living away from home—transport back to home, as we heard earlier—must be balanced out with urban students. The Isolated Children’s Parents Association pleads for some sort of tertiary access allowance. However that is undertaken, it must absolutely, critically, be examined.

That brings me to another issue, which comes up again and again—that is, the basis on which we determine socioeconomic status. Largely, it is determined on postcodes. That may be appropriate for Australia’s cities. It might be easy to identify those suburbs by postcodes. But, if you look at rural and regional Australia, very often the one postcode covers an enormous geographic area. And it will also cover an enormous range of socioeconomic bases, from businesspeople through to people on farms, owning farms, working on farms, to those who may only have part-time jobs or may even not be employed. Therefore, the use of postcodes as a determinant must be changed.

We come then to the new workplace participation criteria. These include a requirement for a minimum of 30 hours work per week for 18 months. For somebody just leaving school, the prospect of getting 30 hours work per week minimum is remote. It is almost negligible. I have put the question in estimates: what about a scenario when the crayfish season is running, when there is fruit picking available, when a crop is going in or a crop is going off? Young people might be working 100 hours a week. Is it possible to calculate back and have an average of 30 hours a week? The answer has been no. There is some logic to a scenario in which, if you are working 100 hours a week, it is credited to you, but you only get 30 hours credit. And when in another week you work 29 hours, of course you have failed the criteria. This is unacceptable. This is nonsense. Everybody can see that those circumstances are not particularly difficult to change. What we need is to have a combination of both. We need to have a scenario where the existing terms and conditions apply for someone who decides to take a gap year—that is, 15 hours a week for two years or the 30 hours a week for 18 months. But I plead that that 30 hours be an average over time, not a minimum.

I also ask the question, as one who would have been challenged with this particular circumstance: if someone cannot actually achieve 30 hours of paid work a week, but they are so desperate that they have given up their 18 months—and, in many cases, that is really equivalent to two years, because they probably cannot start university until the following February—why couldn’t we have a circumstance in which up to five of those 30 hours might be voluntary work, inputted to accredited service providers in the social and community areas?

That is a circumstance in which effectively that person is still committing themselves to 30 hours a week and there is an added benefit hopefully to members of the community, whether in the aged-care sector, the environmental sector or wherever—there will be plenty of opportunities for us to look at and we will not need to condemn these young people to a circumstance where they are not going to be successful. In many instances these people are going to have to move away from home. We know that in rural and regional Australia we want more educated young people in our communities. If they go to cities and never come back to those country towns they are lost as young professionals, they are lost as families and they are lost as contributors to those rural communities. We cannot have that in this country, I submit to you.

Basically what I am pleading for is a circumstance in which we do not disadvantage those who have gone into their gap year based on what they believed would be the circumstances. We must have legislation that protects them and covers them, and we must also allow a circumstance in which they can continue, if they are going to move to the 30 hours a week for 18 months, and they can win. Otherwise we are setting them up to fail. I cannot for the life of me see why we would be setting them up to fail.

I want to come to the question of eligibility for youth allowance in terms of assets. Under the guidelines if a family’s assets, excluding the family home, exceed $570,000 then they are not eligible for youth allowance. In the case of primary producers in agriculture that figure is extended to $2.286 million in terms of net farm assets exclusive of debt, which would include the land, the improvements, the stock, the machinery and the plant and equipment. You might say that $2.286 million sounds a very generous figure, the argument being that if a family’s farming asset exceeds $2.286 million they can afford to have their children at universities in the cities without further assistance from the government. Let me put that into perspective for you, and rather than use any figures that might come out of my head let me give you the figures from the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics which were released in April this year for the period 2006-07 to 2008-09. These were divided into five different farming types: wheat and other crops, mixed livestock and cropping, sheep enterprises, beef enterprises and dairy enterprises. Remember the figure of $2.28 million, because for every single solitary one of those five sectors, according to ABARE, the asset values well and truly exceed $2.28 million.

In the case of our own wheat and sheep farming enterprises in Western Australia there would be very few farms that actually do not have a net asset value of around $6 million and so you would say, ‘Gracious me, there is no need at all for any support.’ But let me relate to you the farm cash income for those enterprises—it varies from $147,000 down to $25,000 for beef enterprises. Go a stage further and talk about what you actually have to spend on your children in the city after you have paid all your costs. According to ABARE, for those five groups the farm business profit—the average of the last few years—for wheat and other cropping was $33,000 and for mixed livestock and cropping there was a loss of $25,000. You might ask why profit is so low, but you only have to have a look around Australia in the last few years to see how farming has gone. In my own state of Western Australia we will probably harvest between eight million and 12 million tonnes of wheat and yet, with the value of the Australian dollar up around US93c, the glut of wheat around Australia and the increasing cost of inputs, most of our wheat farmers will not actually make a generous profit at all despite the fact that the season in many areas is fantastic.

For sheep enterprises ABARE shows a loss of $42,000, for beef enterprises a loss of $43,000 and for dairy enterprises a profit of $127,000. The point I want to make, and that everybody needs to understand, is that to turn around and say that a value of $2.28 million in some way accords to these people such a level of wealth that they do not need any financial support is absolutely and utterly wrong and must be addressed or we are going to condemn a whole generation of young people from farming enterprises to not being able to participate in our tertiary and higher education. That is a matter about which I have a great concern and I will speak further about this aspect. For a non-farming business enterprise, equity in the business of 10, 15 or 20 per cent would be normal, so there would be 80 per cent debt. If an Australian farming enterprise went in with equity less than around 80 per cent—and in many instances much more than that—it would be very dangerous for their long-term viability. I make the point again that the difference between the capitalisation of farming enterprises and non-farming enterprises in Australia is significant. I also have to make the point that there would not be too many enterprises with net assets of $2.28 million that could turn a profit unless it was an intensive horticulture or related activity.

In April 2008 Universities Australia announced some of the areas about which they had concerns for tertiary education opportunities in Australia. We have heard some of that quoted by some of our colleagues. What is interesting is that Indigenous students seem to have less opportunity and fewer advantages, and legislation must be directed towards improving those opportunities. The third group is the higher socioeconomic students, and we should not be throwing babies out with the bathwater because families in higher socioeconomic groups can afford to have their children at university. The ones in the middle are the ones we must address ourselves to, and that includes rural and regional students. The informal conclusion of the vice-chancellor chairman of that Universities Australia group was very interesting when I had a discussion with him about that topic. He made the observation that over the last 50 years, regardless of the conditions for students going to universities—whether universities charged fees or were free, and with the introduction of scholarships and the introduction of HECS—there actually has not been a significant change in the attendance of students from lower socioeconomic families when conditions have changed. What has impacted heavily over 45 or so years of government policy changes has been the capacity and participation of rural and regional students in tertiary education. I want that point to be remembered. An interesting point was made by Victorian vice-chancellors, that the objective is 20 per cent of lower socioeconomic people attending university. They made the observation that in Victoria they are already at 20 per cent for young women; they are not yet anywhere near that for young men.’

I just reflect again on a statement earlier, that everybody in this chamber wants to see young Australians given their opportunity to realise their potential through higher education. I hope earnestly that we can work with the government to achieve that goal. The point being made, of course, is that rural and regional students are likely to be disadvantaged in the proposed changes. I make the plea that we can come to an arrangement whereby that does not happen.

One of those areas is the proposed change to 30 hours work per week for up to a period of 18 months. That is practically impossible for students who are just leaving school. That provision is very good for those who have been in the workplace for a period of time; those who may have already been undertaking 30 hours work per week and who are ready to leave the workplace and go back into higher education. That needs to be applauded. The problem, of course, relates to the school leavers, for whom a minimum of 30 hours work a week in an 18-month period will be practically impossible in most instances, especially in rural and remote areas.

I conclude my discussion this evening with a plea that we need to tie funding and direction not just to participation at tertiary level but to success at tertiary level. Too often we refer to, focus on and concentrate on those policies and strategies that just get young people into places of higher education. That is critically important, but there needs to be incentives, financial and otherwise, that will ensure young people understand the commitment, obligation and sacrifice that are made by families, government and taxpayers so that they have a very strong desire to actually graduate, achieve and get back into their workplaces.

From my experience teaching in the university sector, I make the observation about what I call ‘wastage’ of students from those who leave school with the intention of going on to higher education. If we call them 100 per cent, then for those who take a year off and have a gap year the loss is around 30 per cent. For those who take two years prior to going to university, we do not know the actual figures but they are probably as high as 50 per cent of those who get into the workplace, or travel or do whatever but do not return to tertiary study. One of the concerns I have with the aspect of 30 hours a week for 18 months relates to when that 18 months may well become two years simply because they cannot start their courses until the February of the following year.

I conclude where I commenced: the opportunity for a young fellow, with a very short socioeconomic background—very difficult circumstances in my own family’s case—to go to university in Queensland through the agency of cadetships. A five-year cadetship to a state department guaranteed you employment at the end and ensured that you had to work but, of course, paid for your travel, your education and a sustenance allowance. I do make the plea in the overall circumstance that when we are looking at for the future of young people, especially in regional and rural areas, we consider the opportunity of a return to cadetships.