Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak tonight on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009 with somewhat of a heavy heart. When a government goes to an election, when it goes to the people, and has much to say and proclaims much about an education revolution and its vision for what it will do for education and for young Australians and for their opportunities into the future it is reasonable to hope that it will deliver on those aspirations and put in place action on those beliefs.

People can expect an education revolution to deliver more than bricks and mortar and to deliver more than the occasional laptop—to deliver throughout every level of education: to deliver for young students, to deliver for those in preschool and primary school, and to deliver for those in secondary school; to deliver through improved teacher standards; to deliver through an improved curriculum; and to deliver through improvements in the whole range of areas where education could and should be improved. Education can be improved by taking advantage of the things which are not bricks and mortar but which could make a real education revolution. Indeed, we could improve the opportunities that are available to young people to go on and pursue whatever their educational dreams may be, be they in vocational educational arenas or higher educational arenas in a more academic field.

It is with a heavy heart that I speak to this legislation tonight because it is another area where the government’s rhetoric and the hope and the promises that it took to the last election have not been delivered. It has let down young Australians, especially in this instance young Australians from rural and regional Australia who will now find their pathways to educational opportunity and to pursue those dreams and ambitions they may have of higher education all the more difficult thanks to the proposals in this legislation. This is another classic instance of the government giving with one hand while taking with the other—talking big about all its other education proposals, yet making this pathway to higher education so much harder for young Australians. It is, as I said, particularly unfair for country students. It is typical of so many areas that this government pursues, where its total failure to understand the importance and the unique challenges faced by rural and regional Australia is so evident. Its total failure to grasp these unique challenges of rural Australians stands out and this is yet again another instance of that failure.

These changes to the youth allowance by the government will pull the rug out from under the feet of 25,000 young Australians preparing to go to university just next year. That is 25,000 young Australians just in one year who will face increased difficulties thanks to the proposals in this legislation. They face the prospect of seeing a year of their lives that they put on hold to set themselves up for their university education potentially wasted because the gap year that they planned as a pathway to secure an independent youth allowance will now be shut off if the government gets its way.

This legislation has been investigated by the usual processes of the Senate—by the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport, who delivered their report recently. The coalition, as the Senate has heard from other speakers, intends to move amendments in line with the committee’s key recommendations. We will move those amendments to provide these country students with the opportunity to continue accessing youth allowance. We will remove the retrospective aspects of this legislation that particularly punish those 25,000 gap year students. These are the changes that the coalition is championing tonight on behalf of rural and regional young people.

The main issue facing rural and regional students is the abolition of the workforce participation route for youth allowance eligibility. That route is important to qualify as an independent student and therefore provides a pathway for so many young people from rural and regional backgrounds to access youth allowance and survive independently from their parents in the pursuit of their studies. That is important because an overwhelming number of young people outside of metropolitan areas find that they have to move to pursue their higher education dreams. In the vast majority of instances they have to move from home and into cities to pursue those dreams. This need to move is a much greater burden than any of us who grew up in closer proximity to urban areas usually face. Certainly, many people face struggles to go onto higher education. They face struggles in finding the right income and the right support to assist them through this. But young people from rural and regional areas face a far more defined and greater difficulty than those of us who grew up closer to the cities.

Students from farming and small business backgrounds in the country often find themselves ineligible to receive youth allowance as dependants because the value of the average Australian family farm is often significantly higher than the level of assets allowed under that test. Yet the average Australian farming family cannot afford the tens of thousands of dollars required to support their children’s moving, accommodation and living expenses while studying at university. It is a simple reality that the situation is difficult when you have to set up a totally different home and living arrangement, and that that is a necessity of your pursuit of higher education. If the child was from the city they would have the opportunity—or the choice at least—of staying at home. That does not work out for everybody and I am the first to recognise that, but at least that choice would provide for some greater chance for young people from metropolitan areas to pursue those higher education dreams, unlike those from rural and regional areas.

Because of this, significant cohorts of students from the country who are ineligible to receive the dependant youth allowance choose an alternative pathway. Thousands every year currently gain eligibility for youth allowance under the workforce participation criterion. This criterion, as it currently stands, means that they must earn $19,532 within an 18-month period, which most do during a now commonly accepted gap year approach. This government is seeking to abolish that alternative pathway that has been used so effectively to provide better opportunities for so many rural and regional young Australians. In doing so, the government claims that it is simply because it was being exploited by a small cohort of wealthy city families. Like so many of the proposals that have come from this government, it is fine to perhaps have a valid reason behind your proposal, but you need to consider all of the consequences. All of the consequences of these changes impact on thousands upon thousands of young Australians in rural and regional areas every single year. This is not a one-off impact. Certainly, there is a very particular one-off impact for those people who are already in the middle of their gap year, but it will be a recurring impact on young Australians year in, year out into the future if this legislation is passed.

These changes fly in the face of the government’s claims that they are interested in increasing higher education participation from all sections of the community. This will not increase participation from one key section—from those young people living in rural and regional Australia. It will do the exact opposite when it comes to those young people’s opportunity to participate in higher education. It will disadvantage them, and in doing so it risks decreasing their participation in higher education.

It is not only the Australian parliament that has looked at these changes. The Victorian parliament has taken a look at them as well. The Victorian parliament’s Education and Training Committee has investigated the issue of rural disadvantage in relation to the government’s Youth Allowance measures, and that committee’s report was supported unanimously by all participants across a range of parties. On the issue of criteria of independence for rural and regional young people, this committee of the Victorian parliament found that ‘the removal of the main workforce participation route will have a disastrous effect on young people in rural and regional areas’. This committee, chaired by a Victorian Labor MP, found that the changes that the Rudd government wants this Senate to pass tonight would have ‘a disastrous effect’. Our own Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee also investigated this bill. It found that the removal of the workforce participation criteria would have a particular impact on students who are required to leave home to pursue their chosen course of study and, ultimately, career.

As I indicated earlier, the government is putting in place a change that will affect students for many years to come. There is also, however, a particular impact on students who have taken a gap year in between the conclusion of their secondary studies and the commencement of their tertiary studies. This legislation is particularly damaging to those students in its effects on their plans for study and their chosen pathway through life. The legislation is planned to have a start date of 1 January 2010. That means that all those students currently undertaking a gap year, and who are doing so in order to earn the income required under the threshold to demonstrate that they meet the independence criteria, will no longer be eligible. They will no longer be eligible because this criterion has been axed.

Many of these students undertook a gap year based on advice from their schools and from Centrelink. They decided this was the best pathway for them to be able to gain the independence required. I, and all coalition MPs, and I am sure crossbench and indeed government MPs, have been inundated by what must be thousands of contacts from distraught students who feel like the government has pulled the rug out from under their feet. They made their plans. They had their dreams of going to uni and of studying. They made what seemed to be wise plans to choose to study the area of their dreams and then to set themselves up by taking a gap year and by earning the required income threshold. They believed that this would provide them with the opportunity to enjoy independence while studying. Yet now, in many, many cases, they find that having taken a year out and having not gone immediately into university has left them with no advantage. There is no advantage because this opportunity for so many of these students undertaking the gap year has been closed off.

In August, the Minister for Education admitted that there was a problem with the retrospectivity of this legislation. She acknowledged that there was an impact on rural disadvantage and she said the government would do something to try to address it. Once again, the action does not live up to the rhetoric. The commitment to address it is not a wholehearted commitment. It is not a fully fledged commitment that will ensure that all young Australians in rural and regional areas who have taken this gap year and who meet the existing threshold will be able to qualify under the independence category and fulfil their plans as they set them out. The government’s actions only go part way. The measures are once again half baked and provide a stay of execution simply for remote students in 2010. It is not for all rural and regional students but just for those in the remote category as defined by the government.

It is estimated that some 25,000 gap year students would be left out in the cold. Some 25,000 young Australians of around 17, 18 or 19, in every corner of this country, who have made their plans based on what they thought was a reasonable expectation of certainty that the government would not go changing the rules on them halfway through, now find that the government is changing the rules on them. There was a window there, in August, where they thought they were going to be saved. They heard that the government had listened to the problem of the retrospective action impacting on young people who had already set their lives up based on the existing criteria. But we find that there is only partial salvation for a cohort of affected students rather than a recognition that all who finished school last year and who set themselves on a particular pathway should be able to enjoy that pathway and not have the government go and change their plans for them part way through.

The Victorian parliament’s Labor dominated Education and Training Committee found that these 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’. That is a Labor dominated committee from the Victorian parliament that talks of detrimental impacts and disastrous effects, and still the government seems deaf to these criticisms of its treatment of young Australians from rural and regional areas.

The Senate rural and regional affairs and transport committee recognised the high level of anxiety that would be caused in the community and went on to say that the implementation of this policy by the government had been ‘handled poorly’. That is, of course, a polite understatement—especially if you are one of those young people who have been impacted around Australia.

The coalition parties are pursuing a range of amendments to this legislation. To deal with the issue of retrospectivity the coalition moved an amendment in the House which was opposed by the government. But we will move a similar amendment here in the Senate to move the start date for this legislation from 1 January 2010 to 1 January 2011, to ensure that when it comes to the workforce criteria for independent youth allowance we do not disadvantage anybody who has set their lives on a particular pathway already, so that they can enjoy the certainty they deserve from having made decisions at the end of their schooling before they go and start their university lives and not find that, a few months out from starting at university, the whole world has been turned upside down on their plans, their aims and their aspirations.

Secondly, to assist rural and regional students who do not qualify for youth allowance but who are unable to afford the cost of moving to attend university, we will move an amendment along the lines recommended by the Senate inquiry that investigated this bill. This amendment will provide for rural students who must leave home in order to study to continue to access independent youth allowance by allowing them to access the same gap-year provisions that are available at the moment, to stop the ongoing effects that these proposed changes would have on many rural and regional young people throughout Australia.

We will also move an amendment following the Senate inquiry recommendations to put in place auditing processes to ensure that, once students have received independent youth allowance, they do not then return to live at home while claiming this allowance—to stop the rorting, to make sure that those areas where the government had some intentions of clamping down on rorting are indeed tackled without disadvantaging thousands of other young people. And we have proposed alternative ways to pay for these measures, by reducing the rate of the student start-up scholarship, a scholarship that has not yet been paid so will not disadvantage anybody, has none of the retrospective elements of this provision and of course will not stop the massive decline in access to education that this legislation will lead to for rural and regional Australians.

I hope the government will listen to the opposition’s concerns, will accept these amendments, that the Senate as a whole will accept them and that we will see a fair outcome rather than the grossly unfair proposal that the government has before the Senate at present.