Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I wanted to make a small contribution to this debate on the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009 and to again highlight the value of remote students to our regional universities and the particular importance that regional universities play in getting kids from more remote areas into tertiary education and, more importantly, sending them back to those areas once they have qualified.

Just recently, the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee held a hearing into student accommodation and remuneration at James Cook University in Townsville. I was pleased to be able to go along for a little while to hear evidence from students Anna-Jane Gordon and Heather Ann Hanks and also from Associate Professor Richard Murray, the Head of the School of Medicine and Dentistry there. The two students are members of what is called RHINO, which is the Rural Health in the Northern Outback organisation. They are a great group operating out of James Cook University in Townsville and Cairns. They do a lot to support young people coming in from the bush, going into what is for many of them a strange environment and then undertaking studies. This pair and their organisation, as its name suggests, deal with rural health. The organisation did quite a large survey of students at James Cook University. They found that 11 per cent of people who responded were from urban areas, 46 per cent were from regional areas, 30 per cent were from rural areas and 11 per cent were from a remote location. The research showed that the people who responded had to face barriers to university education. Ninety-six per cent of those who responded to the survey had reported that they would like to return to a regional, rural or remote area upon graduation in the health area.

I will just pause to pay tribute to former health minister Dr Wooldridge—