Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to acknowledge that the reason the Australian Greens withdrew their previous amendments just before Senator Mason spoke to the opposition amendments was that we believed that the opposition amendments are doing a similar thing. The Greens amendments perhaps went a little further in reversing that retrospectivity by ensuring that we caught all current gap year students, but I think that the opposition amendments provide a much better position than the current legislation, and that is why I am willing to support them.

I want to point out from the outset that any type of policy that has a retrospective nature is a bad way to go. It does not matter whether we are talking about student income support, health measures, other education measures or climate change. Whatever it is, you do not as a general rule introduce laws that are retrospective. It is just not a good principle. Aside from the fact that these young people have been caught and have had the rug pulled out from underneath them as the rules have changed, and despite the fact that they were advised by government officials themselves to take a gap year to get a job to earn $19½ thousand, the government is proposing to change the rules.

I just think the whole idea of retrospective law-making is quite outdated and archaic. It is not something that a government which wants a visionary approach to the future would be taking. We need to deal with this, and I would have liked to have seen the government deal with the retrospective nature themselves before they introduced the legislation and brought it to the Senate. They did do a little bit of a backflip but we all know that it did not actually deal with everybody. If you agree that retrospectivity is bad for some, surely you agree that it is bad for all.