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

My amendment on sheet 5957 relates to the creation of a new criterion for independence, based on the fact that young people in rural and regional areas need to move out of home. If they need to travel more than 90 minutes and have moved out of home in order to get to university then they would qualify for youth allowance. Thank you to the chamber for allowing me to jump ahead to my amendments. I thought it made more sense, seeing that we had just had the discussion about Senator Fielding’s amendments.

This amendment reflects the feeling within the community from day one, when it was announced on budget night that the workforce participation criterion was going to be removed without any real comparable alternative for those young people in rural and regional areas. Primarily, those young people have gone through their final years of high school knowing that they want to go to university. They were told by their course counsellors and by members of Centrelink who visited their schools, ‘The best way to get yourself to university and have yourself supported is to take a gap year and earn the $19,500 and you will qualify for youth allowance.’ And of course their families have all budgeted on this, as have their brothers and sisters before them—and that is what they were thinking, after them.

This new criterion would allow for those people not to be simply left out in the cold. I do believe it deals with the issues that the government raises in terms of why they wanted to restructure some of those criteria. That was because of some of the ‘rorting’—in the minister’s own words—that was happening. Young people from metropolitan areas were going off, earning $19,500 during a gap year, but staying at home and still getting that maximum rate of $371. Of course we acknowledge that that is not an appropriate use of the youth allowance.

This new criterion would solve that problem because this is only going to be available for people who have moved out of home. They are not going to be sitting in their parents’ houses and ‘rorting the system’, to use the minister’s words. This is about trying to give young people, particularly those from rural, remote and country areas, the same opportunities to access higher education as their city brothers and sisters or cousins. It gives a pathway which, as Senator Fielding has put it, will make going to university easier as opposed to putting up barriers. I move amendment (3) on sheet 5957:

(3)   Schedule 1, page 5 (after line 25), at the end of item 2, add:

Students required to move away from home

   (10D)    A person is independent if the Secretary is satisfied:

             (a)    that the person is required to move away from the family home in order to undertake a course of at a higher eduction institution; and

             (b)    that the time required to travel between the higher education institution and the family home would exceed 90 minutes.