Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The only reason, Senator Bishop, that she did a backflip on some of them was because of the overwhelming deluge that came from the community to your minister, saying, ‘This is not fair. It’s not on.’ And she realised—she did a backflip for 5,000 which, of course, should never have been there in the first place. But there are 25,000 other students who embarked on that year in good faith and on good advice to be told that they simply were not going to be able to qualify under these criteria any more. By any stretch of the imagination, what we put forward was to say that all of those gap year students should not be affected by a retrospective change by the government. That is absolutely fair and appropriate, and that is why we stuck by it.

The other change that we put forward for the amendment was to retain the criteria (c) for the independent youth allowance. People would most commonly know that as the gap year, whereby a student can earn a certain amount over 12 months in an 18-month period. The government simply ripped that away. The reason why this is so important is because of the inequity that exists between regional students and metropolitan students when it comes to accessing tertiary education. There is a $15,000 to $20,000 cost for regional families in having to relocate their student to go off to tertiary education. There is no other avenue in this bill for that inequity to be addressed, which is why we have been so firm. I see you have lost interest, Senator Bishop. Have you run out of ideas? Or perhaps you just know that I am right?

There is absolutely no other avenue to address that inequity, so the coalition has said through the amendment that in the absence of anything else existing to assist those regional students that particular criteria for the independent youth allowance should stay. It is simply not fair for those regional students to have their pathway taken away completely.

The arrogance from the other side that we are seeing on this is nothing short of breathtaking because, guess what? Today the minister could split the bill. She could bring the bill back into this chamber and we would support those parts of the bill that are beneficial. We have said that. The minister has had the offer. The scholarships and anything else she has been talking about in this bill that does not go forward next year is on the head of the minister. She has said, ‘It’s so terrible that the coalition has stopped this.’ It is her decision not to split the bill and not bring those forward to this chamber so we can pass them, so any commentary from the other side, any commentary from this Labor government saying, ‘It’s all the fault of the coalition’ is absolute rubbish.

We have put forward very, very fair amendments and there is absolutely no reason that the government should not accept those. What is really interesting is that the government has taken away two of the independent criteria to pay for the whole lot, so with all these billions of dollars we have seen go to the school halls that are being talked about and all the other projects why is it that our students’ education has to be the thing that is budget neutral? Why is it that our students’ education has to be the savings measure for this government? It is simply not fair. That is the area that we should put funding into, not taking away from it. I simply challenge the minister to stop harping on about what happened in the chamber and the fact that the bill has been blocked, bring those parts back to the chamber that we have said we will support and do the right thing by the people of Australia and the students who need this side of the chamber to actually make some commonsense decisions for them. The minister knows she can do that. She should bring it back not only for regional students, who are so important and need to be able to have access to assistance, but also for students right across the country.

Question agreed to.