Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

You will have your turn, Senator Evans, I am quite sure. So why did the government not want to debate this bill? Because doing so would show their complete failure to understand regional Australia and the needs of regional students. This government has shown absolute contempt for regional students. The coalition would not even have needed to put this bill forward if this Labor government had any idea what is important to regional students. In a moment, Senator Evans or one of those from the other side are going to jump up and make a big song and dance about how the coalition supported the government’s measures when they went through earlier in the year—about how the coalition made the deal and agreed to those measures. On that, Senator Evans is absolutely correct, and I am going to place on record exactly why that happened.

It happened because the government wanted to get rid of the independent youth allowance for every single student across the country; however, the coalition managed to have three of those zones, though the inner regional zone was not among them, kept for inner regional students. The reason we supported that and the legislation’s going through at the time, as the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs and Workplace Relations knows full well, is that there were a number of good measures—the start-up scholarships, the relocation scholarships and the changes to the amounts available through the straight-up youth allowance—in that legislation. Far from being obstructionist, we on this side of the chamber were very happy to support those measures. We were not going to stop those good measures going forward for those students who needed them.

As Senator Evans will be at pains to point out to you our reasons for supporting those measures at the time, I will tell you what they were. We supported them because the then Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, refused to split the bill. She refused to deal with the independent youth allowance measures separately from all of those other measures in the bill that did have some value for those students and that we very much wanted to support. It was purely for political reasons that she would not split that bill. So, when Senator Evans stands up and tries to say, ‘Gee, the coalition supported this before,’ it is now on record exactly why we did it—we did it because we had no choice. But we now have an opportunity to make sure that we get some fairness for regional students.

As I said, the reason we need to debate this now is that it needs to be dealt with before the end of the year—not next year, not in the middle of next year, not at the end of next year, not the year after that and not off in the never-never sometime with the minister trying to put it off until much later. We need to deal with it now. This Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs and Workplace Relations is newly appointed to the portfolio. He has an opportunity to bring a bit of sense to this debate and an opportunity to support regional students. But now the decision for the Senate is whether to debate this bill and the motion that we would debate concurrently. I ask the Senate to support the debating of both this bill and this motion for the benefit of regional students across this country, who deserve to know exactly what is the position of those in this chamber and exactly what is the position of this government.