Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

For those people who are following this debate and are not clear about what it involves, it is worth explaining it in a little bit of detail. This bill that is before the parliament is an omnibus bill. For those people who have not heard that term before, if you are listening in, an omnibus bill deals with a whole range of seemingly disconnected acts of parliament, looks to cobble together a whole range of different legislative amendments and puts it in the form of one piece of legislation. What we have got is an omnibus bill that deals with things like supports for people with disabilities, issues around single parents and issues around young people. I think of this bill not as an omnibus but as omni-bulldozer, because it just seems to be a bulldozer through the rights and supports of people with disabilities, single parents and young people.

I want a focus on one issue in particular and that is the issue of the supports provided to people who are seeking to get an education. This is something that the National Party should be most interested in. If you live in a regional or rural community, as I do, getting an education often means packing up, leaving your local community and moving to a big city, finding accommodation and meeting all the expenses associated with accessing an education that is far removed from the place that you live. In fact, it is a really important support for those people in my community. What we are doing is effectively ripping out half a billion dollars—