Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak about the Parliament and Civics Education Rebate. I do so not merely to praise this important program—which affords the opportunity to Australian students to visit the national institutions in Canberra—but to defend it from an attack made by Senator Robert Ray on 9 August. His remarks were brought to my attention recently and, and after looking at them, I am quite astonished by what he said.

I think it is important to put the facts about this rebate on the record and to explain the background to it. Until recently, there were two programs that offered rebates to students who visited Canberra, which was done through the organisation of one of those programs in conjunction with a particular student’s school. An education travel rebate was available to students travelling less than 1,000 kilometres to the national capital, and those students were eligible for a rebate of $15 on their travel costs. The rebate was standard whether a student was travelling for 200 kilometres or 950 kilometres and was available to students who visited a number of institutions in the national capital.

The other program, the Citizenship Visits Program, was operated by, or it was at least under the auspices of, the Presiding Officers of the federal parliament. It was available to students travelling more than 1,000 kilometres. Students who took part in the program were required to visit the Parliament House building and to attend a program operated by the Parliamentary Education Office. It is an excellent program, and I am sure that many members of this chamber have had the opportunity of seeing those students passing through this building.

There were a number of serious problems with two parallel rebate schemes operating in respect of visits to the national capital. One was that the criteria for the rebates were quite different. If you took advantage of the education travel rebate, you were required to visit six national institutions or attractions while you were in the national capital, and two of them had to be related to Australian democracy, such as Parliament House or the Old Parliament House. If you took part in the civics education program, however, you had an obligation to come only to this place, and you could literally spend the rest of your time enjoying yourself in Canberra, visiting the snow or whatever it might be. The amounts, as I have mentioned, were different, depending on which program you took part in.

The other problem with the Citizenship Visits Program particularly was that you needed to get access to the Parliamentary Education Office program to justify your access to the rebate, but the program is very popular, and some schools wishing to visit the national capital were unable to make a booking with the program because there were not enough available slots at the time they needed to come to allow them to justify obtaining the rebate. So a number of schools simply were not eligible to obtain the rebate or came here without the benefit of the rebate, which was a great pity.

A number of members of parliament—senators and members of the House of Representatives—have been lobbying for some little time to have that rather unsatisfactory state of affairs resolved. It was a great relief to me, as one of those senators involved in that process of lobbying, to see a decision a few months ago to consolidate those two programs into a single program: what is now called the parliament and civics education rebate. Under that new Parliament and Civics Education Rebate, or PACER, program, it is now possible for a rebate to be paid to students who take part in the program. The rebate is organised under a number of zones. So, for example, if you travel between 150 and 500 kilometres to come to Canberra, you get a rebate of $20, compared with the previous rebate of $15; if you travel 2,500 to 3,000 kilometres, you get a rebate of $150, compared with the old rate of $110; and there are more gradations in that arrangement, so it is more proportionate to the distance that you need to travel to get here. The arrangements for what you need to do when arriving in Canberra have been standardised. It is now compulsory to visit three sites—that is, this building, Old Parliament House and the Australian War Memorial. It is preferred that people take part in the Parliamentary Education Program, but it is not compulsory, so the bottleneck that that program represented for some schools has been removed. That seems to me to be an eminently sensible development for which a number of members of this parliament—as far as I am aware on both sides of the chamber—have been lobbying for some time.

So it was particularly puzzling to see Senator Robert Ray attack this rationalisation, this change, in his speech on 9 August. In that speech, for example, he accuses the government of stripping the parliamentary departments of program funding that had previously been available. For the record, I think Senator Ray needs to be aware that in fact the total funding available for the program has been increased and will increase for each of the next four years. There is no question of this being done on the cheap or of the amount of money available to fund students to come to Canberra being reduced.

He describes the previous education travel rebate, which as I mentioned provided rebates for travel of less than 1,000 kilometres, as having primarily a ‘tourism focus’. That is also simply not the case. The program was designed to bring students to Canberra for an educational experience, and students who came here visited national institutions such as the National Library, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Australian War Memorial, the National Museum and Questacon—national institutions that those students undoubtedly benefited from visiting.

Senator Ray goes on to describe what I think can best be called a conspiracy to in some way turn this education program into some kind of propaganda tool for the federal government. He goes on to say:

... we really should explain to the kiddiewinks what Friedman-like economics is about, what accrual accounting is about and what great savings they have made by amalgamating—

that is, amalgamating the two programs. He says this is ‘about politics and it is about campaigning’. The new program, he says, should have been about the working of parliament, not the working of government, and he suggests that the Prime Minister’s intervention in this matter was a mysterious change of heart on the Prime Minister’s part to effect this change.

The fact is that there is no element of propagandising about these changes. The new arrangements are administered by a consortium which is operated jointly by the National Capital Authority, by the National Capital Attractions Association, representing those institutions and attractions in the national capital, and by the ACT government, which I need not remind members is presently a Labor government. That consortium operates this program to bring students to the national capital. There is no question of propagandising in any of this program. The only vaguely political requirement of the program is that schools which receive the rebate are expected to acknowledge that they have received a rebate from the Australian government—no requirement to publish a picture of the Prime Minister, no need to mention any government programs or anything of that kind; simply to acknowledge that the program has been funded by the Australian government. That seems to be perfectly fair enough.

What we have here is a very sensible reorganisation of what was a cumbersome and somewhat unsatisfactory duo of schemes in the past. It operates on a purely apolitical basis. It is administered at arms-length from the Australian government. The Australian government is one-third, through the NCA, of the consortium that operates the scheme. It is a very effective program which has done some brilliant things in bringing students to Canberra and helping them to understand the working of government and of course the national parliament. This scheme deserves praise and support. I sincerely hope that Senator Ray has the opportunity to reconsider his attack on this program.