Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

I am speaking today on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Simplifying Student Payments) Bill 2016. This bill seeks to amend means testing for Youth Allowance and Austudy recipients to make it consistent with other payments as well is to create an automatic entitlement an issue of a health care card to all recipients of Youth Allowance and Austudy. Youth Allowance is payable to students studying at university or TAFE, including Australian apprentices. Some of the changes in the bill will align Youth Allowance and Austudy with existing rules for Abstudy and other changes in this bill will also apply to Abstudy.

This bill will also amend the Social Security Act to allow for the most recent Australian Statistical Geographical Standard Remoteness Structure to be applied when assessing whether an applicant for Youth Allowance lives remotely. Schedule 1 amends means testing for student payments in a number of ways. Independent Youth Allowance and Austudy recipients are currently exempt from assets testing if they are a member of a couple and their partner receives an income support payment. This bill would remove the asset test exemption from this group of recipients. Current payment recipients will remain eligible for payment unless they and their partner have assessable assets over $375,000.

Under existing legislation only Independent Youth Allowance and Austudy recipients' interests in private trusts are considered for means test purposes. This bill will make the means testing of interest held in private companies and trusts by Independent Youth Allowance and Austudy recipients consistent with other income support payments. Currently any periodic gifts or allowances received by recipients of Youth Allowance or Austudy from family members are included in the means test. This bill will exempt these gifts from means testing.

Eligibility for dependent Youth Allowance recipients is subject to a parental income test. Currently the parental income test does not include any tax-free pensions or benefits. This bill will change the parental income test to include tax-free pensions or benefits. It will make the test the same as the calculation of income for the purposes of family tax benefit. By making the two tests the same, the reporting on families and the department will be lessened. The bill will create an automatic entitlement to a health-care card for recipients of student payments. Student payment recipients are the only income support recipients who are not currently automatically entitled to receive a health-care card. When the bill becomes law, the health-care card will entitle students to access the extended Medicare safety net threshold and discounted prescriptions under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Student payment recipients who live in remote areas of Australia can be eligible for additional benefits such as a relocation scholarship. The Social Security Act currently refers to the 2006 remoteness structure which is now 11 years out of date. This bill will amend the Social Security Act to instead consider the most recent remoteness structure. It will amend the Social Security Act so that it automatically considers the most recent remoteness structure instead of requiring a legislative amendment to this effect every five years.

Since the bill was introduced into the parliament in October last year, an amendment has been added—specifically schedule 4. This amendment will make it easier for young people from regional and remote areas to qualify as independent for youth allowance purposes. Currently, students from regional or remote areas who need to move from their parental home to study can qualify as independent if, since leaving secondary school, they have over an 18-month period, earned 75 per cent or more of wage level A of the national training wage schedule included in a modern award—in the 2016-17 financial year, this was equal to $24,042—or, for at least two years, worked at least 15 hours each week. This amendment will allow applicants from regional and remote areas to qualify as independent after only 14 months of paid employment, as per the other conditions that I have just mentioned.

Claimants can check whether their address is classified as regional or remote for youth allowance purposes on the Centrelink website. It is expected that around 3,700 regional and remote students will qualify as independent as a consequence of this change, and that will be a helpful thing for them. It is argued that this measure will allow students to take a gap year following the completion of school and still qualify for youth allowance as an independent in time to commence study the following year. We certainly do welcome these sensible changes to youth payments.

As someone who grew up in regional Victoria and had to move to Melbourne to pursue my ongoing education, I do know of the challenges experienced by many young people who are moving from the country to the city to study. It can be very difficult and expensive for those young people. There is a significant regional divide in the proportion of school leavers who go on to higher education. While 37 per cent of school leavers in major cities go on to further study, this drops to 20 per cent in inner regional areas, 16 per cent in outer regional areas, 13 per cent in remote areas and just four per cent in very remote areas. I hope the changes in this bill will help those regional students.

As I said, Labor will be pleased to support these measures in the bill. However, we do remain deeply concerned about a whole range of cuts that this Liberal-National Party government is trying to inflict on young Australians. Labor, of course, strongly oppose the attempts by the Turnbull government to deregulate Australia's university system. In the 2014 budget, the Abbott-Turnbull government launched an all-out assault on Australian universities and Australian students by trying to bring in $100,000 degrees. Let's be very clear: this government wants to make it harder and certainly more expensive for young Australians to go to university.

Labor believes that your parents' credit card should not determine whether or not you go to university. Those opposite might try to pretend that, as a result of this bill, they are the friends of students. But I think if you look at a wide range of different things that this government is trying to do to students you can see why Labor is very concerned. The government does appear to be making it easier for regional and remote students on the one hand, but they are going to make it much harder for those young people if we see penalty rates slashed, as this government supports.

In order to be deemed independent in the 14 months that students will have to earn money, young people will have to earn $24,000. Of course, that will be so much harder if and when their Sunday rates have been cut. The cut to penalty rates will mean that young people will take longer to earn the required amount and, of course, some of them just will not be able to meet that $24,000 target in the 14 months that they have available to them. For example, a part-time retail worker on the minimum rate of $19.44 an hour who works every Sunday would have to work an additional four hours a week, 17 hours a month or 240 hours over the 14 months in order to earn the money that they will lose from the cut to their penalty rates. This is the very real implication of what the penalty rates cut will mean for these young people and, of course, it relates to the bill that is in front of us.

On top of that, the Turnbull government is attacking young Australians by trying to introduce a five-week wait period for Newstart. This is a cut that is due to be debated in the Senate this week. In the 2014 budget, this government wanted to make young people wait six months before accessing any income support. Six months is really what those opposite wanted, and many people here in this House voted to say to young people, 'You will have to wait six months before you get any form of support if you cannot find a job.' They could not get that through the parliament, so now they are trying to get this new one-month wait.

There is no evidence whatsoever that this would be something that would actually work, let alone any evidence to suggest that young people would be able to survive with no form of income support over a four-week or five-week period. It is actually a five-week period because there is currently a week that people have to wait to get access to Newstart. The government wants to add another four weeks to that. So young jobseekers, if this government got its way, would have to wait five weeks with absolutely nothing to live on—to buy food, pay the rent or even get the bus to look for a job. They would have absolutely nothing to live on for five weeks.

I certainly hope that when this is debated in the Senate, maybe as early as tomorrow, we will see this very, very cruel measure, pursued by this government over the last 3½ years, defeated again and that finally this government will take it out of the parliament. No amount of window dressing can hide the fact that this Liberal-National government has consistently targeted young people to find budget savings. It is not just the effort to say to young people, 'You will have nothing to live on for five weeks'; they also want to say to young people aged between 22 and 24 that they are going to be pushed off Newstart onto the lower youth allowance. This is a cut of $48 a week—almost $2,500 a year. We have not heard the minister talk about these cuts to payments to young people, which would leave many young Australians in dire poverty.

I hope that this measure will be defeated in the Senate tomorrow and that this government will take this cruel measure out of the parliament. All of these measures—the deregulation of university fees; saying to young people that they will have nothing to live on for five weeks; saying to young people that they will get moved off Newstart onto the lower youth allowance—should be removed from the parliament.

I would also say to those opposite that one of the main reasons that we have so many students in rural and remote Australia not going on to further education is, of course, because they do not get the support that they need at school. If students in rural and remote Australia do not get a good education at school, of course they are not going to get the chance to go on to further study. That is one of the big reasons why we argue so forcefully for the Gonski education reforms, to make sure that all Australian children, including those in rural and remote areas, get the best in life.

We will support this bill today, but we certainly have not lost sight of the attacks by this government on Australia's young people: cuts to Newstart, cuts to universities, cuts to schools—a terrible record on the way in which this government is trying to attack young people. Labor certainly will not be letting any of you forget it.

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