Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Capricornia talks about the educational dreams of young Australians, but her government has just trashed the educational dreams of so many rural and regional students. I am bitterly disappointed on behalf of the electorate of Farrer and in fact all rural families who have contacted the Liberal and National parties in such distress after learning of the Deputy Prime Minister’s plans for Youth Allowance from 2010.

I would like to start by reading a letter regarding these changes that comes to me from the Finley High School P&C Association in Finley in western New South Wales. Finley is a small town which is very badly affected by the drought. If you are a young person looking to study, there is no local rural or regional university. You pretty much have to travel and live away from home in order to study anywhere. What the minister is saying to the students of the Finley High School is: ‘You will have to demonstrate your independence prior to age 22 by working 30 hours a week for a period of 18 months within a two-year period. Unless you can do that you will not qualify for youth allowance, and if your family is not on a low income, you will receive no help from the government.’ It is absolutely impossible for somebody from one of the small towns in western New South Wales to find a job in any of their local areas for 30 hours a week for a period of 18 months within a two-year period. In order to get over the first hurdle to qualify for youth allowance, you have to leave home, because you will not find a job for those hours while you are living at home. Your chances are cruelled before you even begin. To support yourself after leaving home means you cannot put money aside and, by the time you have demonstrated your independence, your dreams of going to university are probably over, because you have moved into a different sphere of life and your circumstances have changed.

I come back to the letter from the P&C Association of Finley High School because I think that they spell out the concerns of my constituents very well. This was a letter to the minister. I am not sure if she has responded.

I write on behalf of the parents and guardians of students within the Finley, Berrigan, Jerilderie and Tocumwal communities in southern NSW to express our concern regarding the recent announced changes to the Youth Allowance.

Students from country areas must live away from home to attend tertiary education. This comes at a significant cost of families and the students. In many, many cases the student has to raise the funds to meet the living away from home costs. These costs include accommodation, living and travel to and from home and to and from sporting or other extra curricular activities.

The independent Youth Allowance has been a critical component of the financial resources to enable country students to complete their tertiary education. It costs a minimum of $350 per week to live while at University. On campus college fees that cover basic living costs for 5 days start at around $250/week.

Historically country students have undertaken part time work after leaving school, worked during semester breaks while at university and during term and during the summer breaks to raise the initial funds to qualify for the Independent Youth Allowance. They then work tirelessly during subsequent university holidays to raise the next year’s living expenses to supplement the Youth Allowance. This is done while their city counterparts study during term and holiday during their tertiary study years.

Country students will now be forced to take two years away from study. The recent drought conditions in much of rural Australia and particularly in the southern Riverina in NSW combined with the economic downturn has severely limited the employment opportunities for these young people. The reality is they will be forced to move away from home to find a job and hence will have to meet all their living away from home expenses while earning thus limiting their capacity to raise the funds needed to live while doing their tertiary training.

The need to take a gap between study and school of two years will not suit many students. Some will never return to study.

This is what careers counsellors are telling us the country over. Once the gap between ending school and starting study stretches out beyond one year, students simply do not return to study. The letter continues:

There is also some doubt as to whether universities will allow students to defer courses for more than one year.

In fact, I understand that at some universities you have to reapply after one year, so for the very first year that you take off as a gap year it is problematic. The letter continues:

Research in Victoria has shown that only 55% of students who defer for a year take up their University place within four years.

The changes to the Youth Allowance are, in reality meaning that tertiary education will not be available to all those students capable of completing a course. It will be primarily limited to those who can live at home while studying, those with wealthy parents and those who can access employment during a gap year from their family home.

As students need to qualify for the Youth Allowance to be eligible for the Commonwealth learning scholarship, restricting eligibility to the youth allowance has a significant flow on effect for rural students. These scholarships are an important encouragement for students to further their education an are critical for funding accommodation and learning aids such as textbooks.

The proposed changes are undermining the confidence of the region’s community In the Federal Government to govern for all Australians. These changes do nothing to enhance the educational opportunities for rural students.

I do not think I could put it better than the Finley High School P&C have. They are not a political organisation. They are willing to take this government at its word; they are willing to weigh up on merit the policies it puts in place. But they are just absolutely disgusted and beside themselves over this proposal to change Youth Allowance.

The government has spruiked that its reforms are aimed at meeting its objectives of 40 per cent of all 25- to 34-year-olds obtaining a qualification at bachelor level or above by 2025—the Bradley review recommended that this be attained by 2020—and, by 2020, 20 per cent of higher education enrolments at undergraduate level being people from lower socioeconomic status, SES, backgrounds. I am all in support of people from low SES backgrounds having access and equity when it comes to university, but you can see that in the government’s statement nothing was said about rural and regional students. If they in fact achieve this aim it will be at the expense of rural and regional students, because they are not included. We only have to look at the evidence so far about what proportions of our university students—graduate and postgraduate—come from rural and regional areas. What we find is that not many of them do.

I now refer to a submission from the Victorian branch of the National Union of Students to the Senate committee review of Australian higher education. They made this very clear:

People from regional and remote parts of Australia remain seriously under-represented in higher education and the participation rates for both have worsened in the last five years.

The submission stated that access and participation rates for these students over the last six years are getting lower every year. The union stated:

Retention of the regional group has also been decreasing relative to urban students and retention rates are now 3 per cent below the rates of the remainder of the student population. The success and retention patterns for remote students are of much greater concern. The indicator levels are very low compared with their non-remote peers. For example, success rates are currently 9 per cent below and retention is 13 per cent below the rates of other students.

They also went on to give to the Senate committee some examples coming, so to speak, directly from students from country areas who are studying. They made the point, and I make the point, that most country kids have to defer for a year because they do not qualify for assistance from Centrelink—their parents earn too much even though they do not earn enough to support their child by paying the costs incurred in going to university. These changes are only going to exacerbate that trend.

Other comments indicate that many students did not take up study at the end of the gap year due to financial considerations. As one student said:

Originally from country Victoria, in order to study and support myself in Melbourne I had to take a gap year to work and save enough money as my parents are unable to financially support me away from home. Also, to receive Centrelink benefits ‘independence’ must be proven and 18 months (from conclusion of school) must elapse. While my motivation to study remained during this time many of my peers (of all academic abilities) found that the attraction of maintaining regular employment and income is greater than the desire to resume studying.

These changes are only going to exacerbate this trend. As I said, people from regional and remote parts of Australia are underrepresented in our universities. We can already see that trend. We are already hearing from the students who are struggling to make the transition from, in this case, homes in rural Victoria and New South Wales to Melbourne and Sydney. What the minister is proposing is just going to make that transition more and more impossible.

If the government wants to do something about correcting the underrepresentation of rural, regional and remote students in our universities and by extension in our professions, and enable them to contribute as we know they can to the life and work of Australia in all of its forms, then it really does need to have a second look at this legislation. Under the current work participation requirements for independence a person must have worked full-time for at least 18 months in the previous two years, or worked part-time at least 15 hours a week for at least two years since leaving school, or have been out of school for at least 18 months and earned at least 75 per cent of the maximum rate of pay under wage level A of the Australian pay and classification scale—that is, $19,532. Currently, we have gap year students who are going through amazing feats in order to earn that sum of money in an 18-month period—it is not easy—to qualify for youth allowance by the time they are halfway through the year in 2010.

We need to understand that the hoops that people are required to jump through in order to qualify for youth allowance now are not easy. This is not something that the government is handing to students, be they rural or city, on a plate. I do recognise that there were problems in the existing Youth Allowance scheme and that there were students with comparatively well-off parents living at home and receiving youth allowance. That is not in the spirit of the scheme and I understand that the Bradley review made some recommendations that this should be corrected. We support that; we are not advocating a return to the system as it currently stands. But in making those changes and addressing the mischief that certainly was being done in a small percentage of instances, why has the government created such a two-tier system? Why has it decided that rural students are simply going to be excluded from the opportunity to attend tertiary institutions before they turn 22, the new age for independence, or if they have not worked for 30 hours a week for an 18-month period in two years?

It does not matter how good the labour market is in Sydney or Melbourne or even in some of our larger regional centres; the labour market in a small rural town will never support even two or three students working 30 hours a week and earning the amount that they would need. They are simply in a position where they have nowhere to turn. They say to me, ‘We won’t go to university because we can’t afford to.’ Students are very conscious of the income levels of their parents. Parents make sacrifices and they are to be commended for that, but a lot of students have said to me, ‘I don’t want Mum and Dad to make these sacrifices,’ particularly if they are in a drought affected area and if they have experienced many years of lower than average income. They say: ‘I don’t want them to make these sacrifices. I will just put off my tertiary study. It will be fine. I will get to it later in life.’ As we know, that very often does not happen. If you put off the time when you go to university, you also delay your career, your experiences and the contribution that you make. I am not suggesting that everybody needs to go to university when they finish school, but those who are ready to and those who choose to should have the opportunity.

The government is saying that the opposition is running a scare campaign. They have pulled various numbers out of a hat and given us the information that people will not in fact be excluded from youth allowance, that the parental income threshold will be raised to $42,000, that there will still be opportunities to get payments beyond that, et cetera. In the minister’s correspondence to my constituent, she has referred them to Centrelink. People have rung Centrelink only to be told there is no way that anybody is going to give them information over the phone about what they may or may not be entitled to. However, to the extent that they have been able to determine it, they have seen that at $42,000 of combined parental income youth allowance is available to young people, but after that the taper rate is so fast and so sudden that many parents on middle incomes are really going to find that the students in their families are not going to be entitled to very much, if any, youth allowance.

If you simply crunch the numbers in some real life cases, as I encourage the Deputy Prime Minister to do instead of just listening to the prattle that comes out of her department, which talks about having more students than we have had before and talks about it in macro terms instead of individual case studies, then we will find that parents on middle incomes are not going to be able to afford for their children to go to university if it involves moving away from home. If they live close to a university all parents with adult children let them live at home, save money and carry on their normal activities after leaving school. But children from rural and regional areas have got no choice. In order to attend university at all they need to travel.

I do not for a moment mean to criticise our rural and regional universities and I am not doing so, but I particularly mentioned the towns of Finley, Berrigan and Jerilderie—all of my electorate feels very strongly about this, and I am sure the member for Moncrieff’s electorate does too—because there is no local regional university in that area. In Albury and Wodonga we have Charles Sturt University and Latrobe University, and they are fantastic local regional campuses. I have attended both myself and I cannot speak highly enough of them. But they do not have every single course that a young person might want to do upon finishing school. They simply do not. In order to do the course that you choose, you need access to other universities, whether they be in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Newcastle, Wollongong, the Gold Coast or wherever. That choice should be just as available to rural and regional students as it is to city students. To suggest, as the government is, that we are going to have two classes of students and two classes of graduates in the future is appalling and it needs to be changed.

The minister has felt some heat on this and so has grandfathered the current gap-year students—the students who left school at the end of last year and who are currently working during a gap year. Many of the representations we have had to our offices have concerned those students. I thank the minister for making those amendments to the legislation. It is good for those students. But it makes no difference at all to those who will be in exactly the same circumstances the following year and every single year after that. So, in what I believe was quite a political response, the minister has quietened down some of those who were rightly making a lot of noise about this because they felt it was enormously unfair—and it was—that those students had embarked on their gap year only to find the goalposts had been moved halfway through.

But remember that what the minister has not done is address the concerns of rural and regional youth into the future. As a rural and regional representative, that is my very great concern, because we are going to find that the statistics I have included in these remarks about the lack of rural graduates from universities are only going to get worse in the future. The financial impact on rural and regional students who want to attend metropolitan universities is such that they will not be able to afford to go. Countless parents have given me the intimate details of their household budgets. They have modest means and live with no extravagances, saving to do the very best for their children. But the cost of supporting a student in Sydney or Melbourne, even though they may do their best to get a part-time job, is absolutely astronomical. Anybody who checks that out will certainly find that is the case.

The ramifications of this piece of legislation have not been thought through in relation to rural and regional families. It completely unfairly discriminates against our rural and regional students. Some sort of means test is fine, we do not want the system to be abused, but, please, Deputy Prime Minister, give our rural and regional kids a chance to enter and excel at the professions which match their passions.

Part of that last paragraph is a quote from Juliet Cullen, a farmer and working mother in Tumbarumba, New South Wales. Juliet Cullen put in a submission to the inquiry into the proposed changes to Youth Allowance and wrote very passionately, I have to say, explaining how much she and her family had done in order to give their children the best possible opportunities, only to conclude that it would not be possible to send their son to university in 2011. He wants to study engineering, and there is a national shortage of engineers, so her conclusion was that this seems to be an extremely short-sighted move on the part of the government. I urge the government, in the time that it has left to consider this legislation, to look seriously at the opposition’s amendments and not disadvantage regional students. (Time expired)

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