Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to strongly endorse this matter of public importance from the member for New England on improving educational pathways for country Australians. I will certainly be one of many members who, quick smart, will be getting to know more about the QuickSmart program. It does sound like it is doing some tremendous work in other areas around the mid-North Coast. If it is as good as the member for New England and the government say it is, then I as a local member will be chasing that program for my community.

I also want to endorse the comments of the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment, who has just spoken in this debate. The mid-North Coast of New South Wales is a priority area. The parliamentary secretary has visited the area with Bill Kelty and we now have a local employment coordinator and are in the process of putting together a local plan. That is assisting in some challenging times. But without doubt, in my view and in the view of many in our region, none of it really matters unless we tackle head-on the issue of the significantly lower than average education figures. Whether it is in relation to completions of year 12 and retention rates, or the frustratingly low tertiary education and university attendance, or just the general culture around the aspiration for education on the mid-North Coast, we have some huge challenges. Our lower than average wages, our higher than average unemployment, some of the lowest participation rates in the country: none of those are going to be cracked unless the meal ticket and the aspiration for education are grabbed by our region and supported by the government for our region. That is why this motion today is important.

I received just in the last couple of days a document from DEEWR about a whole range of issues, but they have put in a couple of paragraphs about the mid-North Coast of New South Wales. It is the first time I have seen in writing a summary from a government department about the issues in our area, so I am pleased to see it, as gloomy as it might be. Hopefully, it does send a message to everyone here, to those involved in government policy making who are listening and to those in the community who are listening that we do have some real and substantial challenges in the area of education, so I will quote what it says:

The Mid-North Coast has been one of the most persistently disadvantaged regions in Australia in recent decades and continues to experience high levels of disadvantage. Indeed, a high proportion of the region’s working age population is on income support, while the region’s participation rate of 49.2 per cent in September 2009 remains well below the comparable rate for Australia of 65.1 per cent.

The region’s reliance on at-risk industries, particularly retail trade when the impact of the cash payments begins to recede, and well below average levels of educational attainment suggest that not only is the region currently disadvantaged but may also deteriorate further as the impact of the GFC deepens.

I can report back to the House that at this stage that further deterioration is not happening. There is enormous resilience in the mid-North Coast market. But, given the comment about educational attainment, if in the long term we are going to creep out of being comparatively disadvantaged on all the relevant indicators then we do need the support of government in building the culture for education and opening up the pathways to allow that culture to develop. So the program that the member for New England talked about is an important one.

I want to talk about access to university from an area that, as I say, already has comparative disadvantage and does not have a bricks-and-mortar university campus. We are told that students can, if they want to, stay at home and do any course in Australia, with most universities now providing distance education options for most degrees. The reality is that the uptake is not happening as I think all of us would like. Bricks and mortar to some degree do matter. I spoke to one university last week, the University of Sydney, about the issues of access and pathways to try to get my head around why regional and rural students are not represented as well as they should be in the courses. It was an interesting and somewhat alarming discussion. One of the comments was that to get access to do a law degree this year it looks like the minimum cut-off will be 99.7. Unless you are wrapped in cotton wool in an aspirational family environment for education, where you have it drummed into you every day that you are going to go to university, that is out of the reach of most students, particularly those who are grappling with a whole lot of other issues in their lives. The Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training, who is in the House at the moment, has just delivered an excellent report on the issue of work and the impacts on students’ lives. That is very much a live issue in regional and rural areas, whether because of family structure or income levels. I defy anyone in this place to say that someone who is getting through year 12 in a difficult, sometimes abusive situation in a poor area of the mid-North Coast, for example, is a lesser person who deserves less opportunities than a person on the North Shore of Sydney who is wrapped in cotton wool and has a family making sure they study 24/7 to get the mark.

The opportunities for tertiary access need to be opened to all by the government. The very good targets that have already been announced by government—one is that by 2025, 40 per cent of I think over 25-year-olds will have a higher education qualification—are wonderful targets to aspire to. But we are not going to get anywhere near them unless there is a real loading for and a real focus on regional areas such as the mid-North Coast. Our rate of university attendance is one in six. We have a long way to go to get to that 40 per cent mark and to do our bit to contribute to that national target. It is a two-way street. The message today is very much for the homes of the mid-North Coast to be aspirational about education. The evidence is clear: the previous speaker mentioned the evidence about length of stay in education and the opportunities that creates. It is sometimes difficult to get that conversation going in households where there has not been a tradition of education. The comment is often, ‘I went to the university of life. I don’t need to go to university.’ Those are the sorts of challenges faced by a young student who may want to leave that home and go to university. They need to be supported by government if we are going to be serious about these targets.

The other target, of 20 per cent from low socioeconomic areas, relates directly to the mid-North Coast. At the moment, we are a long way short of attaining that target, based on the current settings. The one good thing that has come out of the youth allowance debate over the last 24 hours is the review. None of us likes reviews too much but it is the first sign that we are going to get serious about addressing the inequality in the challenges and access blocks for regional and rural students accessing tertiary education. I hope that review happens soon and not at the cut-off date, which is the middle of June 2012. I hope it happens sometime within the next 12 months, that it has eminence, that it has the resourcing to make it a cracking document and that any recommendations that come from it are taken seriously by the executive and acted upon as a next round of reform for education policy. Then we might actually achieve some of these lovely targets that we have had set and that we all want to attain. But at this stage I have to question whether we are going to achieve them on the current settings.

I hope at some point, whether it be through demand-based funding for universities on the near horizon or further government reform, that we can consider the individual who comes from an area of low socioeconomic background who gets a lower mark than someone who has come from an area of advantage and somehow allow that person to have access to university at an equivalent level. I think the issue of UAI thresholds being locked in stone as the only indicator for entry to university is a serious access block for those who might get 10 or 15 per cent less, but the challenges they have faced to get within 10 or 15 per cent are worth far more than 10 or 15 per cent in the overall equation. I endorse this MPI and I ask the government to really focus hard on rural and regional students as a group and to treat them as a group. (Time expired)

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