Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition is in favour of equal access to higher education for all Australians, including rural and regional Australians, and we are in favour of the new Commonwealth scholarships, but we are opposed to disadvantaging rural and regional Australians. The minister has handcuffed the new Commonwealth scholarships to denying rural and regional Australians access to youth allowance, and we cannot support this and will not support it. The minister is holding students hostage so that she can satiate her own ego at getting a win over the opposition. It is juvenile, it is pathetic, it is sad and it is what we have come to expect from the Minister for Education. If she really cared about students, she would do more than just point-score: she would pick up the phone, she would offer to talk, we would sit down and we would negotiate. But she has not. I have offered and she refuses.

This minister is a failed minister. She has failed to deliver computers in schools; she has failed to deliver trade training centres; she has failed to deliver childcare centres; she has failed to avoid blow-outs, waste and mismanagement in the memorial school halls program; and she has failed to deliver new Commonwealth scholarships. And now she has failed to deliver reforms to youth allowance. Her crowning achievement for which she hopes to be remembered is that she has established a website, My School. I have a feeling that she will go the same way as the other ministers whose crowning achievements have been websites—GroceryWatch and Fuelwatch.

This minister owes students, particularly in rural and regional Australia, an explanation for why she could have passed this legislation last year and why no student should be waiting on their scholarships or their youth allowance, but instead, in insisting on handcuffing the Commonwealth scholarships to the youth allowance reforms, she has denied students the opportunity to receive scholarships and new youth allowance.

This bill hurts rural and regional Australians, and let me explain why. To satisfy the work participation test to access the independent rate of youth allowance, students in rural and regional Australia will need to work 30 hours a week for 18 months in a two-year period in order to qualify—in order to meet the work participation test. Where on earth in country Australia are rural and regional Australians going to find that kind of work?

Our side of the House truly represents rural and regional Australia. The vast majority of seats in rural and regional Australia are held by the coalition, and we have a large representation of members from country Australia. They understand that rural and regional young people will not be able to get those kinds of jobs, which means they will either have to leave home to qualify for the independent rate—so defeating the purpose of the independent rate of youth allowance and the purpose of trying to get country people to go to university and go back to the country to work—or simply not go to university.

Students from country Australia are already a disadvantaged group of people when it comes to higher education. They are under-represented at universities. This is only going to make the situation much worse, and their parents—the parents of young Australians in the country—know this and have been contacting our members by email, by phone, by visits, through rallies and through letters, saying, ‘Stand up for rural and regional Australia.’ But this minister turns a hard face to those Australians and says: ‘We’re not going to change. We want to get a tactical win over the opposition. We want to make them back down.’ Well, Minister, the livelihoods of Australians and their higher education dreams are much more important than your eggshell-like ego, and I can tell you that we are going to stand up for rural and regional Australia and we are going to split the bill in the Senate. We are going to move to split the bill so that Commonwealth scholarships can be paid and so that youth allowance can be dealt with as a reform on its own.

Do not just take my word for it, Minister. Your own Labor Party chair of the Education and Training Committee in Victoria, Geoff Howard from Ballarat, said of the changes in his introduction to a report that they handed down last year:

… the Committee … is concerned that the specific circumstances of rural and regional young people still have not been adequately addressed. Already, many such students defer their studies to meet eligibility criteria for income support and this route to financial independence is set to become even more difficult under the new system.

He went on to say:

… the Committee believes that the removal of the main workforce participation route will have a disastrous effect on young people in rural and regional areas—

and that the changes—

… will have a detrimental impact on many students who deferred their studies during 2009 in order to work and earn sufficient money to be eligible for Youth Allowance.

There are others who understand what is really going on in country Australia, like the Isolated Children’s Parents Association, who wrote to the minister saying:

Where will some students residing in rural and remote Australia find full time jobs for a two-year period? The short answer is they won’t.

The Country Education Foundation of Australia, representing 38 local education foundations across rural Australia, wrote again to the minister saying:

Anyone who has spent any time in rural communities will understand that for the vast majority, providing part time or full time jobs for unskilled youth in the numbers required will be impossible.

Impossible, Minister. ‘Anybody who has spent any time in rural Australia would know,’ is what the Country Education Foundation of Australia said.

But, of course, the minister does not spend any time in country Australia. She simply takes the advice of her department in the same way as she did on trade training centres, on computers in schools, on the memorial school halls and on the childcare centres, because this minister is incapable of actually delivering a program or a reform. Even the My School website collapsed on the first day, and the minister tried to convince people that eight per cent of the Australian population had tried to access it between 1 am and 7 am. It was an absolutely ludicrous claim from a minister who is becoming a laughing-stock in education.

It is not just the Labor Party in Victoria that has criticised and damned the government’s plans, or the Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association or the Country Education Foundation of Australia; it is average individual Australians in country areas. Even today, Karen emailed me, saying:

The 2008 group will become eligible under the current independence test scheme in about six weeks, and to change it now seems grossly unfair. They have been waiting for an outcome for nearly 18 months now. All the best in sticking to your points and getting a better deal for rural and remote students.

People know that this side of the House understands and cares about rural Australia and they know that the minister does not.

The bill is retrospective as well in its effect. Over 25,000 young people have had the goalposts moved on them during their gap year. The minister simply says to those people: ‘Stiff cheese—you’re going to miss out. We’re going to go ahead with our youth allowance reforms regardless.’ Not only is she holding a gun to rural and regional Australians, saying, ‘You won’t get your Commonwealth scholarships unless the coalition supports us,’ she is also saying to those people in their gap year—those at least 25,000 who still miss out—‘Stiff cheese; we’re not doing anything for you. The plans you made for higher education and the reason you took an 18-month gap year so you could qualify for the youth allowance, we’re just going to change that.’ It is a fundamental principle of law and regulation that if someone relies on the laws or regulations at the time, they should be able to rely on those laws into the future. They should not have the goalposts changed on them in the middle of that reliance.

The coalition has moved amendments in good faith to fix these problems. We moved them last year and the government rejected them. The Senate passed them, they came back and the government rejected them again. That is why we are in this position where in February—almost March—tens of thousands of students have been made worse off by the government and its intransigence, and the minister who refuses to negotiate.

We have moved the amendment to begin the new program on 1 January 2011. That amendment would remove the retrospectivity from the bill and mean that no-one in their current gap year would be worse off as a consequence of the government’s changes. The government rejects that. We have moved amendments to make pathways for rural and regional students to get to higher education; to change the thresholds to put them back in the position they would have been in if these youth allowance reforms had not been proposed. In other words, to return the work participation test to 15 hours rather than 30 hours, which will mean they will be able to access the independent rate of youth allowance. The government has rejected those amendments.

The minister likes to blather on about some idea that came up in a Senate committee, which she insists, in true Comical Ali mode, is somehow the opposition’s policy. The media do not buy it and the public know it is not true. We have actually proposed as part of our amendments a $696 million savings measure by reducing the start-up scholarships from $2,255 to $1,000: new scholarships and new money—not taking money away from students but money they have never received before. That $696 million savings measure would pay for all of the amendments that the opposition has proposed. Our amendments are revenue neutral; they punch no hole in the government’s budget. If the government rejects them, then they are the ones who are punching a hole in their own budget bottom line and they will wear it.

We will move all those amendments again in the Senate, but we will also move amendments to split the bill into the new Commonwealth scholarships bill and the youth allowance reforms. We warned the minister in May last year and throughout last year that linking the new Commonwealth scholarships—handcuffing the Commonwealth scholarships to the youth allowance reforms—would meet with disaster, and that is exactly what has happened. Either today or tomorrow we will move to split the bill, and I hope we will have the support of Senator Xenophon, Senator Fielding and the Greens. We are negotiating with them because they have already all indicated that they believe the bill should be split.

It will then be in the government’s court to decide whether young Australians get paid the new Commonwealth scholarships, because that split bill will come back to the House of Representatives and that is going to be the true test for the Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. That is when the iron will really hit the fire; that is when she is going to have to decide. The acid will be on her to decide whether young Australians should get those new Commonwealth scholarships or whether she will rip them away from them.

The split bill will be supported by the coalition in the Senate and then we will deal with our amendments to the youth allowance reforms, because we believe our amendments put rural and regional Australians in a position where they will have a pathway to university which the government is currently denying them. We will unhandcuff the two measures and we will not allow the government to hold students hostage to the minister’s ego. We will propose our savings measures again so that the changes are revenue neutral. If the government opposes splitting the bill, and if the government insists the bill be kept together, then it will be the government that is playing politics.

Let me finish with Lisa, of Shepparton, who also emailed me just today:

Well done in standing firm on youth allowance. Everyone seems to have forgotten what this is all about. We have lost the mechanism used by thousands of country students to get a tertiary education. The sliding scale of the proposed arrangements means a pittance for all but the poorest students. Certainly those students should be catered for, but the reality is that most of the doctors, nurses, accountants, teachers and lawyers who service regional Australia will come from the ranks of ordinary middle-class people, who now face an uphill battle to keep kids at uni at an average annual cost of $20,000 a year.

Lisa has summed it up entirely. The government’s reforms are going to disadvantage and hurt rural and regional Australians. We will not support them in their current measures. We will support the new Commonwealth scholarships and we will split the bill. If the government insists on keeping them together, with the support of the Senate we will vote them down and it will be on the minister’s head.

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