Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Senate’s requested amendments to the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Income Support for Students) Bill 2009 [No. 2]. I acknowledge the Minister for Education is in the House and also the Leader of the Nationals and the member for Sturt, who has been spending quite a bit of time with the minister. We were getting worried about him, given the amount of time he was spending there, but we note that he has made some progress, which is welcome from my point of view, representing a landmass three times the size of Victoria in my seat of Maranoa.

The requested amendments remove the retrospective nature of what was in the bill, and anything that is retrospective I cannot support, so that is certainly welcome. I want to say something about when this Prime Minister was first elected. He went to my home town of Roma and I pulled up the transcript of what he said when he was out there. He said:

I said when I became Prime Minister of Australia that I intended to be Prime Minister for all of Australia, and that included being the Prime Minister for rural Australia.

Those are the direct words from a press conference he held in my home town of Roma seven days after he was sworn in and took office as Prime Minister of Australia. What we can see from this legislation is not a Prime Minister for rural Australia. He is certainly not a Prime Minister for regional Australia, and all those regional members from the other side of the House who have walked away on this issue since the budget initiative was brought forward by the minister stand condemned. They will have to answer to their constituents at the next election because we will be reminding them of where they stood on this issue.

The index that is used to determine eligibility for the independent youth allowance, the work test, is just nonsensical. I have gone to the map. The Leader of the Nationals has outlined some of the anomalies, including Dalby in my electorate of Maranoa. But I went to a village just north of Dalby on the Cooyar Road, which I know the Leader of the Nationals would know well, called Kaimkillenbun. It is a little village. About 100 people live there. There are 30 students at the school. It was once serviced by a railway line, and when you cross that railway line you head up to Cooyar on the way up to Kingaroy. On one side of the tracks in this little village you will be in an outer regional area and the work test there will be for 15 hours work per week and a certain income you have to earn. But if you are on the other side of the track you will have to work 30 hours. It is one of those classic anomalies that we see when you start drawing lines on maps.

I then went to the town of Millmerran. All the areas surrounding Millmerran, which is about 100 kilometres west of Toowoomba, are outer regional areas. The work test of 15 hours per week will apply. If you live in a rural residential area of Millmerran, a town of 2,000 people, you will be in an outer regional area, but if you happen to live in the confines of Millmerran’s boundaries you will be considered to be in an inner regional area. These boundaries are just nonsensical. That is why this government should have accepted the amendment put up by the opposition in the upper house. And shame on those Independent members and the Greens in the upper house who joined with the Labor Party to defeat a very sensible amendment that would have got rid of these stupid lines on maps. How long has it been that a pathway to affordable access to education depends on lines on maps? I represent those students from rural and regional areas, whom many on this side also represent and whom those opposite have failed to represent.

Access to post-secondary education should not be a privilege. It should be a right for all Australians to be treated in the same way as those students who live in capital cities. The great anomaly in this legislation is that, if you happen to live in Cairns or in Townsville, you will be able to gain access to the independent youth allowance with a work test of 15 hours per week, but if you live in Kaimkillenbun and you live on the wrong side of the track you will have to qualify through the 30-hour test. That is a little village of 100 people north of Dalby on the road to Kingaroy.

Before I came in here a lady from the media outlet in Kingaroy had been contacted by families in Kingaroy wanting to know whether they would be eligible under the new rules. Well, they are in one of those towns where to qualify for the independent youth allowance they will have to work 30 hours per week. But if they lived 30 kilometres up the road in Wondai they would have to work 15 hours. (Time expired)

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