Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Hansard source

The member for McMillan is right in endorsing my comments. We are talking about all regional students. This is a question of equity of access. In my view, a tertiary access allowance should be in the order of something like $10,000 per annum and it should not be linked to parental income.

We should not require a student to take a year off study and undertake a gap year unless that is their personal choice. The gap year provision has become somewhat anachronistic. It is unfair for students who want to get on with their studies. Some students just want to go from high school straight into their studies. But, instead, in a bid to try and fulfil some complex bureaucratic eligibility criteria, to achieve this notional status of what we call independence, they find out that their parents' income will still be counted against them.

So it is quite frankly a bizarre situation. As a government, as a nation, as a department of education, we cannot have it both ways. We cannot be telling these kids: 'You have achieved independence by working for 12 months and getting $19,500. But, by the way, we are still going to hold your parents' income against you. You are not really independent.' You cannot have it both ways. They are either independent and they get the youth allowance or they are not independent.

This is a bureaucratic nightmare. It is a mess. The Centrelink staff themselves do not understand the system. They simply cannot weave their way through the maze which exists at the moment in relation to youth allowance and the whole system of student income support. We have set up a series of hoops which we expect these young people to jump through, but then we deem them 'not really independent', because we use their parents' income to stop them from actually accessing any benefits whatsoever, if they want to actually go on to achieve their full potential and undertake university studies.

This is a topic which I and many others could talk about all night, because it is a source of enormous frustration for regional MPs. I recognise that what I am saying tonight—that all students from regional areas forced to move away from home to access university should receive in the order of $10,000 per annum—is going to have a cost to the bottom line of the budget, and it would probably be in excess of $200 million per year from the rough calculations that I have done. But there would be benefits in cancelling the current allowance, and in the reduction in staff hours of the bureaucrats required to navigate their way through the current mess.

But we have a Prime Minister who wears like a badge of honour around this nation her claims to be an education Prime Minister.

If she is serious about her claims and her ambition to raise university participation targets, if she is serious about her so-called education crusade, this is a gaping, glaring hole in her credentials and her claims to be a Prime Minister who cares about education.

The Prime Minister is already wearing some level of baggage in relation to education because of the $16 billion that was spent on school halls. The $16 billion on school halls, billed as the Building the Education Revolution program, did not have a single educational outcome attached to it. There were no improvements in literacy, no targets for numeracy and no targets for university participation rates tied to the spending of that $16 billion, so I will not wear from this Prime Minister or the education minister that we cannot afford to provide a fair deal for regional students when we can spend $16 billion on school halls without a single educational outcome attached to it.

There are other issues attached to helping regional students achieve their full potential in terms of participation in university. There are other issues in relation to aspiration and the quality of teaching available to them in a regional location. But the economic barrier is the single biggest factor which prevents regional students from participating in university studies at the same level as their city cousins. Unless one member in this place is prepared to stand up here in this building and tell me that city kids are smarter than country kids, there is no explanation for why country kids do not participate in university at the same rate, unless it is the economic barrier. Unless anyone from a suburban electorate is prepared to stand up and have that debate with me tonight, saying that city kids are smarter than country kids and that that explains their participation in university, the simple issue of access is the biggest factor. The biggest barrier for regional students in achieving their full potential is the economic barrier, and we can do something about it in this place.

This remains an enormous sticking point for Australian regional families. Even after students achieve their so-called independence criteria under the barriers we have established, they can be excluded from receiving any assistance whatsoever under the current arrangements which were put in place by this government. The system of student income support should be making sure that every student in Australia, regardless of where they live, has the opportunity to achieve their full potential. We have a desperately long way to go when it comes to regional areas. Regional students remained vastly under-represented at our university campuses.

This is an issue that goes beyond the individual students. It also goes to the simple concern I have about regional growth and prosperity in itself. It is a separate point that is related. We constantly talk in this place about our skill shortage in regional communities, but parents will make a conscious decision to move away from a regional community to a city because they can support their kids better in their university years, if they cannot receive income support while they are still in a regional location. This is a direct wealth transfer, as well, from regional communities to city communities, because our country parents are paying rent to support their children from a regional location.

The debate does not end here. This is a major social and economic issue. It should not be this hard to get a fair go for regional students.

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