Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise tonight to raise an issue that I know is very close to your heart, as well as mine. It is an issue of great importance to many farmers in my electorate of Barker. It is due to concerns for students in electorates like ours that I raise this issue. If these students wish to study at university, they have the extra costs of accommodation and travelling.

Recently I have received a number of letters from various constituents relating to their children’s desire to study at a tertiary level and the financial barriers they are forced to consider in making their decisions. This has certainly been an ongoing issue for some time and one which affects many of the youth of Barker. I acknowledge that, since my election to parliament, this government has made considerable changes to the Youth Allowance scheme, but I stand here this evening asking this government to give the rural youth of Australia a fair go in undertaking tertiary studies, and let us make some further changes to really make a difference. Whilst these children find a desire to better themselves and their skills to become skilled citizens of this nation, unfortunately a lot of them do not have the resources to even contemplate such a dream.

In a rural electorate as large as Barker some students need to go to a tertiary institution in the nearest capital or regional city, often located a considerable distance from their home town, forcing them to leave their family home and stay at a residential college, board or face setting up their own accommodation at an extra cost to their family. Unfortunately, many country families cannot fund such costs on top of the cost of education and we have many fine students who cannot even consider attending further tertiary education. We certainly cannot expect families to take out loans or extend their mortgages just to educate our future leaders.

With the current costs of university courses, one cannot even consider how much it would cost a rural student in total to move to a new town, set up a place to stay whilst studying and fund an education course. Whilst the government provides the youth allowance, we need to ensure that we are considering our rural youth and that the means test and qualifying periods ensure we are encouraging the rural youth of Australia to continue to study and not making it an extremely expensive and difficult exercise for them as compared to students from city based families.

Were changes to be made to the Youth Allowance program, allowing more rural students to study, we may actually be able to encourage these graduates to then return to rural Australia with their skills and encourage the next generation of this nation to undertake further study. I remember seeing a study some time ago which showed that doctors who came from rural areas were at least a 50 per cent chance of returning to a rural area, but if they came from the city, the chances were only one in 20, or about five per cent, that they would move to the country. So there is certainly a greater chance of a rural student coming back to a rural area and serving those areas that they often grew up in.

I would certainly like to see the government allow any student who needs to travel more than 100 kilometres from their home—which takes in most of my electorate, I might add—to undertake tertiary study to immediately qualify for full youth allowance or residential rent assistance under the exceptional circumstances determination. For example, students from the city of Mount Gambier, with 25,000 people, have to travel 450 kilometres to attend a university in either Melbourne or Adelaide. In the Riverland, students travel between 200 and 300 kilometres to attend university. For students from my hometown of Keith it would be 250 kilometres and from Naracoorte it would be 350 kilometres. I would certainly like to see the family means test relaxed by the genuine cost of a student living away from home for that calendar year. Conservatively this would be around $10,000. I believe that with these two changes in place we would really be assisting rural youth to become the best they can be without the extra financial burdens they face, as opposed to their city classmates.