Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I think all honourable senators do agree that the prospective changes to youth allowance are a very important issue. Senator Collins was quite right—I think all of us in this chamber have received a lot of correspondence about the issue. I have received many emails, and I know all honourable senators have. Senator Collins said something very interesting, and she was dead right. The Bradley review and also the government have spoken about equity and access to tertiary education and higher education. This fundamentally is the point. The Deputy Prime Minister, who is the Minister for Education, has spoken many times about the importance of having more people graduate from Australian universities and attending higher education. Equity and access has been one of the themes of the Deputy Prime Minister’s crusade on higher education. Let me just say that a lot of it I agree with. I think it is a good thing that more people go to university and I think it is a good thing to attract students to higher education from whatever background. Australia should be a meritocracy and certainly people should not be precluded on the basis of coming from a disadvantaged or Indigenous background. But neither should they be disadvantaged or have access reduced by where they happen to live. It was easy for me to go to university because I caught a bus to it. So many students in this country do not have the option of doing that. They live far too far away to even drive to it. So this is a question, as the Deputy Prime Minister likes to say, of equity and access. If that is the fundamental test—and that is the test that Professor Bradley raised in the Bradley review—what about rural students? They are disadvantaged. This is the litmus test. They are disproportionately disadvantaged by the changes to the youth allowance scheme.

I accept what Senator Collins said, that many of these prospective students will not qualify because their parents earn too much. That is true and I accept that. But the bottom line is that these young Australians do not have the option of staying at home to go to university. Their access to university is much less than the vast majority of Australians. That is the fundamental flaw in the government’s position. I have heard so often from the Deputy Prime Minister—indeed, nearly ad nauseam—about equity and access to higher education. I agree with a lot of it. I agree with her on much of that. I think a lot of other honourable senators in the opposition do as well. But you cannot argue that and talk about disadvantaged students and Aboriginal students and then say it does not apply to students living in rural and regional areas. It just does not work and it does not wash.

Secondly, as Senator Nash and Senator Williams have put so eloquently this afternoon, there is a transitional period. I have to agree again with Senator Collins that technically this bill is not retrospective. I accept that. Technically it is not retrospective. Senator Sherry is right to suggest that sometimes goalposts change. But so many prospective students have put their lives on hold on the basis that the rules would be as they are now. What about them? The government intends to introduce this on 1 January next year and again we are going to have tens of thousands of students miss out. It is all very well for the government to talk about equity and access—and, as I say, I agree with a lot of that—but rural students and students undertaking transition will both miss out. It is not fair and it upsets equity and access. The government cannot have it both ways.

The government’s approach to youth allowance is symptomatic of their approach more generally to education. They have big ideas and really lofty rhetoric but they are defeated in detail and often a shambles in implementation. We have heard so much about that in question time today and over the last 18 months since the election. Who could forget the then opposition leader, Mr Rudd, standing there with a laptop computer saying, ‘This is the tool box of the 21st century.’ Eighteen months later only eight per cent of the computers promised have landed on desks. Even then it was underbudgeted by $800 million. It is a shambles in implementation. It is a tool box without any tools. It is an absolute farce. It was great rhetoric, but in implementation it has been a total, unmitigated disaster.

Also, the Prime Minister promised there would be an internet connection, that all these laptop computers would be connected to fibre at 100 kilobytes a second and we would have a great new education system. But there have been no new connections to fibre from the government and when you ask about this at estimates you are told, ‘It is okay. You do not need to worry about it because Senator Conroy has it under control. The National Broadband Network will fix the problem.’ How long will it take? According to Senator Conroy, it will take five to seven years—by which time, I might add, all the laptop computers that the government has promised will be redundant. Not only have the laptops not arrived; when they do arrive they are going to be redundant. It is a total farce.

As we heard today in relation to the Building the Education Revolution and primary schools, the two aims of that project were to provide jobs and to enhance education. We now know the government did not even ask how many jobs would be created when they sought the tenders. So the problem with the youth allowance, as has been put so eloquently by my colleagues, is symptomatic of a broad problem. The broad problem is this: the government is great at rhetoric, is great on spin, has lofty promises but is absolutely woeful on implementation.