Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I understand why there is a problem in rural and regional Australia in relation to accessing the significant supports of youth allowance and the fact that there is such an anomaly based on the agreement that was made by the government and the coalition to get the piece of legislation through earlier this year. Of course, it has left things in a total mess, and what we now have is two schemes which are both inadequate and which do not really support the students that we need to be supporting. Rather than simply patching up and pushing or ramming through a piece of legislation that is not actually going to deal with the issue, has not been to a Senate inquiry and has not been properly costed, what we need to be doing is asking the government, working with the government and proving to the government that the current scheme for testing the eligibility of people from rural and regional areas for access to youth allowance needs to be totally overhauled.

If you have to move out of home in order to go to university, you should be given that support. By virtue of moving out of home, you are independent. That should be the criterion. We should not be saying to students who have worked so hard this year through year 12 to be given their place at university: ‘Hang on a minute—you defer that, because we’re not going to give you the support, because you come from a country area. You defer for 12 to 18 months. Go and get a job and prove to us that you’re independent.’ It still leaves students and young people from rural and regional Australia as second class when it comes to accessing education, and it is absolutely not right.

This bill, however, does not deal with the problem. The idea of hijacking a Tuesday afternoon with very limited notice to anybody to ram through a bill which is not going to solve the problem does not really lead us to a place where we are going to be able to give those students the support that they need. Rather, the government should be doing their own modelling and costing for a new criterion that actually gives students the support they need. The budget is coming up. Let us see something in the budget that starts looking at this. During the negotiations on the Youth Allowance legislation at the beginning of this year—of course, this time last year we were discussing exactly the same issue in this chamber in the final two weeks of parliament—it was agreed that there would be a task force set up to look at the greatest needs and, of course, that there would be a review of the system. That review has to happen. The program has to start before we can actually review it, so let us allow that to happen. Let us get a commitment from the government that they will review the current inadequacies and inequity in how the boundaries are drawn up. Let us get from the minister an acknowledgement that the process is not perfect and a commitment that he will review.

It is silly—it is not just silly; it is ludicrous—that a family at one end of a street can access youth allowance and a family at the other end of the street cannot, that some students can access it and other students who go to the same school cannot, but we should not be making it harder for students to go to university; we should be making it easier. That means not making them jump through hoops or over hurdles and ensuring that, if students have to move out of home in order to go to university, we give them that support. That is what the government should be looking into. The government should be finding out a way to fund that and budget for that.

The idea of hijacking the Senate’s time to ram through your own bill that is not going to solve the problem is not just disingenuous in relation to how this place works; it also does not give students the support that they need. Let us not give young people in rural and regional Australia false hope that this is somehow going to solve the problem, because it ain’t. It is not going to solve the problem. I would like to see the government commit to reviewing the boundaries and see that this is not an adequate criterion that is set down and that we need to see that reviewed.

We cannot support the suspension in order to bring this bill on, because it is not the appropriate way. If the coalition honestly want their bill to stand up, they should send it to an inquiry, and we can thrash it out. We can come up with amendments and talk about that. Do not try to ram through something that is not going to fix the problem and is not going to deal with the issues in relation to the struggles that students are feeling. We know that when students are forced— (Time expired)