Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will just touch on two points that the member for Braddon made. I will go first to the issue of income payments to students from regional Australia. I agree with the member for Braddon that this is an issue that we all hold dear to our hearts and one which we all—especially those from regional and rural campuses—would like to see progressed, but we must make note of the fact that there is a discrepancy between how those students in inner regional areas are assessed and how those in the outer areas are assessed. Although we might have seen some increase in the number of students accessing some form of payments, the figures do not show the level of those payments and how much those students are receiving. It would seem that it could be the case that a lot of those students are receiving minimal amounts, which is not going in any way to address the costs of country students accessing tertiary education.

So, as far as we on this side of the House are concerned, although we agree in principle with you that this is an area of real importance to country students, the devil, as always, will be in the detail. We need to wait and see the detail, and we also need to make sure, I think, just on the pure basis of fairness, that those in inner regional areas are treated the same as other country students. As a matter of fact, on the day that the government was heralding its changes, I received a letter from a father in Ararat, which is in the inner regional zone, expressing to me his great discomfort, unease and unhappiness about why one of his three children could not access payments to help him, struggling with higher costs of living, send the child off to a tertiary education.

I would also like to pick up on what the member for Braddon had to say—and his lovely quote—about our need to operate in a resource limited world. I think this goes very much to the heart of what we are discussing in the debate on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Demand Driven Funding System and Other Measures) Bill 2011, because we have a wonderful aspiration, which is supported by the coalition, that we would like to see 40 per cent of Australians between the ages of 25 and 34 holding at least a bachelor's degree by 2025. The sad thing is, and the G8 have pointed this out, where are the resources going to come from to support this aspiration. So far, from what we have seen from this government, it is not going to come from the Gillard government. We have seen four deficits in a row. The last deficit handed down in the recent budget was $47 billion. Just to put that into some perspective, the entire budget handed down by the Victorian government this year, for health, education and police, was $47 billion. So the federal deficit was the size of the whole budget of our second largest state. That gives an indication of where our finances are at the moment. We have a rather illusory target to try and hit surplus again in 2014—

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