Gillard meets students on allowance row
Weekly Times Now
GAP year students from around Australia will be able to put their concerns on youth allowance changes directly to Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard next week.
Ms Gillard said today that the students, along with their local federal MPs, would be part of a roundtable in Parliament House in Canberra on Monday.
Also attending will be the Chair of Universities Australia, Professor Peter Coaldrake, President of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations, Nigel Palmer and the National Union of Students National President, David Barrow.
Thousands of students, along with their families and all non-Government MPs, have called on Ms Gillard to pull back from proposed changes to the work requirements to qualify for independent youth allowance, which would force current gap year students to defer for yet another year.
Instead of having to earn just under $20,000 to qualify, from the start of next year, students must have worked for 30 hours a week for 18 months.
But Ms Gillard said these and other proposed changes to youth allowance would benefit more than 100,000 students.
“Changes to the parental income test threshold will mean that many students will no longer be encouraged to take a gap year in order to be eligible for assistance,” she said.
Studies showed that around 30 per cent of gap year students choose not to commence their university studies, Ms Gillard said.
“The Government is committed to increasing the number of Australians accessing higher education,” she said.
“The changes to the allowance recommended by the Bradley Review into Higher Education are designed to ensure that it is targeted to the students who need it most.”
Under the proposed changes, around 150,000 students would also receive a $2,254 per year start-up scholarship to assist with expenses at the beginning of each academic year, Ms Gillard said.
More than 14,000 students who are required to move to study would be eligible to receive a relocation scholarship of $4,000 in their first year, and $1,000 each subsequent year.
“Together with the changes to the parental income test, the Rudd Government will ensure more students receive Youth Allowance and more students will receive more assistance to study.”
But Nationals Senator Fiona Nash, who is chairing an inquiry into the youth allowance changes and other aspects of education access for rural students, said Ms Gillard didn’t seem to understand the impact of the change to the work requirements.
“She should just push back the starting date by a year to help those gap year students who undertook their gap year in good faith that the old criteria would sty in place,” she said.
The cost to the Government would be minimal compared to some of its other expenditure on education, Senator Nash said.