Income support revamp could fail
There are signs that the federal government’s income support package could be headed the same way as its campus amenities package. This is despite Julia Gillard’s concession to gap-year students last week – and even though the income support revamp is based on one of the Bradley review’s most lauded recommendations.
The package is expected to be introduced during Parliament’s next sitting – next week and the week after – as an amendment to the Social Security Act. But while the timetable and contents of the new Bill are still unclear, the Greens say they’ll pursue amendments when it hits the Senate.
Greens youth spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young welcomed the gap-year changes, which delay the scrapping of workforce eligibility criteria for youth allowance for six months. This means gap-year students – people who deferred their studies this year, often in order to qualify for youth allowance – will receive support if they start studying in first semester next year.
But Hanson-Young also wants a new eligibility criterion to be created “to accommodate geographically disadvantaged students” who have to move out of their family homes to go to university or TAFE.
Gillard told a press conference last week that she wasn’t considering any more changes. “This is a balanced and fair package. If the Greens or Coalition want to stop around 100,000 students from qualifying for youth allowance for the first time or getting an increased rate next academic year, I suspect they’re going to have some explaining to do.”
Gillard’s quid pro quo for the gap-year concessions was to delay a planned increase in the amount of money students can earn before they start losing their youth allowance benefit. The new provision, which lets students earn $400 a fortnight before they suffer any penalty – instead of the current $236 – will now be put back 18 months to mid-2012.
“We announced a huge package of reforms in the May budget for universities which have been underfunded for a decade now – an additional $5 billion investment in higher education and innovation. But we always said the youth allowance package would have to be a budget-neutral one,” Gillard told Triple J.
This is the crux of the problem, according to the Greens. “Education and supporting students should be prioritised when the job market is contracting. Students should not be left carrying the can for the government’s budget savings,” Hanson-Young said.
The National Union of Students agrees. “The government has been stubborn in its commitment to a budget-neutral package. This is just not good enough. The youth allowance needs greater funding. We will take this demand to all parties in the 2010 election,” said national president David Barrow.
The government won’t need Greens Senate support if the Coalition agrees to its package. But that’s by no means certain. Opposition education spokesperson Christopher Pyne dismissed Gillard’s youth allowance roundtable last week as a “partisan farce”, then criticised her failure to announce any changes afterwards. When she did, a couple of days later, Pyne condemned it as a “humiliating backflip”.
“It’s taken a nationwide campaign by the Oopposition and students for the government to start seeing reason. Julia Gillard has gone some of the way to eating humble pie, but she has a few more dishes before she’s completed the banquet,” he told ABC Radio.
Nationals deputy Senate leader Fiona Nash, who co-sponsored the senate inquiry into regional education with Hanson-Young, said the government wouldn’t need to be “searching for savings from those who can least afford it” if it hadn’t accrued a $315 billion debt in the first place. “This is the same government that wants to tax our lives with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme,” Nash said – suggesting another generally well-regarded education reform package may fall foul to politicking.
Pyne said Gillard’s original income support package would have cut 30,000 students off youth allowance, and the changes last week would restore access to only 5000 of them – leaving 25,000 “in the cold next year”.
But Gillard said 68,000 currently ineligible students would gain access to youth allowance and another 35,000 would see their payments increased as parental income tests and the age of independence were lowered. And almost 150,000 students will benefit from new scholarships, she said.
Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations president Nigel Palmer, who attended last week’s roundtable, said the government would have been “taken aback” by the sustained negative reaction to its income support reforms. He said the roundtable participants had generally accepted that if the change to the workforce participation criteria was to be delayed, some other part of the package would also be rolled back to keep costs neutral.
Palmer said the government had put “some very smart people” to work on the package. “Those of us who spend a lot of time working with spreadsheets know that if you work at it long enough, you can find the money to do things you thought weren’t possible. They’ve done a lot with a little. It’s quite miraculous.”