Dr LIM - 1994-08-24
Shortly before the last federal election, the Commonwealth government undertook to address an anomaly in the residential Abstudy allowance to provide that Aboriginal students aged 14 to 16 years and living away from home received the same allowance as those aged 16 to 17 years. Given the Territory's large Aboriginal population, will the minister advise whether the federal government has fixed the problem as promised?
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ANSWER
Mr Speaker, on my appointment as Minister for Education and Training, I was pleased to follow up some earlier lobbying by Kormilda College, St John's College and later Yirara College to ensure that a fairly commonsense suggestion to the federal government in regard to Abstudy residential payments was met. I was greeted with a fair amount of support from the then federal Minister for Education, Hon Kim Beazley, and I understood that matters were well in hand. The situation was fairly simple for students under 16 years, for example students 15 years of age, in that the school received $3384 per annum but, if a student was over 16, the payment was $5587. That is a difference of over $2000. We all know that a 15-year-old eats as much as a 16-year-old, requires the same amount of electricity and other consumables for their share of the dormitory and that their care involves the same in terms of cleaning, laundering etc. It was pretty obvious, therefore, that the proposal was based on commonsense facts and, at least on the surface, it appeared to be greeted with support by the federal government.
Hon Warren Snowdon, who is Parliamentary Secretary to the federal Minister for Education, announced on 11 February 1993 that this was all in hand and was to take effect from July 1993. That is over a year ago! Thus, for over a year, schools have been waiting to experience the benefit of this federal initiative. What happened, of course, was that the left-wing got hold of this agreement and decided that it would be better to pay these moneys direct to the families concerned, by way of family allowance, and it became a matter not of education but of social welfare benefits. The logical outcome has been that, in the remote areas, Aboriginal families have been very reluctant, to say the least, to hand back to schools the component of those $2000-odd that covers the 40 weeks of the school year. That means that those 3 schools alone are some $600 000 per year worse off.
Much correspondence on the subject has passed between myself, the federal Minister for Education and subsequently Con Sciacca who is, I believe, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Social Security. He was suggesting that it was really a matter for the parents and he claimed to me that no parent had agreed to hand the money to the schools. What he omitted to say, of course, was that one parent in the Northern Territory did say yes to signing over the family payment to the student's school. However, in its wisdom, the Commonwealth government sent 2 officers some 800 km to counsel that particular parent with the idea of informing the community of the great benefits that would accrue as a result of their handing their payments over to the relevant schools. The result was that that person withdrew within days of those 2 officers having travelled that 800 km, and the outcome is that, in the 6 months during which the Commonwealth has been carrying out yet another review of these payments, those 3 schools will lose another $300000. That is simply not good enough. It reflects yet again that, when the lunatic left of the federal Labor Party gets hold of good initiatives and converts them into totally impractical absurdities, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
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Page 62
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, on my appointment as Minister for Education and Training, I was pleased to follow up some earlier lobbying by Kormilda College, St John's College and later Yirara College to ensure that a fairly commonsense suggestion to the federal government in regard to Abstudy residential payments was met. I was greeted with a fair amount of support from the then federal Minister for Education, Hon Kim Beazley, and I understood that matters were well in hand. The situation was fairly simple for students under 16 years, for example students 15 years of age, in that the school received $3384 per annum but, if a student was over 16, the payment was $5587. That is a difference of over $2000. We all know that a 15-year-old eats as much as a 16-year-old, requires the same amount of electricity and other consumables for their share of the dormitory and that their care involves the same in terms of cleaning, laundering etc. It was pretty obvious, therefore, that the proposal was based on commonsense facts and, at least on the surface, it appeared to be greeted with support by the federal government.
Hon Warren Snowdon, who is Parliamentary Secretary to the federal Minister for Education, announced on 11 February 1993 that this was all in hand and was to take effect from July 1993. That is over a year ago! Thus, for over a year, schools have been waiting to experience the benefit of this federal initiative. What happened, of course, was that the left-wing got hold of this agreement and decided that it would be better to pay these moneys direct to the families concerned, by way of family allowance, and it became a matter not of education but of social welfare benefits. The logical outcome has been that, in the remote areas, Aboriginal families have been very reluctant, to say the least, to hand back to schools the component of those $2000-odd that covers the 40 weeks of the school year. That means that those 3 schools alone are some $600 000 per year worse off.
Much correspondence on the subject has passed between myself, the federal Minister for Education and subsequently Con Sciacca who is, I believe, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Social Security. He was suggesting that it was really a matter for the parents and he claimed to me that no parent had agreed to hand the money to the schools. What he omitted to say, of course, was that one parent in the Northern Territory did say yes to signing over the family payment to the student's school. However, in its wisdom, the Commonwealth government sent 2 officers some 800 km to counsel that particular parent with the idea of informing the community of the great benefits that would accrue as a result of their handing their payments over to the relevant schools. The result was that that person withdrew within days of those 2 officers having travelled that 800 km, and the outcome is that, in the 6 months during which the Commonwealth has been carrying out yet another review of these payments, those 3 schools will lose another $300000. That is simply not good enough. It reflects yet again that, when the lunatic left of the federal Labor Party gets hold of good initiatives and converts them into totally impractical absurdities, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
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Last updated: 09 Aug 2016