PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr GREGG (Deakin) (11:36): I'm very pleased to support this important motion by my good friend the member for Holt. Paid prac is good for students and it's good for the nation. The choice between making a living and pursuing your studies is not a real choice at all.
If they can't pay the rent, there's no way they can finish their qualification. This isn't just a bad outcome for those individuals. It's a bad outcome for Australia, as it prevents smart, hardworking young people from entering the essential jobs we all rely on.
When I was a teacher in regional Victoria, I met a lot of students who were choosing what they wanted to do next, and the requirement to do an unpaid placement was a decisive factor for them. We're losing the very kinds of young people we're trying to push into professions. Regional kids are more likely to remain regional professionals, so it is essential that we ensure that opportunity is not decided by postcode or by income.
A compulsory placement should be assessing whether you are ready to enter a profession, not whether your bank account can withstand a hit of weeks or months, and that's what it has become for too many young people trying to qualify for the jobs we really need them to enter into. If they need to do unpaid work, that turns completing a degree into a financial obstacle course.
What paid prac does is address that last really important hurdle that ensures that they can finish their qualification if they're willing to do the hard work in order to complete it. It is something that is critical to equity in our system. We are investing so much effort into ensuring that the opportunity to get a university qualification is available to all young people who are willing to do the work and have proved their capability to be successful.
But it's become a financial minefield for far too many students. We've seen it in practical terms—people dropping out of courses simply because they can't afford to complete the final prac. I think back to when I was training as a teacher.
I was living in a caravan in a regional town, while eating mostly Easy Mac, and I was one of the lucky ones because I could afford to pay not only my rent but also to rent on a caravan park site. Not everyone could afford to do that. A lot of students keep their heads just above water at the best of times, week by week, so they cannot afford to go weeks or months without a normal income, and that's what we expect them to do.
Either students are required to give up a lot of their time working or they simply can't work at all because they're placed far away from where they normally reside. It's quite normal. A lot of young people cannot choose where they conduct their placement.
Options and opportunities are limited, so sometimes they need to do these practicums far away from where they live, so they need somewhere to stay or they need to put more petrol in the car so they can get to and from there every day. We need to think of those practical issues when we're designing a system, because we can't separate our system from reality. We know that this has been a problem for a very long time, and it is a barrier to entry to far too many Australians who would make terrific professionals.
They have the right attitude, they have the capacity and this is just a small barrier that is really getting in the way of us achieving our goals. We know that placement poverty is real and we know it's a barrier, so paid prac is there to alleviate that barrier for professionals that we really need to be expanding in number at this point in time. You look at the list of future allied health workers that this is supporting, and they're the very people we need with an ageing population and increasing support needs in our community.
A shortage of these professionals would be unacceptable for most of our communities. I know that, in my own community of Deakin, we've got a lot of great young people, not all of whom could afford to make that sacrifice, but we also have an increasing number of older Australians who will be needing physiotherapists and those other allied health professionals as time goes on.
So we need to make sure that we've got that pipeline of workers ready to meet that expanding demand for professionals that we already know are in short supply in many parts of Australia. It is essential that we confront and deal with this issue. We've seen the success of paid prac in the professions that have already been enjoying it, including teachers and nurses, so we know it works.
We know it makes a significant and material difference to the success of people completing these qualifications and that it ends a barrier confronted by far too many younger people, and other Australians of all ages, who are completing a qualification. It is just a small incentive, relative to the cost of investing in their degree. The last thing we want to do is invest a whole lot of money encouraging them to get into university and then invest a whole lot of money in getting them through units only for this final hurdle of a practicum to prevent them from completing the qualification.
It undermines the financial investment we as the Commonwealth are making in these young people. So this is a final piece of the puzzle. It's an essential piece of the puzzle, and I'm incredibly proud of the Albanese Labor government for stepping in with this really important initiative.
I thank all those in the parliament who have given voice to the young people about this issue, because those have been important contributions as well, as have the contributions of many fellow members of the Albanese Labor government who've been pushing this for some time—and I include the wonderful member for Holt among them—because they realise that you can't separate— (Time expired)