Goodhew Jo: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoodhew Jo: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5805. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JO GOODHEW (Associate Minister for Social Development): Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this estimates debate. I want to add to the debate an element of the measures that the Government is currently taking to support students. I am going to do so at a time when we are hearing quite a lot of debate about what students do with the money that the Government sends their way for support of their tertiary education. So I would like to talk a little bit about my responsibilities within the social development portfolio for student loans.We have made changes to the student support. It has allowed us to free up money that we can invest in improving the quality of the tertiary education we provide. Back in 2011 we passed legislation to make sure benefit and student allowances increase every year along with inflation. That lines up very nicely with the same changes that we made to give some certainty for increases to other welfare payments as well. Interestingly that was not an action taken by the previous Labour Government along with its partner-in-arms at the time the Green Party.Each year the rates and thresholds for a range of Work and Income assistance and StudyLink assistance will rise to keep up with increasing living costs and back on 1 April this year we saw the annual general adjustment go up by 0.51 percent which of course was indexed at the time. So we are supporting students. We are retaining the student loan repayment threshold at $19084 until April 2017 and increasing the student allowance rates for families with children by $25 a week which will kick in on 1 April next year. We are retaining the student allowance parental income threshold at $55027.96.There is another thing that we are doing for students. Let us face it a lot of what we hear about students is that they are time poor—they are very busy studying. They are very busy in many cases with some part-time work to support their study. This year more than 130000 students have benefited from the improvements that we have made to student loan and allowance application processes. These make it easier in the following ways. They allow for a pre-filled online application process which saves about 30 minutes for every student getting on there. The one other thing that does is it saves money for the taxpayer because the taxpayer is not spending more time with these students getting the answers from these students in order to fill in the necessary forms to apply for things. So in fact we are in that same way getting better bang for the buck for our taxpayers as well. There is also a digital repository called Connect which allows students and parents to scan the necessary documents the evidence that they need to apply to StudyLink.You know there are some amazing statistics that demonstrate how well this is going. Unanswered calls have been slashed from 800000 unanswered calls back in 2013 to fewer than 8000 this year. That means again a saving for the taxpayer because there is a 22.5 percent drop in foot traffic at the StudyLink offices. So this is yet another example of this Government being careful with the money that the taxpayers are entrusting to us. It has been said in the Chamber this afternoon—and I am going to say it again because we cannot say it often enough—that the way for families to help themselves if they are dependent on a welfare benefit is wherever possible for the Government to assist them into work. That is how their children their lives their health and their welfare indeed are bettered. Therefore this Government is going to many lengths—extreme lengths in some cases—to assist families to benefit from having work and having an income coming into their household.We have heard sanctions debated here today and it is reprehensible to hear members of this Committee misrepresent the obligations we place on people and the way that sanctions are applied. We know at the heart of this that if sanctions are applied that means quite a drop in income. That is never done without good cause and if there are reasons for that person to have failed an appointment then all they have to do is say so. But we also know that having an excuse repeatedly time after time after time again might indicate an inability to really show commitment towards going to appointments to undertaking training and therefore no commitment to bettering their own lives.