Sepuloni Carmel: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSepuloni Carmel: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8404. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): Speaking to Part 2 Part 2 amends the Education Act and I guess basically brings it into line with what is happening to the Social Security Act changes in relation to supporting children in hardship with the actual student allowances section of the Education Act which of course we do support. It is making sure that anything that they were able to get via these changes—so the $25 increase—will actually apply to those who are on the equivalent student allowance. So we do support that.I just want to say that we support in general the idea of parents not only being supported in a positive way to go back to work but also being supported to return to study. So we think there should be no difference in the amount of money that they are able to access for support if they are in study compared with say being on a benefit.I will though just reflect on the Supplementary Order Paper that the National Government voted against that went through during Part 1 which is relevant to this—Matt Doocey: Ha!CARMEL SEPULONI: —in many ways Mr Doocey because it is about support for sole parents to be able to go back and study. So let us keep in mind here that when we are looking at student allowances student allowances can be approved only if the person is studying for 32 hours or more a week. They have to be in full-time study to access a student allowance. The difference here I guess is that when we are talking about the work obligations the National Government is talking about 20 hours. What we were trying to say with the Supplementary Order Paper is that actually parents should be given the option of either studying for 20 hours or working part-time for 20 hours.The National members of the Social Services Committee in discussions on that said that actually they can access student allowances but they cannot access student allowances if they want to study part-time—say 20 to 31 hours. You can get limited full-time study approval at universities but having worked there for 5 years supporting students I know that actually this would not be a reason to get approval for limited full-time study. So there is going to be this small gap where unless you want to go full-time into study then you actually will not be able to access study at all once work obligations kick in because the expectation will be that work obligations take precedence over everything else.So that is a real concern for us despite the fact like I said that we do support the amendments to the Education Act for the purpose of this bill. They need to be done because we do not want our students who are sole parents to be disadvantaged in any way. There were a few submissions that came through to the select committee that touched on the importance of this. One of those submissions was from the National Council of Women. It talked about how clause 10 amends various schedules which is also reflected in an amendment to the Education Act 1989 to cover students with dependent children. The council’s concern was that students with dependent children would be covered. Caritas also pointed out the importance of ensuring that this allowance carried over to students who are supporting children.The Child Poverty Action Group also pointed this out. The group noted the intention to allow student parents on allowances to access the $25 increase in benefit. The Child Poverty Action Group said that given this intent it was actually concerned that if this was done in terms of the $25 increase there could be no justification for denying students the in-work tax credit for their children as well which I think was a really interesting argument. I wonder whether or not the Minister for Social Development took that into consideration when reading that submission from the Child Poverty Action Group.We had another submitter Graham Howell who talked about the importance of ensuring that this $25 was made available to sole parents on a student allowance. Law for Change which represents a whole lot of students—a large number of whom it says are concurrently not only studying but supporting children—was pushing for the fact that this needed to be reflected in student allowances. I think it is still an area that we do need to look at. I know that the Government has made changes with things like the accommodation supplement so that applies to students who are on student allowances and to sole parents. I have been told that there are still other areas—