Youth Allowance changes worry Nash

Nationals senator Fiona Nash has raised concerns about how exactly the federal government will give inner-regional students a better income support deal.
Labor has tightened Youth Allowance eligibility criteria so that students from city and inner-regional areas must work an average of 30 hours a week for 18 months to qualify for the benefit's more generous independent rate.
But additional workforce participation tests were retained for outer-regional and remote students to recognise the difficulties they faced accessing higher education.
Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans has released figures showing that since March last year the number of dependent inner-regional university students receiving the maximum rate of Youth Allowance has risen by 2239, or 42 per cent.
But Senator Nash maintained young people from inner-regional areas such as Bunbury in WA and Orange in NSW were still being treated inequitably in comparison to their outer regional peers.
She is worried about how exactly Senator Evans will deliver on his promise of new Youth Allowance eligibility criteria that remove the distinction between inner- and outer-regional students from January next year.
"He (said) he was going to take away the lines on the map but he didn't say in what form or what sort of funding arrangement," she told AAP on Thursday.
"Does he mean that he is going to include all regional students in a certain arrangement but they are all going to get less than they currently do?
"It is hard to read it any other way than that."
Senator Evans' office wouldn't be drawn on exactly how the distinctions between regional students would be removed, given an independent review of student income support reforms by academic Kwong Lee Dow was due to report on the matter next month.
"The government looks forward to Professor Lee Dow's report, and will not pre-empt the outcomes of the review," a spokesman for the minister told AAP in a statement.