Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) Bill 2025 and the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. These are the bills which establish the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, known as ATEC. Let me say at the very outset that these bills are very troubling. They establish a new regulator for an overregulated sector. They fail to articulate a clear vision for tertiary education in Australia but, at the same time, they tie it to inappropriate objectives. They don't deal properly with the independent or vocational and technical education centres and their links with universities. They are replete with problems of a technical or operational nature, and they've been criticised across the board. It's a turgid technocrats' policy that entrenches more bureaucracy. Labor loves to write its own hagiographies and they love to talk about education. When they go to write the next chapter of their own history, I fear these bills will be an unfortunate footnote. They are, to put it bluntly, not what Australia needs right now.

I want to start at the top with the policy objective. The Universities Accord started with the point that the roadmap for Australian universities needs to start with a vision and a shared objective. That's unobjectionable as a statement of general principle. Of course, if you're going to embark on reform, you should have a sense of where you're going. But the accord process then made two extraordinary leaps. First, it produced an objective for the tertiary education sector as a whole. I pause here to make this critical point. The higher education sector is more than just about our public universities. In fact, public universities make up only around 20 per cent of the higher education providers in Australia, and the tertiary education sector, which includes both higher and vocational education, is broader still. There are 4.86 million student enrolments in the independent sector. In our tertiary sector, more than 71 per cent of the enrolments are not in the public universities. But having just completed a consultation centred on the needs and demands of Australia's public universities, the accord set an objective for the remaining 71 per cent of tertiary students who arguably weren't adequately accounted for. This was the first extraordinary leap. The second was to seek to define that objective in a way that seems completely divorced from the needs and purpose of our higher education sector and, worse still, to try and entrench it in legislation.

The Universities Accord proposed a national tertiary education objective, and that's the objective which has found its way into the bill in section 13. And it's not just the objective of our tertiary education sector as a whole. It is an objective that ATEC will be required by law to take into account in the performance of every function and the exercise of every power. It's the iron rod that will guide this new regulator. So what does the objective say? The legislation says:

… the National Tertiary Education Objective is the objective for tertiary education in Australia to:

a. promote a strong, equitable and resilient democracy; and

b. drive national, economic and social development and environmental sustainability.

It's quite extraordinary. The words 'teaching', 'learning' and 'research' simply do not appear. There's nothing in there about the quality of our institutions. There's no consideration given to the way in which our tertiary system can align with or support our national interest. There's no reference to student experience. There's nothing about fostering dynamism, competition, innovation or efficiency. In fact, there's nothing at all which sets out the things you'd ordinarily expect in a statement setting expectations of an educational institution or a critical sector of our economy. But according to this government, this is the unifying objective or vision that's meant to shape our higher education sector out to the 2050s and an objective it wants to set down in law.

Let me be clear. This government's national tertiary education objective says nothing about tertiary education, and why on earth not? If you were to stop the average woman or man in the street and ask, 'What do you think should be the objective of our tertiary education system?' they'd probably say something about teaching students or doing research or the other things you generally associate with education. These considerations simply do not make their way into the definition in this bill.

That omission is bad enough in its own right. It is what the government has included that really makes the stick in the craw. Instead of talking about teaching, learning and research, the government says that our ATEC should be governed by vague and inappropriate references to 'social development and environmental sustainability'. What does social development even mean? It's an extraordinarily loaded term that goes to fundamental beliefs about the way our society should be shaped and the direction it should take in the future. It is a deeply, deeply political idea. It is the core focus of this parliament, the function of this place, to debate and contest the way our society should develop with ultimate accountability to the voters who ask us to represent them here.

This is an undefined and heavily contested and entirely inappropriate function to confer on a bureaucratic body entrenched by law in the Department of Education. Take, for instance, the ATEC's role in providing for domestic and international student allocations. Does driving social development affect those processes? Those are questions for the parliament and the people, not the ATEC. And why, regardless of the decision or the topic, is environmental sustainability shoehorned into the ATEC decision-making processes? It's a naked attempt to introduce cultural and political considerations into the decisions about our tertiary education sector.

If environmental sustainability is relevant to the performance of ATEC's functions, it will be taken into account. That's basic administrative law principle. And if it's not relevant, it should not be taken into account. That is common sense. But under this bill, regardless of context, the ATEC is required to have regard to environmental sustainability. Quite simply, that is not the appropriate focus of our higher education sector. It means that this is a bill about ideology, not improvement.

To those opposite who say, 'Well, all we've done is adopt a recommendation of the Universities Accord,' I say that's not good enough. Governments accept and reject recommendations all the time. They're expected to have the intellectual curiosity to engage with those recommendations. They're expected to weigh consequences. They're expected to look carefully at proposals that are put to them and make decisions in light of the interests of all Australians and the electors who choose them to be in this place. Once it's in legislation, you own it; it's your policy.

It's not just me making these criticisms. The National Tertiary Education Union has slammed this ham-fisted attempt to ram more ideology into our universities and tertiary providers. It said:

The NTEU believes that this objective does not adequately address the character, nature and purpose of higher education; it makes no reference, for example, to the importance of critical inquiry, academic discovery and discourse, institutional independence or even to academic freedom. Instead, the objectives seek to define tertiary education as part of broader Government policy and could apply to virtually any sector.

Deputy Speaker, you know that, when a member of the Liberal Party is quoting the National Tertiary Education Union in its criticism of a Labor bill, the bill is in real trouble.

Deakin University, in a submission that included a detailed paper from its Vice-Chancellor, Professor Iain Martin, about the social licence of universities, emphasised the need for universities to maintain their social licence and to consider the way they are seen by the public at large. He said, 'Either through action or inaction, we are readily accused of being politicised; the playthings of left-wing, inner-urban cultural elites, who possess social and economic capital.' He specifically described education, teaching and learning as the 'core responsibility' of university and specifically argues for excellence. It's a point well made and one the government has missed. In setting its legislative objective for the entirety of the tertiary education sector, this government has missed the mark. The point of our tertiary education sector is not social development and environmental sustainability. It's education. It's learning. It's teaching. It's research. It's a dynamic, vibrant, competitive sector. It's support for our values and alignment with our national interests. If we are going to have a national tertiary education objective set out in legislation, it cannot be the one set out in clause 13.

I want to say something about the second major flaw of this bill, which is that no serious commentator has looked at our tertiary education sector and concluded that it needs yet another regulator. Perversely, though, that is exactly the situation which this government has now found itself in. In a submission to the universities governance inquiry last year, the existing regulator, TEQSA, specifically highlighted the complex governance and regulatory environment in which our institutions operate. It listed 13 different bodies which exercised some kind of oversight, influence or control of our universities. And that number rises to 14 once TEQSA itself is included. As Western Sydney University said, Australia's universities now operate under more than 300 pieces of legislation and regulation, a system it describes as a 'Frankenstein system'. This bill adds to that system. Submissions to the inquiry have made absolutely clear that the ATEC will be a regulator in all but name. Describing ATEC's function as 'stewardship' is not an answer.

Stakeholders have specifically rejected the government's denials through Senate estimates that ATEC will be a regulator, saying that attempts to do so rely on an overly technical definition of the term. I go further. it's disingenuous to say that ATEC will not be a regulator. It will exert policy influence. It will shape resource allocations. It will have the power to enter into compacts with universities, suspend them where it decides to do so and replace them with standard-form agreements. That is a suite of powers that is clearly designed and intended to regulate behaviour within a very important sector of our economy. It will operate alongside but distinct from the Department of Education, which oversees general education policy; the Department of Home Affairs, which governs international student intakes; the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, which has responsibility for skills and the VET portfolio; TEQSA, which is the specific higher education regulator; ASQA, which regulates the remainder of the tertiary sector; the National Student Ombudsman; the Australian Research Council; the National Health and Medical Research Council; Jobs and Skills Australia; state and territory regulatory bodies and designated state authorities; professional accreditation bodies; and all of the other bodies which exercise oversight, influence, control or otherwise shape the tertiary education environment. ATEC is a new regulator, and no disinterested observer would look at the constellation of higher education and VET regulatory and governance bodies and say, 'What we really need right now is yet another regulator.'

Let me move to issues of duplication, cost and lack of harmonisation. These issues of excessive regulatory burden raise the related issues of duplication and cost, because, as has become clear in Senate estimates, the department, as a department of state, will retain policy oversight over all matters within its policy remit, including higher education. Inevitably, with all of the regulators, there will be overlap and there will be duplication. Translated, that means there will be cost to taxpayers. But there's a broader problem, because the $54 million that's allocated to ATEC does not create a single additional student place. It does not improve student experience. It does not add value for those who make sacrifices to attend universities. The $54 million could be allocated to fund $1 million research grants for each one of Australia's universities, with more than $10 million left over.

And when it comes to harmonisation between higher and vocational education, these bills don't achieve what they're meant to do. ATEC is intended, in part, to reduce the barriers between VET and higher education, to allow students to move back and forth between the two freely. However, the ATEC legislation appears to be focused on Australia's 43 universities, largely ignoring the 166-odd non-university higher education providers and the 3,700 tertiary education businesses. It is unclear how the ATEC can achieve harmonisation and mobility across the whole of the higher education sector in these circumstances. And at a time when interest rates are rising as a result of Labor's poor economic management, which has seen education costs balloon by 5.4 per cent—higher than the core inflation rate—there's no justification for yet more government expenditure which doesn't add to productivity or reduce the cost of education for Australians. Yet again—when Labor spends, you pay.

But the criticism of the bills doesn't stop there. Extraordinarily, there seems to have been incredible disquiet about this bill even among the very institutions that championed ATEC in the first place. Universities Australia has said:

As currently drafted, the Bill does not deliver on the Australian Universities Accord's … aspirations for an independent body to design and drive the longer-term reform agenda for Australia's tertiary system.

Independent Tertiary Education Council of Australia said:

ITECA supports reform aimed at improving the long-term clarity and cohesiveness of Australia's tertiary education system. However, the ATEC Bill as currently drafted, does not align with the stated ambition of creating an integrated and equitable tertiary framework.

The ATEC Bill suffers from drafting that is based on there being no clear needs case for the tertiary system, especially the more than 4.8 million students and over 3,700 tertiary education businesses that will have little or zero engagement with this new bureaucratic fancy.

It seems clear that the ATEC Bill before the Committee is not at a stage where it is ready for consideration by the parliament and the Commission is not ready to be established. It is far preferable to ensure that an agency of this importance is ready, and its enabling legislation is not compromised by eagerness for speed.

ITECA strongly urges the Committee to deeply consider the need for this Commission, as its core functions can, and in many cases already are being undertaken by existing agencies of the Commonwealth.

Independent Higher Education Australia said this:

The Bills establish the Australian Tertiary Education Commission … as the central system "steward" for Australia's tertiary education sector. It is in fact a regulator in all but name.

… in practice, ATEC's functions, including allocation of domestic and international places, establishment and oversight/monitoring of compacts and influence on the Threshold Standards, give it a regulatory role.

… Without [expertise in the independent sector], there is a real risk that ATEC's work will default to a public-university-centric view of the tertiary system, overlooking the contributions, challenges and operating environments of independent providers. This would undermine the Commission's ability to function as a genuine system steward and would diminish the accuracy, balance and relevance of its advice to Government.

Deakin University, having described itself as a firm supporter of ATEC, said:

However, though supportive of an ATEC, and already engaged with the interim body in a productive and meaningful manner, Deakin holds several concerns regarding the proposed legislation. We posit that addressing these concerns, which range from a lack of clarity to missed opportunities to truly achieve the ambitions of establishing such a function, should be a priority.

The Tasmanian government, in diplomatic language, fired a warning shot about the introduction of unnecessary and duplicative compliance mechanisms. Referring to such mechanisms, it said:

These mechanisms should be demonstrably necessary and proportionate, avoid administrative burden and ensure that reporting requirements contribute directly to improved educational and research outcomes. Integration with existing data collections and reporting platforms is essential to minimise duplication.

Compliance obligations should, at their core, add value for students by generating actionable insights that improve equity, participation, and completion rates, rather than diverting resources from teaching and support services.

Science and Technology Australia, the peak body for the nation's science and technology sector, said:

Science & Technology Australia is concerned that while the Bill states the proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission's … powers will extend to university research and research training … there is insufficient clarity in the proposed legislation and no evidence of sufficient capability or resourcing built into the ATEC to properly support university research.

In short, ATEC does not support Australia's national research agenda.

Regional Development Australia picks up on the failure of the legislation to address the needs of regional communities. Under the heading 'Concerning gaps for regional communities', it says:

The Bill and its settings make welcome progress towards access equity for cohorts who are currently underserved, particularly at an individual student level. However, at a structural level there remains a risk that these settings may entrench or amplify existing inequities affecting regional institutions and communities, with implications for their capacity to contribute to the nation's long-term prosperity.

That's extraordinary.

And it's not just bodies who are impacted by the change that have criticised the bill. Dr Ant Bagshaw, a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education in Melbourne, broadly supports the diagnosis that Australia needs a system steward in its higher education sector, but he said this:

The Senate should recommend that ATEC not be established in its current form, and that the Department of Education be legislatively required to discharge the stewardship role with strengthened transparency, consultation and capability.

…   …   …

… system stewardship is not the same as creating a new agency.

Professor of higher education policy at Monash University Andrew Norton, one of Australia's leading public policymakers and commentators on higher education, asked, in the first question in his submission, whether an Australian tertiary education commission should be created at all. He said this:

The government's policies imply a belief that a more bureaucratic approach will improve higher education outcomes. Even if we accept this assumption, it is not clear that ATEC will improve matters significantly compared to current Department of Education arrangements.

His principal recommendation is simple—that the bills should be rejected—and the criticism he gives is devastating. Before dissecting the legislation in detail, he says this:

The following chapters—

in the submission—

identify numerous flaws in the ATEC proposal. They include recommendations to improve the bills, should they have in-principle parliamentary support. But the ATEC bills should be rejected. They would narrow higher education's purposes. As they stand, they offer universities nothing but additional government control and bureaucracy. Due to ATEC's design flaws, we can have little confidence that it will improve on the current policy framework.

Professor Mark Warburton, a highly influential academic, a respected public servant and a former adviser to the Australian government during the Hawke and Keating years, said this:

The Government has announced its "three important structural reforms that are central to setting the tertiary education system up for the future". These are the ATEC, Managed Growth Funding and Needs-based Funding. It has not provided adequate detail on how any of these proposals will advance the objectives the Government has set for them.

In his second reading speech for this Bill, the Minister declared:

the ATEC is the Accord. … It is a national project and it needs a steward that is there for the long haul. … To get the sector to work more like a system. … And to help drive real and lasting reform.

Unfortunately, the direction of change for the system is articulated only in the most broad and high-level terms:

Warburton goes on to say:

There is no satisfactory detail on how ATEC is going to achieve any of these things. Given the magnitude of ambition for ATEC, it does not seem unreasonable to ask for some detail on precisely what changes it will be making in the short term, how it will go about making those changes and what leverage it will have to enforce those changes.

Many of the claims made about the Government's response to the Accord are inflated …

This person was a higher-education adviser during the Hawke and Keating governments. He goes on:

In Higher Education Attainment Under the New Managed Growth Funding System

it's one of his papers—

I show how both the claimed expansion associated with Fee-free Uni Ready places and the claimed additional funding provided in the 2024-25 MYEFO changes are overstated. I provide evidence that planned government funding will most likely result in lower higher education attainment in the 2030s, than in 2021. …

In his Second Reading Speech, the Minister stated of ATEC that "Its operations will be transparent". The Bill does not provide for this.

It's pretty damning criticism.

Many others criticise the ATEC's perceived lack of independence and its failure to deliver on what was originally conceived of when ATEC supporters first pitched the idea to government. The list of critics is extraordinary. Unions, government bodies, universities, independent providers, experts—all of these are saying that the ATEC legislation currently before this parliament is not fit to pass.

Before I go further, let me be clear. There is a committee process that is underway right now in the other place. We respect the committee process, and I hope it is an extensive committee process. There were 60 different submissions made to that committee—powerful, insightful and careful analysis from across the sector. We need to hear from those witnesses, and the committee will fail in its duty if we do not hear from them. If the government doesn't call the witnesses I've mentioned today, it will fail, because the Australian public deserves to hear from the authors to understand where this legislation is good and where it is not. They deserve to hear from the experts in the field and those with a stake—witnesses like Professor Mark Warburton, a highly respected academic from the University of Melbourne who wrote a penetrating and insightful analysis that deserves recognition and careful consideration, and bodies like the Independent Tertiary Education Council of Australia and Independent Higher Education Australia. They have the most skin in this game when it comes to this legislation, because tertiary education is more than just our universities.

As IHEA said, Australia's higher education system consists not only of public universities but of a broad range of independent higher education providers, including private universities, university colleges and both not-for-profit and for-profit non-university higher education providers, or NUHEPs, and the range of providers is much broader once VET is added. ITECA covers both, and it points out that the independent sector accounts for 77 per cent of all higher education institutions in Australia and 92 per cent of registered training organisations. Of course we should be hearing from those types of bodies. Doing otherwise is a disservice to the parliamentary committee, and it's a disservice to the Australian people, who expect us to properly scrutinise legislation. So I hope that this committee in the Senate has the opportunity to properly scrutinise the legislation, to ask questions of expert witnesses and to understand from bodies who operate in the field how this bill will affect them in a practical way, and I hope that the government would support me in showing this basic respect for stakeholders and the parliamentary process in having a proper inquiry.

Let me finish by saying this. There are bigger questions about our tertiary sector that need to be solved and where, in the last couple of years, government policy has not made any real inroads. How long can we continue with one third of our universities struggling? Does the current balance between vocational and higher education really suit Australia's long-term needs? What is the process and methodology that should be adopted for international student intakes? How do we deal with low volume, expensive but strategically important skill sets and capabilities that are taught in our universities but which are expensive to maintain? How do we maintain the presence of those regional campuses that feed activity and meet the needs of communities outside the big cities? How do we provide and promote competition and dynamism between the public and independent sector? What is the long-term trajectory of Australia's standing on the international stage, given the growth of its campuses in South-East Asia, China and in our region more broadly and their ability to offer comparable quality at a lower price point? Are our universities losing their social licence? What is the impact of AI, which right now can develop and sequence information almost to a university level and almost for free turn it into a package or a podcast that I can use to educate myself? What does that mean for our sector? What steps do we as a nation need to take right now in terms of our policy settings and longer term development to best position ourselves to train and educate future generations?

These are big questions, and they should be answered by the Australian Department of Education as the minister's principal policy adviser. Otherwise, what's the department doing? It doesn't run any schools. It doesn't run any childcare centres. It doesn't run any vocational or higher education institutions. If it's not answering these questions, what is it doing? Regardless, none of these questions are answered by these bills. Those opposite will say that the purpose of ATEC is to answer them. That's not a good answer. It doesn't explain why the department can't or won't do it, and it doesn't explain what the department will do going forward. It doesn't even explain why the sector needs yet another regulator. In any event, the gap between answering those questions and the options put forward in this bill is just too wide. Even if you support ATEC in principle, this legislation is too problematic.

So, in summing up, let me say this. If forced to vote on this legislation before the committee completes its inquiry, the Liberal Party will oppose this legislation. That is the holding position. We will join the very large chorus of stakeholders and interested parties saying these bills are not fit to pass, and we will continue working on those bigger questions in the interests of all Australians. In closing, I thank the House and move the amendment as circulated in my name:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) notes with concern that:

(a) Australia's tertiary education sector is significantly over-regulated;

(b) providers report to multiple competing and overlapping bodies; and

(c) some providers are required by law to deal with more than 300 different pieces of legislation and regulation;

(2) affirms that the objective of tertiary education in Australia must focus on teaching, learning and research, and should otherwise be aimed at promoting a dynamic and innovative sector that provides a positive student experience, delivers value for money, improves Australia's productivity and supports Australian values;

(3) further notes widespread concern among the tertiary sector and expert stakeholders about the drafting of this legislation; and

(4) calls for this legislation to be the subject of proper and thorough scrutiny".

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