Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I think about the thousands of Australian university students who have committed themselves to three-year, four-year and five-year programs, wanting to build out the potential for their participation not just in the workforce but in contributing to human progress and human achievement. They go to tertiary institutions—in particular, universities, as I did—because they want to be embodied with knowledge, skills and purpose to be a much more significant contributor not just to themselves but to the wellbeing of the entire Australian community. When you talk to those students, so often they're looking for improvement in student outcomes and minimising the size of classrooms—which are chockers, because the universities have geared themselves towards the number of students they have who are full fee paying. There is an increasing number of students who go to university with low contact hours.

Even worse than that—Deputy Speaker, you're one of the people who have gone through life, let's say, learning from street cred—is that so much of our system is geared towards qualification inflation. I know the government is addicted to inflationary forces. Well, qualification inflation is no different. We have seen over many years because of the efforts of Labor governments the diminishing value of a tertiary qualification which means that people need to get more in order to distinguish themselves, to demarcate themselves and to be able to get ahead. Look at all the problems that university students have right now. Look at the problems of what they want from their education, not only if they're going on a pathway of research and through the academic pathway but also if it's industrial or commercial or simply for their own satisfaction or achievement. What we are not seeing is vision from this government to unleash universities and their potential because their focus is squarely on how they feed those at the top.

The Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) Bill 2025 and the associated bill are no different. The Australian Tertiary Education Commission is a bureaucratic solution about how more people are employed to sit over the top of policy when one of the biggest problems with universities right now is that they are completely top heavy. If we add bureaucracies on top of university administrations, where we have vice-chancellors earning in excess of the Prime Minister and everyone in this chamber, we won't be getting the focus and the resources to where we need them—learning, teaching and research. In fact, this bill does so little to advance learning, teaching and research it doesn't even mention them in the legislation. I'd say that's disappointing but, truthfully, it's an embarrassment.

Universities need a vision. Universities need reform. They have forgotten their core purpose which is to make sure that they are there to advance the educational improvement, wellbeing and transfer of knowledge between generations. Instead, the incentives that have been put in place since the Hawke government have re-engineered them towards focusing their energies on their own self-sustainability rather than the outcomes.

This is a perennial problem of so much of the legislation that this Labor government brings into this House. It is built from the proposition of intent. It is not focused on the outcome, particularly improving outcomes for young Australians to get the best standard of education that they so desperately need and, in addition to that, are paying for.

What do we need? We don't need a plan for another bureaucracy. They can sell it under any banner they like. What we need is a plan and a vision for how we are going to improve our universities, unleash their potential and focus their efforts towards turning their primary research into something that is innovative, commercialisable for the human improvement of everybody and, more importantly, underpins the economic progress of what our country needs in the future, not more bureaucracy that gets in the way, that tries to impose solutions of Canberra's way. What we need is something that empowers universities to be part of and integrate into full component of the Australian economy.

I hear this all the time. I was at a lunch recently for people who had just been elected to parliament recently—in my case, it was my second time round—with many Labor members of parliament with the Vice-Chancellor and various deputy vice-chancellors from Monash University. Their one message from that lunch was, 'Can the federal government and state government get out of our way and provide clarity and certainty so that we can attract the research funding and go on and do things like invest in the research potential around things like power, particularly nuclear power?' They have major international corporations like Rolls-Royce that are desperate to be able to invest in their research capacity, which could not only be a pathway for economic opportunities but also create jobs, and they are not getting it from Canberra nor Spring Street.

In the face of that desperation for a pathway and for a point of clarity about how universities can build themselves to be able to be part of building Australia's next round of economic progress and growth and to be able to provide the research foundation to support students to be able to achieve they can do and to drive the process of scientific progress and human improvement, the answer from this federal government is silence and another bureaucracy to sit over the top of you, to impose the government's agenda and, when they're out of office, to front run the arguments about why they should be given more power. This comes to the fundamental proposition of some of the divide between those who sit on this side of the House and those who sit on that side of the House. We understand that the strength of our country does not come from Canberra and central authorities down or from organised capital. It comes from families and communities coming together to build the foundations and success of our great nation. One of the starting points of that is we desperately, desperately want students to be able to get good value and return on investment for their energy and, more importantly, not just their money but their time. Three years or four years of young Australians' time at university is a huge investment and risk for their future, and we want them to get maximum value for that, not simply be set up to feed the interests of the select few—the vice-chancellors on their big salaries and, of course, the academics that go on to become members of the National Tertiary Education Union, which is the constituency of this government.

Bureaucracy is not an answer to human improvement. Success for us looks very clearly at how we are going to empower and enable and liberate Australia's students to be able to have a tertiary education that delivers for them, because the failure—and this is what we're going to get from this process—is more of the same, and that is currently failing Australian students under the Albanese Labor government.

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