Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I move amendment (1) as circulated in my name:

(1) Clause 11, page 9 (line 13), after "Commonwealth", insert "and student".

This amendment to the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) Bill 2025 is about one thing: it's about ensuring fairness for students in our higher education system. Today, for many young Australians, university education has become a narrow and expensive pathway. Students are being burdened with rising fees, growing debts and a funding structure that fails to reflect the realities that they face. My amendment takes steps towards recognising those issues.

The government says that it wants a tertiary education commission able to drive long-term reform, but the bill before the House creates a commission that cannot speak for or investigate the plight of students unless it's politically convenient to the government of the day. Under this bill, the commission is empowered to examine what the Commonwealth contributes to higher education, but it's prevented from looking at what students themselves are charged. It's extraordinary that the government has drafted a bill that gives the future steward of Australia's tertiary education sector the power to review and advise on what comes out of the Commonwealth purse but pays no mind to the financial burden on students.

The government's omission is not accidental; it's deliberate. That omission significantly weakens the commission's ability to provide the honest and robust advice that the government needs to hear. Many submissions on this bill from higher education experts and from within the university sector have raised the alarm that the legislation fails in this respect. I know that the minister has heard these calls, but he continues to ignore them.

After years of expensive university degrees, it's irresponsible, in my view, to legislate a new national steward that is deliberately blind to the significant policy failure of the job-ready graduates scheme. The reality is that, because of this scheme, students are paying more than $17,000 a year for studies in disciplines like arts, the law and business. That's over $50,000 for a basic three-year degree and upwards of $80,000 for combined programs like arts/law. This is a pricing system with no coherent policy background or logic. It's neither fair nor efficient. It is simply punitive.

The universities accord reported that student contributions need to be fixed urgently. That was in 2024. We're now in 2026, and nothing has changed. In fact, the maximum student contributions for cluster 1 degrees, including law, accounting, economics and business are almost seven per cent higher in 2026 than they were in 2024. If the government were to tackle this issue today, it could consider reforming section 93.10 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003—this division sets the maximum student contribution price per place for disciplines as well as their indexation under the act—but the government has declined to consider this simple reform for over two years. All we have now before us is an act to establish a commission that cannot address this issue.

My amendment to this legislation is a simple one. It's only two words—two words which mean a huge amount to the students whose lives it would transform. The amendment seeks to remedy the ongoing and worsening burden of student debt by expanding the commission's remit to consider student contributions—two words. The sector wants it, Australian students deserve it, and our parliament should insist upon it.

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