Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

James Cook University has done it again. The tourism academics in Australia’s leading regional university have made the university the highest ranked institution in the world when it comes to tourism research. What a wonderful achievement.

An investigation by two researchers from the University of Calgary in Canada nominated the 57 leading scholars in tourism, and JCU has four of the scholars on the list. The Texas A&M University and James Cook University are the leading employers of leading tourism scholars, and that is a wonderful outcome. Our vice-chancellor, Professor Sandra Harding, observed—and I support the observation—that James Cook is a world leader in many areas. Congratulations to James Cook on that achievement.

That is why a survey recently has found that North Queensland employers have a preference for locally educated graduates. Almost 50 per cent of North Queensland employers that were surveyed have already employed JCU graduates and 79 per cent said that they found JCU graduates were an attractive option. The survey looked at whether employers would want to employ somebody from the north who was educated in the north, somebody who grew up in Brisbane and attended James Cook, or somebody who was from the north and attended UQ. A clear preference among local employers was for the people who grew up in the north and attended James Cook University. So, clearly, JCU is doing very well indeed. When the students were interviewed, they had comments like:

[JCU] has world leading science research and student-centred learning.

Another student said:

I live in Cairns and JCU has an excellent reputation, so why travel elsewhere?

One student also said:

I wanted to go to a smaller university where I was a name, not just a number.

That is a wonderful endorsement of James Cook University. I am pleased to announce that there are now 30 Commonwealth learning scholarships, worth more than $300,000 in total, available to those who want to undertake studies at James Cook. Those scholarships are available for the midyear intake. Twenty of them provide $2,120 a year for up to four years, and the other 10 are Commonwealth accommodation scholarships worth $4,240 a year. I encourage people to take those up.