David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Fadden on his first speech and wish him well in this place. There's a great opportunity for all members in this place to support important legislation, such as the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. This will end the 50 per cent pass rule that was introduced by the previous government as part of the Job-ready Graduates Package. Rather than supporting students who are struggling with the demands of academic life and getting them ready for life after university, this rule was intended to dissuade struggling students from continuing their studies. The statistics speak for themselves. Since the 50 per cent pass rule was implemented, more than 13,000 students at 27 universities have been affected. According to research from the Department of Education, many of these students come from a disadvantaged background. In the Albanese Labor government's vision of education, students who are struggling and/or are from disadvantaged backgrounds should be supported to complete their studies rather than be penalised for struggling.

On the passing of this bill, universities will be required to demonstrate how they will identify students who are struggling and how they will connect those students with the support services to help them. Universities will be required to provide sufficient, non-academic supports for students, such as financial assistance and mental health supports.

This is also why we are implementing the third recommendation of the report. As recommended by Professor O'Kane and her team, this government must extend demand-driven funding currently provided to Indigenous students from regional and remote areas to cover all Indigenous students to close the education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. We cannot ignore the historical and systemic challenges that have perpetuated the gap, hindering the access and opportunities for Indigenous students to receive quality education. By taking action in line with the recommendation, we are demonstrate a commitment to rectify past injustices and build a foundation of empowerment for Indigenous Australians through education. This measure directly supports efforts towards achieving Closing the Gap outcome 6, to increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who've completed a tertiary qualification to 70 per cent by 2031. Universities Australia, the peak body representing Australia's universities, has said that the 50 per cent fail rate measure was unnecessarily punitive on students and that universities have long called for uncapped places for all Indigenous students and the removal of barriers to a university education for students from underrepresented backgrounds.

This measure builds on our government's election commitment to deliver up to 20,000 Commonwealth supported places and fee-free TAFE. Australian universities also contribute to economic activity and jobs in our country. Education added more than $29 billion to the economy in 2022. This is a tangible demonstration of the relationship between education and economic development. The importance of our universities transcends their immediate academic function. They are dynamic engines of progress, shaping the next generation of skilled professionals who address the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. In acknowledging the existing skills crisis in Australia, we must recognise that the solution lies within a robust and resilient education system. The demand for skilled professionals, whether they be nurses, doctors, engineers, scientists or in other vital roles, cannot be met without a strong and capable education foundation.

From the earliest stages of primary school to the halls of higher education, Australian students deserve nothing less than the best-quality education that not only imparts knowledge but also cultivates critical thinking, creativity and adaptability. Our education system should be a nurturing ground for future leaders, innovators and problem-solvers. This is something that we have focused on and will continue to strive to achieve. The Labor Party's dedication to education reflects our collective understanding that an empowered, educated population is the cornerstone of a resilient democracy. In our pursuit of progress, let's also remember that education equips individuals with more than just knowledge. It empowers them to be empowered, engaged citizens who contribute positively to society. Education is a policy space where we have always demonstrated our dedication to creating fairer and more equitable societies where every individual can reach their potential. It has been Labor that has led this country in advancing higher education, and no doubt it will be Labor that continues to lead this country in ensuring that our nation has a higher education system that encourages Australians, no matter their socioeconomic status, to advance their education.

I would like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of our Minister for Education, the Hon. Jason Clare, for bringing this bill before the House. The Albanese Labor government understands that if you want to upskill, it's in the national interest for the government to do what it can to facilitate this. But this is just the beginning. As we look to the future, we must continue to work together, united in our purpose, to build a society where every Australian has a chance to unlock their potential and fulfil their aspirations. All members of this parliament should be able to recognise the important place of higher education and therefore the importance of this bill. I commend this nation-shaping legislation to the House.

Alison Byrnes (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. The bill, which makes amendments to the Higher Education Support Act 2003, HESA, is part of the government's implementation of the priority recommendations of the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report, which was released by the Minister for Education on 19 July 2023.

The Australian higher education sector has travelled through an agonising period of policy and funding uncertainty, including extraordinary ministerial vetoes and interventions into research funding over the last decade. However, the election of the Albanese Labor government is an opportunity for a reset for so many sectors in Australia. Most certainly, a reset was needed between the Commonwealth and the Australian higher education sector.

I note in the break the minister released the government's response to the Australian Research Council review, agreeing with the key recommendations to establish an ARC board that will be responsible for the appointment of the CEO and the approval of grants within the National Competitive Grants Program. This will improve the governance of the ARC and strengthen the integrity of decision-making processes. This is about a reset, not only with the institutions but also with the academic staff, researchers and students.

In the decade under the previous government, we saw it become harder and more expensive for Australians to go to university. We saw legislation come before this place that caused students to pay more to attend university, saw thousands of students have their fees double, saw billions of dollars cut from universities and saw legislation that did nothing to get young people into high-priority courses or jobs. It is these reasons why the Albanese Labor government has taken the approach to work with the community to rebuild our higher education sector. Initially this is being done through the Australian Universities Accord. At its core, the accord is about a reset, an opportunity to build a long-term plan for our universities together, without any partisan political games which ultimately only sees the prosperity of our country suffer. The Albanese government is committed to opening the door of opportunity for more Australians to go to university. This is why we are acting so swiftly to implement the priority recommendations of the accord interim report.

I must acknowledge at this point the hard work of the accord team, led by Professor Mary O'Kane AC, chair and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Adelaide; Professor Barney Glover AO, Vice-Chancellor of Western Sydney University; Ms Shemara Wikramanayake, the first female managing director and chief executive officer of Macquarie Group; the Hon. Jenny Macklin AC, former Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs; Professor Larissa Behrendt AO, the first Indigenous Australian to graduate from Harvard Law School and a professor of law and the Director of Research in academic programs at the Jambana Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney; and the Hon. Fiona Nash, a former senator for New South Wales, a former minister for regional development, regional communications and local government and territories, and now Australia's first Regional Education Commissioner.

As other speakers have already outlined, the interim report makes five priority recommendations: (1) that we create more university study hubs not only in the regions, but in our outer suburbs; (2) that we scrap the 50 per cent pass rule and require better reporting on how students are progressing; (3) that we extend the demand-driven funding currently provided to Indigenous students from regional and remote areas to cover all Indigenous students; (4) that we provide funding certainty during the accord process by extending the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee into 2024 and 2025 with funding arrangements that prioritise support for equity students; and (5), that we work with state and territory governments to improve university governance.

The bill that we see before us today is about recommendations 2 and 3, which require legislative amendment. But all of the recommendations speak to the lived experience in my community. Our local university, the University of Wollongong, engages with the community from the south-western Sydney regions all the way to the Victorian border. As the university outlined in its response to the accord discussion paper, around 50 per cent of UOW students are first in family. On a personal note, this was the case for me. Leaving school after year 10, I did a business administration course and then entered the workforce here in the parliament. It was not until my 30s that I went to university as a mature-aged student while working as a full-time adviser in this place. I was the first in my family to complete university and I am a proud University of Wollongong alumni. So is Flying Officer Julia Cronan, who is participating in the Australian Defence Force Parliamentary Program in my office this week. Flying Officer Julia Cronan completed her degree in international relations at UOW.

In many schools across Australia, in excess of 65 per cent of students are still going directly into employment after school and are not accessing higher or vocational education. When education is a key to Australia's future prosperity and development, we must do all we can to support Australians to acquire the skills that our future workforce needs. Locally, UOW is striving to provide that support with a dedicated team that has been committed to widening the participation of individuals from underrepresented backgrounds in higher education for more than 15 years. Despite its name, the activities of UOW are embedded in the Wollongong, Bega Valley, Eurobodalla, Shoalhaven, Sydney CBD, Southern Highlands, Sutherland Shire and south-western Sydney regions, where UOW has regional and metropolitan footprints. More than 3,500 students have graduated from UOW's regional campuses.

We must be more innovative when it comes to supporting the options of education in our regions. One example is UOW's coordinated aged-care traineeship programs in Bega, where the university works with local aged-care providers to offer cohort based traineeships whereby students gain paid employment with certificate IV level study in a face-to-face cohort model with mentorship as well as a guaranteed pathway into a local Bachelor of Nursing degree. The vice-chancellor has put to me that this model is proving very successful in terms of retention of the workforce and completion of qualifications, and industry groups have sought to replicate it in other regions.

The work that UOW has been doing in my community is very much consistent with where the accord recommendations are. However, as previously mentioned, this bill is making only two legislative changes: extending the current demand-driven funding for regional and remote First Nations students to all First Nations Australian undergraduate students studying bachelor or bachelor honours level courses other than courses in medicine from 2024 and removing the pass-rate requirements for students to remain eligible for Commonwealth assistance and introduce new requirements for universities and other providers to support students in successfully completing their studies.

The pass-rate requirements were originally introduced in January 2022 by the former coalition government as part of its Job-ready Graduates program to dissuade students from continuing in courses that they were not academically suited for. However, the practical effect of these measures has been overly punitive for students. I want to be clear that these changes to the pass rate are about increasing support, not about lowering standards. More than 13,000 students at 27 universities have already been hit by the rule. The pass-rate requirements have disproportionately affected students from First Nations, low-socioeconomic-status and other underrepresented or educationally disadvantaged cohorts. Those are the groups that achieve the most, particularly in social and economic development opportunities, when it comes to undertaking higher and further education. We must be helping students succeed, not forcing them to quit.

Students come from all walks of life and experiences. Undertaking higher education is in many cases a leap of faith for students who don't back themselves, their skills and their abilities. We must have institutions which can support students to learn, develop and meet the standards of a world-class education and more. For a lot of people, especially in my community, this is a balancing act of competing priorities, including work, family and caring responsibilities. Under these policies, universities and other providers will be required to demonstrate how they will identify students who are struggling and how they will connect those students with support services to help them.

The extension of the demand-driven places to metropolitan Indigenous students is a measure that will directly support efforts towards achieving Closing the Gap outcome 6 to increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 25 to 34 years who have completed a tertiary qualification, cert III and above, to 70 per cent by 2031. I note that the Department of Education estimates this may double the number of Indigenous students at university within a decade, and it has strong sector sport. The measure builds on the government's election commitment to deliver up to 20,000 Commonwealth supported places, including 936 at the University of Wollongong, and fee-free TAFE places. This bill is the first part of the accord reset process and seeks to reduce the narrowing of options that we have seen occurring in Australia's higher education system for far too long.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to say a few comments in relation to the interim report and the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. It gives me an opportunity to speak about the importance of higher education, particularly to regional electorates like my electorate, the electorate of Bendigo. We are proud to be the home of the Bendigo La Trobe campus, but our higher education didn't start with Bendigo La Trobe. Our higher education history goes back 150 years—we're celebrating this year—with the School of Mines that was opened back in the day of the gold rush.

Since then we've seen the growth of higher education in our city. We've had the very successful teaching colleges, and I do, for the moment, forget the name. My partner will not forgive me! He, like many people in Bendigo, started their education to be a schoolteacher through that forum, only to graduate with a degree from La Trobe uni. There has also been the growth of the Bendigo TAFE campus, another proud higher education institution. Both of those institutions have had input into the accord process and are keen to encourage the government to look at how we can foster a greater pathway between vocational and higher education studies. The ability to start at Bendigo TAFE campus and go from certificate, to diploma and to bachelor should be easy and the norm, not the exception. But far too often it's been too hard to complete.

Quite often you hear from institutions that they spend hours, if not days, in multiple meetings trying to work their way through a complicated state-federal system to achieve that outcome. It's just one of the many areas that they are hoping this accord looks at, and I know that the accord and its committee members are keen to do so. This quote I think sums up where we're at in terms of Australia's higher education sector; it's the last line in the summary of the interim report:

In short, the Australian higher education sector lacks the institutional resilience and 'metabolic rate' needed to prepare our nation for the future. There is so much that needs to be done and higher education policy must respond.

They have laid down the challenge to us to do better, to do more and to work quickly at addressing the issues that we have.

Also, the summary of the interim report talks about how employment conditions for university staff are often precarious. There's high casualisation, which impairs future teaching and knowledge creation. We know this to be the case. Wage theft is quite often talked about when we think about people working in the higher education sector. With the high casualisation rates and the tenure rates, it's getting further and further away from what people imagine higher education work to be. The interim report also talks about students sometimes experiencing poor-quality learning and teaching, and encountering risks to their health, safety and wellbeing. It talks about the lack of support services and those services quite often being insufficient to enable people to achieve their best. Again, this is not new. It's what any member of parliament who has visited a university campus or spoken to university students would have heard on a regular basis.

University has changed a lot since many of us went to university. I went to university in the late nineties and early 2000s. I was the first in my family to enrol to go to university but wasn't the first to graduate; I did get involved in various campus activities along the way. My mum was actually the first in our family to graduate—last to enrol but first to graduate. She was a very dedicated student and stuck to her studies and her time. She's now working in the sector and is a very proud lecturer and associate professor at Melbourne university.

Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

She's amazing!

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

She is amazing! She used to work for the assistant minister at the bench here. But her story is one that reflects a lot of people in Australia and one that we want to encourage, regardless of age.

Mum was in her late 40s when she first enrolled to go to university. She'd always dreamed she could go to university, and, when her youngest child finished high school, she said, 'It's my turn.' She did undergraduate, honours and then her PhD. Then she moved to Canberra to start working. She continued to work and research in the sector, and that is where she is today. She's overseas at the moment speaking at a conference. That's how her career has progressed. That story should be the opportunity for every Australian, but what we're seeing is more and more people from a working-class background or people who are first in family not enrolling to go to university. You have to ask: why? That's what the interim report seeks to highlight.

The lack of student support services is one issue. Cost is becoming another issue. We've also seen mentioned in the interim report that workforce shortages are a crucial issue. The lack of forward planning in relation to jobs and skills is a concern. The report also says:

Australia's research excellence is well known, but it is built on uncertain financial foundations. These threaten Australia's sovereign capability and cause us to miss opportunities to adapt, develop and localise knowledge to the benefit of industry, communities and the wider economy.

That's part of our challenge here. If we keep saying we want to be a skilled nation, a nation that builds things and a nation that is at the forefront of thinking, we need strong research universities. We need a situation where we're not always demanding an immediate outcome but allowing time to think, to work through and to research, as they say.

The interim report also talks about:

While the importance of lifelong learning has been well understood for some time, our system needs to be better at providing a more flexible and adaptive approach to learning.

By that I don't believe that they just mean 'go online'. It shouldn't just be about 100 per cent online. I acknowledge that that works for some students. Doing the night class online and being able to do lectures at a time that works for them could suit some students who might be upskilling, who might have a family or who might want that work-life balance, but it doesn't work for everybody—particularly for students who might be from disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly for students who might need that extra support and particularly, too, for students who learn through engaging, through interacting and through being able to discuss, debate and test ideas with their peers. They learn from being able to do lab experiments with their peers and from being able to do that hands-on learning. That is why we need to have a really good look at higher education.

I mentioned cost a moment ago. I think this is an issue that we really need to look at in this country, and I'm hoping that in the final report we start to see some recommendations about the fair cost of a higher education degree. I don't agree with the Greens when they say, 'Just make it free for everybody.' I believe that all Australians see that there is some contribution that they should be making towards their higher education, but for many students it's become quite unaffordable. Well into their 40s and 50s, they are still paying off a debt to our government in terms of their higher education. I believe that we've stepped quite a way from the original idea about what HECS was and what was first envisaged by Dawkins and by Hawke when it was introduced many years ago.

I have some sympathy for people who are saying, 'My debt is increasing with CPI.' We need to look at the impact that their HECS-HELP debt is having on other aspects later in their life. We have to be really conscious that young people today going to university are making a decision—whether it's informed or not informed and whether it's right or not—of: 'Do I buy a home, or do I get a university degree?' because the cost of both is quite high. When you're going for a loan, the bank asks you, 'Do you have a HECS-HELP debt you have to pay back to the government?' At this point as well is where we start to talk about HECS. We have to have a really honest conversation about who pays it back, how much gets paid back and the proportion of women who actually pay back their HECS debt. Believe it or not, 30 per cent of women will never pay back their HECS debt to the Commonwealth, because of the jobs they have, the interrupted wages they earn when they take time off to care for young children or for elderly relatives and the fact that some, like my mum, started university late in life and have shorter careers. The fact is that we have such a high proportion of women who will never pay back their HECS debt. It's not income the government will get, and I think that's where we have to have a really honest conversation about the debt we expect people to pay back. What is the contribution we do seek students to pay?

I also do believe we need to be more targeted. We need to have a really honest conversation about the skills and the kinds of work we're looking for. Another criticism that came up in the interim report did focus on the Job-ready Graduates changes, saying that funding and finance arrangements risked damage to the sector if left unaddressed, and I think that's a really important point. The interim report is saying not only that we are falling behind and don't quite have the structure or the vision for higher education we need for the future but that further damage was done to an already vulnerable sector by decisions made by the previous government.

We all know the stats. We all know what skills we need going forward. The analysis prepared by the BIS Oxford Economics review suggested that, by 2050, approximately 55 per cent of all jobs will require higher education qualifications, yet to meet this need we don't have the system in place. To meet this demand we need to grow the sector significantly, making sure we've got not just the capital infrastructure but the places and the support services required to get the skills and the workers we need. Skilled migration absolutely will always be part of our Australian make-up, but we can't rely solely on skilled migration to fill all the skills gaps we need. We should be giving an opportunity to everybody in Australia who wants to have access to higher education.

That is why I support the measures in this bill. Ceasing the 50 per cent pass rule will give students an opportunity, if they have had a tough year, to keep studying. They may have a better year the year after. Extending the demand-driven funding for metropolitan First Nations students, not just for remote and rural students, will give every First Nations student the opportunity to study. Given we know an Indigenous man is more likely to end up in jail than to have a university degree, this measure should be noncontroversial for everybody in this place. Let's encourage every First Nations Australian to access higher education if they choose to do so. The ones in my part of the world are studying degrees that will lead them straight back to their community. They're studying to be nurses. They're studying to be teachers. They're studying criminology. They're studying courses where they want to gain the skills to work back in their community, and it's not just them. This is the same for migrant communities and the same for many people who are first in their family to be studying, most of whom pick a career course that will lead them back to their communities to help, whether it be social work or nursing, just to name a few.

These measures before us are just two of the many things we need to do to get higher education in our country back on track. Our government are ready and willing and want to see the final report because I do believe we have the right team in place to bring about the big reforms needed. It's long overdue. The idea that we can keep cutting, sticking and gluing back together higher education just isn't working. The sector is in trouble. We need to act. It starts from the foundation of what kind of higher education system we want in Australia. What is its purpose? Where should we go? We need well-funded research that's supported. We need good university degrees and opportunities for all students, regardless of their postcode, to access. We need to make sure that the staff, the teachers and the support staff working in that sector have that continuity of employment that they so deserve.

Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. Universities are a major part of our economy. They educate our citizens, conduct groundbreaking research, drive innovation and employ many thousands of workers. In my electorate of Canberra, there are five universities: the Australian National University, the University of Canberra, the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, the Australian Catholic University and Charles Sturt University. UNSW is also building a second campus in Reid, close to the civic centre. I'm not totally certain, but I'd be surprised if there was any other electorate that had more university campuses than mine.

In the 2021 census, approximately 4.2 per cent of people in the Canberra electorate were employed in the higher education sector compared to a national average of 1.3 per cent, which makes higher education the second-largest industry of employment in my electorate, following the Public Service. Fifty-three per cent of my constituents have attained a bachelor's degree or above, and 37 per cent of my constituents are currently attending a university to further their education. I think it's safe to say that Canberra is a university town.

Unfortunately, however, our university sector is not currently fit for purpose and requires serious reform. Fortunately, we've got a government and a minister who are very much up to and focused on that task. How refreshing it is to be standing here today talking about the positive changes coming to the university sector rather than having to defend it and trying to draw attention to the attacks from those opposite under the previous government. For a decade we saw attack after attack—ideologically motivated—on our universities, often because they told the government inconvenient truths. We saw the previous occupiers of the education minister's office launch warfare on the humanities. They picked up and chose the disciplines which would not receive extra funding be would be so lucky as to not have their funding levels cut.

We do things differently on this side of the House, and this bill is just one example of that. This bill implements a number of recommendations from the interim report of the Australian Universities Accord Panel. I want to commend the accord team, consisting of the chair, Professor Mary O'Kane AC, Professor Barney Glover AO, Ms Shemara Wikramanayake, my former boss the Hon. Jenny Macklin AC, Professor Larissa Behrendt AO and the Hon. Fiona Nash, for their work on the review to date. They're all eminently qualified, with experience from the university sector, from business and from the political sphere. This report outlines a vision for the future of Australians' higher education system and is a significant milestone in the accord process, which will release its final report at the end of this year.

The interim report makes five recommendations for priority action which the government is committed to implement. Two of those recommendations require legislative amendment, and it is that that this bill provides. The first recommendation being addressed in this bill is scrapping the 50 per cent pass rule. The 50 per cent pass rule is a requirement that students must pass 50 per cent of the units they study to remain eligible for a Commonwealth supported place and FEE-HELP assistance. This was a rule introduced under the previous government as part of the Jobs-ready Graduates Package. Unfortunately, the consequences of this rule have been that students from equity backgrounds have been disproportionately disadvantaged.

Unfortunately, our higher education system is inequitable. Opportunity and attainment are influenced by location and student background. Since 2016, participation rates for students from low-SES, regional, rural and remote student backgrounds have actually gone backwards. While First Nations' participation has increased, it still languishes at around 40 per cent below non-Indigenous rates.

When the Jobs-ready Graduates package was introduced, higher student contributions compounded the barriers to education for disadvantaged students, and the 50 per cent pass rule made it even worse. It doesn't take a genius to work out why. For a student from a low-socioeconomic background, consider the need to move out of home in a regional or rural area to attend university in an expensive capital city like Canberra or Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane. They might need to work multiple jobs to support their studies, and then they don't have the same time to study as their peers who don't have to go to such efforts to support themselves, particularly with the cost of living as it is at the moment. Therefore, they don't achieve the same grades as someone from a more privileged background, and they are probably under a great deal of stress.

Then you have the Commonwealth saying, 'Actually, sorry, you're not trying hard enough, and we're going to take away your support.' Can you imagine the impact of that on a young person? It makes sense then that this rule has had a serious impact on the equity of enrolment, and more than 13,000 students across 27 universities have been impacted by that rule. Universities across the country have urged us to scrap the rule, and that's exactly what this bill does. We should be helping students to succeed, not forcing them to quit because of an arbitrary punitive rule. Instead of this rule, the government is introducing measures to support students to complete their studies. This bill will introduce for universities a requirement to demonstrate how they will identify students who are struggling and how they will then connect those students with support services to help them.

This bill also extends the current demand-driven fundings for regional and remote First Nations students to all First Nations students studying bachelor-level courses. The existing measure, which these changes are expanding, was implemented in 2021 in response to the Napthine review of regional, rural and remote education strategy. This measure will aim to directly increase First Nations enrolment. It is a national shame that young Indigenous men are more likely to end up in prison than to graduate from university. That's an issue which is a direct result of government policy failures, and this measure will hopefully change that trajectory. This measure means that there will be no cap on the number of First Nations students that can enrol in Commonwealth supported places. All institutions will receive Commonwealth funding for all Indigenous students. Modelling from the Department of Education estimates that this could double the number of Indigenous students at university over the next decade.

There's a lot more to the accord's interim report than just these issues, and there is plenty to discuss. There is nowhere near enough time in this speech, but I want to briefly talk about some of the incredible work of the universities in my electorate, which I have the privilege of visiting quite regularly. I was incredibly fortunate to work at the University of Canberra for a number of years before entering this place. I worked at the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, which was instrumental in how we understand the impacts of social policy and economic policy on Australian households. The microsimulation methods developed at NATSEM continue to be used by the Commonwealth Treasury and also by other academics in social policy modelling to this day. The University of Canberra has been ranked as one of the top universities in the country on metrics such as graduate employability and student experience. It ranks as the second-best young university in the country and 18th in the world. This year the university rose a huge 81 places in the resent QS World University Rankings, an absolutely incredible achievement for a great Canberra institution.

At the ANU, which is just over the bridge from this place, we see some of the most groundbreaking research done anywhere in the world. At the John Curtin School of Medical Research I recently had the opportunity to launch the Shine-Dalgarno Centre for RNA Innovation. It is 50 years since John Shine and Lynn Dalgarno discovered what became known as the Shine-Dalgarno sequence. That sequence is far too complex for me to understand or try to explain here, but what I can say is that much of what humans know today about molecular biology and about RNA and gene expression came from right here in Canberra. Obviously, many of us hadn't heard about RNA until the COVID pandemic, but this was key in identifying vaccines. It's a great example of what science means for humanity that that was what gave us comfort and gave us a way through the pandemic.

Also at the ANU I saw the incredible research that the Research School of Earth Sciences is doing into the extraction of rare-earth elements like lithium, which are necessary to fuel the renewable energy revolution. And, at the Research School of Physics, I saw the huge heavy ion accelerator, which attracts researchers from all around the world, including from the CERN accelerator in Switzerland. Also at the school of physics I joined Professor Jodie Bradbury to smash diamonds together. It sounds fake, but I can assure you that it's true. The end result is a material which has a huge range of applications, including for the construction of solar panels and computer processors. These are just a few examples of the vast amounts of path-breaking, mind-blowing research that is occurring not just here in Canberra but around the nation thanks to the brilliant academics at our universities.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I and, I'm sure, many members of this place, when we have the opportunity to meet with academics at our universities, across a whole range of fields, are blown away by the things that they are grappling with day to day—the problems they are solving, the innovation they are driving and their role in teaching and educating university students, who are the future of this country and of the world. So it's always concerning to hear, when you speak to them, about things like job insecurity for some of the brightest minds in our country and how difficult it can be for academics, who are often incredibly highly qualified people, to go from contract to contract and, in many cases, to have unmanageable workloads of marking and other parts of their job. It would be good to see more sustainable support for these academics so they can get on with what they do best, which is making the discoveries, doing the research and teaching university students around the country.

Back when I was working at NATSEM, all those years ago, I got to author a report which was commissioned by AMP called What price the clever country? This looked at what students gained by getting a university education or a vocational TAFE qualification. All the numbers would obviously be vastly out of date by now, but it showed that it really was so worthwhile for people to pursue education post school and that it would make an immense difference to their lifetime incomes. It showed that, for students—and, as I've talked about, particularly students from rural and regional backgrounds—the costs of living are perhaps the biggest barrier to being able to pursue their studies. As I've said, our cities are expensive. Rent is expensive. Food is expensive. Often people are working multiple jobs to keep themselves able to pursue their studies, often at the cost of their studies and certainly at the cost of their wellbeing a lot of the time. Supporting yourself while studying is something that many students enjoy and want to do, but it can become so onerous that you really can't focus on the study that you have moved to the city to do. That is to the detriment of the objective, which is to encourage people to take up these opportunities, with the great gains that has for our future economy and society.

So I feel that the costs of living for students are something that needs to be looked at more closely, to see what we can do to better support students as they embark on studies, be it in university or TAFE. Our fee-free TAFE is a fantastic example of this. I had the great opportunity to meet with some students from the Canberra Institute of Technology who were meeting with Minister Brendan O'Connor and the Prime Minister today and to hear about the difference that being able to access fee-free TAFE has made to them. They were studying in a range of priority areas such as early childhood education, cybersecurity and hospitality. It is so important that people have a range of options when they finish school to pursue these things, so I wish those students the best again. As I've talked about, part of this bill is also about supporting students to be able to study while they're at university. I'm so proud to be part of a government that values our university sector and what it can offer for all Australians. I commend this bill to the House.

Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to speak after the member for Canberra. It's always good to be in the chamber listening to the member for Canberra. It was a thoughtful and considered response by the member, and I know that she cares deeply about this important reform, as we all do in this place. Regarding the Accord interim report, I'm going to start my remarks by making some broader comments about the process and about the challenges that many people face in our university sector, as well as the importance of it. Then I will go through some of the details of the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023.

The first thing to say is that the Universities Accord comes at probably one of the most important times in our university sector's history. The changes that are on the table and the reforms that are being led by the Minister for Education are crucial because we need, in order to develop the economy of the future, skilled Australians who are able to attain qualifications from university. We know that Australians are facing extreme pressures around the costs of living, and the cost of attaining education cannot be a deterrent for people. We want to make sure that education is accessible for every single Australian who wants it. We want to make sure that education, the great enabler of social mobility, is available for as many Australians as possible. That's why we are having a deep-dive look into our university sector—not only the courses that are available and the priority that some of the courses get but also the affordability of life after university and the affordability of Australian students to participate in and access university. Fundamentally, probably the most important question is about access to university and ensuring that there are enough places in Australia that are available to people from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds so that, no matter what postcode you were born in, you have a chance to study.

In my own family, both of my grandparents on my father's side left school when they were 13 years old, and they never had the chance to go to university. My grandmother, before she passed away, loved to read. She would consume books, fiction and non-fiction, and she was an extremely academic person. But, due to her socioeconomic background and the world she was born into, she never had the opportunity to go to university. We need to ensure that that's not the experience for Australians today.

This interim report comes at a time when we need to make sure that we are providing access to universities for younger Australians. We need to make sure that, when they are in university, they are supported, which goes to some of the recommendations that I'll outline in a moment, and also, when they leave university, they are able to manage the accumulation of government debt. We all know that in a high inflationary environment, the HECS debt, which has traditionally always been a very low interest loan, has been more expensive for students over this period, which is another reminder of why we need to get inflation down as low as possible. But the HECS system has served Australians really well. It has meant that, for the amount that governments are putting into university, we've been able to open the doors to university far wider, for more students across the country.

The bill that's before the parliament at the moment implements priority recommendations of the Australian Universities Accord interim report. This report was released by the Minister for Education in July this year and brings together the ideas and expertise of some of our country's leading experts in academic, business and public policy. Personally, this bill demonstrates why this Labor government is committed to ensuring that every Australian has the opportunity to access and benefit from higher education. The interim report shows us just how powerful education can be in shaping not only one person's journey but that of whole communities and our entire nation. Education isn't some secret club meant for only the chosen few. It's a game changer. It's a great enabler of social mobility that provides people with life-changing opportunities. The government has confirmed that we will implement each of the recommendations of the interim report. With this bill we endeavour to reaffirm the belief that every individual, regardless of their background and circumstances, deserves the opportunity to pursue higher education and unlock their full potential.

In my own electorate, I'm lucky to have two great universities: the Caulfield campus of Monash University and the Southbank campus of the University of Melbourne. We also have the wonderful Victorian College of the Arts and other institutions, including NIDA, which enable higher education. Macnamara has one of the highest concentrations of tertiary students of any electorate, and I am very proud of that. I'm very proud of the fact that many people in my electorate have gone to university and that they are able to use those skills to add to the Australian story. We need highly qualified people to come and contribute to the Australian economy. Let me say that we are also extremely proud of our TAFE graduates, we're extremely proud of and reliant on our skilled workers, and we're extremely proud of our tradespeople. We are home to all and we need people from all different skills backgrounds. Whether they're in the creative sector or the financial services sector, or anything in between or connected, we are very proud to have people in our electorate of Macnamara.

The interim report of the Australian Universities Accord recommended that we create more university study hubs in the regions and in the outer suburbs. I recognise that not every part of Australia has the concentration of university graduates that I do in my electorate, and we need to make it as fair and accessible as possible. As a member proudly representing an inner-city seat, I certainly agree that people in the outer suburbs and the regions deserve the same access to university education as anyone else in the country, certainly the same as people inside the cities. Concentrating higher education in the cities creates pressure on the rental housing market, which is something that's playing out in my electorate at the moment.

One of the report's most important recommendations concerns the so-called 50 per cent pass rule, which a number of speakers have spoken about. Under this rule, students are currently required to pass at least 50 per cent of the units of study they undertake to continue eligibility for Commonwealth assistance. The pass rate is assessed after they have completed eight units in a bachelor degree, or higher, or four units in a shorter course. Students who fail more than half will lose their eligibility for Commonwealth assistance. This rule was introduced in 2022 by the previous coalition government to dissuade students from continuing in courses that they are allegedly not academically suited for.

Let's break this down. The practical effect of these measures was to discourage students and increase the dropout rate. As Labor warned at the time, the impact of the rule disproportionately affected students from First Nations, low socioeconomic backgrounds and other underrepresented or educationally disadvantaged cohorts. More than 13,000 students at 27 universities have already been affected by this rule, and the removal of the rule has been called for from universities right across the country. We should be supporting students, not forcing them to quit. That's why this bill scraps the 50 per cent rule, but it does more than that. It introduces requirements on universities and other providers to have policies in place to support students to successfully complete their studies.

The report also recommended that we extend the funding currently provided to Indigenous students from regional and remote areas to cover all Indigenous students. In Victoria, the majority of First Nations people live in Melbourne. If we want to help them get a higher education, as we certainly should, we need to even the playing field and ensure that this funding is available to all Indigenous students. This funding was implemented in 2021 in response to the National Regional, Rural and Remote Education Strategy. Of course, assisting First Nations people living in rural, regional and remote areas to have better access to higher education is a very, very good thing, but there's no real reason why all Indigenous students should not get the benefit of this support.

Accordingly, the bill aims to increase First Nations enrolment numbers by expanding the eligibility of demand driven funding to include metropolitan First Nations students studying bachelor and bachelor honours courses. This measure directly supports efforts towards achieving Closing the Gap outcome 6: by 2031, to increase the proportion of First Nations people aged 25 to 34 who have completed a tertiary qualification to 70 per cent. This means there will be no cap on the number of First Nations students that can enrol in Commonwealth supported places, and providers will receive Commonwealth funding for all Indigenous students. The Department of Education estimates that this will double the number of Indigenous students at university within a decade. This measure is strongly supported by the universities.

We know that investing in education is investing in the very foundation of our nation's growth and prosperity. This bill shows the dedication of the Labor government to shaping a higher education landscape that is based on the values of inclusivity, innovation and access to opportunity. It reflects our commitment to collaboration between government, the university sector and industry, forging a future where education is not a privilege for a few who live in the right suburbs and go to the right schools but is available to all Australians, regardless of their background.

The work going on as part of the interim report is important. It will determine whether or not young people in Australia have access to a future beyond their postcode. It will ensure that Australians are not disadvantaged just based on whether or not their parents are able to afford a particular path in life. We need to make sure that public education is invested in constantly and we need to make sure that access to our quality universities is invested in constantly. It changed my family's life—a classic migrant family's story of coming to this country with nothing, but, within a couple of generations, able to have access to higher education and create a wonderful life for our family and for the generations to come. University is great enabler. It's a great tool to enable social mobility, and this universities accord is going to be the defining policy work that will determine how many Australians are able to access affordable university education that literally changes their life.

I am very pleased to be involved in this policy area with the Minister for Education. I know how much he cares about and values our university sector. I know that he has been working closely with all members of the committee that has been leading the universities accord. We thank them for their work. We thank them for their diligence. We thank them for the interim report. This bill is the response to the interim report and implements its recommendations, and I commend the bill to the House.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The most profound gift that can be bestowed upon a human being is the gift of a decent education. The difference that a good education makes to a person's life is quite remarkable—their quality of life, the income that they'll earn during their career and their health. But the outcomes for their family members and, in particular, their children will be fundamentally different for a person who receives an education compared to one who doesn't. That's why I think that people across the world, international forums and nations have recognised that access to a decent education is a fundamental human right—because of the difference that it makes to a person's quality of life and the difference that it makes to the quality and standing of a nation in terms of how well it treats its citizens.

When it comes to education, the most important principle that governments should operate around and legislate for is equality. Equality of access to education should be the fundamental principle of any education system in a modern-day democracy. That is the premise behind this important piece of legislation: ensuring that we deliver equality when it comes to access to higher education throughout Australia. To achieve this, once we were elected, we set about looking at that issue and that notion of equality in our higher education system, particularly at the university level.

I want to congratulate the Minister for Education, the member for Blaxland, who put in place this Universities Accord and asked eminent Australians who have experience working in government and in education—particularly in the equality realm—to put together the interim report around the Universities Accord. We're acting on their recommendations because we see equality of access to education as a fundamental human right and as vitally important for the future of our nation in so many areas—in the health outcomes of Australians, in the social outcomes of Australians, in the efficiency and effectiveness and productivity of our economy moving forward, and ultimately in the wealth of all Australians and our nation.

We're taking this action because the report makes it abundantly clear that more and more occupations and careers in the future will rely upon higher education, particularly a university qualification. This report outlines five priority areas where we, as a government, can work towards achieving greater equality in university education and greater access to that equality, with greater numbers of Australians being attracted to and offered university positions and greater numbers graduating with a university qualification in the future.

There are five priority areas for action that are outlined by this report, and the government is committed to implementing all of them. Two of the priority action areas require legislative change, and that's what this bill is all about. The first one abolishes the 50 per cent pass rule, introduced as part of the Job-ready Graduates scheme, which has had a disproportionately negative impact on students from poor backgrounds and those in rural and regional Australia. More than 13,000 students at 27 universities have already been hit by this. Instead of forcing them to quit, we want to make sure that we're helping them to pass. We know that, generally, when students get access to the assistance they need—perhaps to overcome learning difficulties; to overcome personal issues; to overcome access issues; to overcome issues associated with balancing work, family commitments and studies—that you can help people pass their university courses. And this bill will provide the chance for that to happen. This law will make a change and ensure that can occur.

As well as abolishing the 50 per cent pass rule, the bill strengthens accountability and reporting requirements for higher education providers, to ensure that students are properly supported to study and complete their courses. Higher education providers that fail to meet these new requirements will face some actions as to compliance and possible penalties.

The bill also delivers demand-driven funding for all Indigenous students to attend university if they're qualified for admission to the course. At the moment, this requirement applies only to Indigenous students who live in regional Australia. In the New South Wales context, that's passing over where the largest number of Indigenous Australians live in New South Wales, and that's in the cities. Most of them will live in a city environment, like the rest of the country. So having a policy that deliberately excludes where the majority of Indigenous potential students will live is counterintuitive. We're removing that rule and ensuring that it will now apply to all. Doing this could double the number of Indigenous students at university within a decade.

I have witnessed, in the community that I represent, the difference that higher education can make to the lives of younger local Indigenous community members. I'm proud that our community is home to the University of New South Wales, where they're building on the success of the UNSW Indigenous Strategy. This was launched in 2018, and UNSW's strategy represents a commitment to creating an environment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, researchers and staff to thrive. It's a successful approach that's emphasised recognising the importance of country, community and culture at UNSW. It's led by Professor Megan Davis, the Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous, and it provides an overarching framework for Indigenous education, employment and research. That means the strategic vision is implemented across all aspects of the university's operation.

It's not just a strategy about increasing the Indigenous student body and workforce; it's also about developing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers and academics who will make an impact in communities across the nation. I've often spoken quite proudly in this place about a project that's happening in the south of my electorate in Botany Bay, or Gamay as it's known to the local Indigenous community, where researchers from the University of New South Wales—marine biologists—are working on a seagrass restoration project for Botany Bay. They're working on that project in collaboration with the local Gamay Rangers, the people who know the bay best because their ancestors have fished and lived on the shores of Botany Bay for thousands of years. They're working closely with that group to care for and to restore that important natural environment for their local community.

It's a classic example of a nature-positive project in a partnership between the university and the Indigenous rangers. These will operate side by side with the carbon market, with a shared regulator, and the market will encourage carbon farming projects that also deliver biodiversity developments. Most importantly, some of those Gamay Rangers have now been attracted to further study, and a couple of them are now studying degrees in marine biology. What a wonderful example of a university working in collaboration with local Indigenous populations to get better outcomes not only for our wider community but for the individual young Indigenous men and women who work on that project. I'm very proud that UNSW is also actively supporting the Voice to Parliament. It became the first Group of Eight university to officially support a First Nations Voice to Parliament, and that's something that we're very proud of.

The changes in this bill will make a real difference to access and equity for underrepresented groups at Australian universities, including for Indigenous Australians. In addition to the immediate priority actions, the interim report has identified more than 70 policy areas that the accord panel is considering including in their final report. The Australian Universities Accord interim report makes it clear that more and more jobs will require a university qualification into the future. This government wants to make sure that, if that is the requirement—if that is the entry ticket into the future—that all Australians have access to that quality education to fulfil their dreams of a better life in Australia.

As I said at the beginning, the most profound gift that we can give a human being is the gift of an education. The fundamental principle to providing that gift is equality, and this bill is all about equality—delivering equality of access, particularly for disadvantaged groups of Australians who might be from low income families or who may be Indigenous or from rural Australia. Providing them with that equality and that access is fundamental not only to their human development but to the development of our nation and in particular the efficiency, effectiveness and productivity of our economy into the future.

Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There's something really powerful about being the first whatever it is. But, when people are the first in their family to go to university, that sends a message through the generations to open those doors of opportunity a little bit wider. Recently I spoke at the NAIDOC Ball in Western Australia, and I shared the story of Irwin Lewis who, way back in 1957, walked onto the campus of the University of Western Australia for the very first time. Most students, when they walk onto campus, are nervous. They are worried about whether they're in the right place, whether they're there for the right reasons and how they're going to go. Maybe they're worried about if they're going to make any friends and all the rest. But I reckon it's possible that Irwin Lewis would have been one of the most nervous students walking onto that campus that year, 1957. He was the first Aboriginal student to attend university in Western Australia.

He was attending university just three years after what was then called the 'native pass' system, which would have prevented him from being able to visit that very institution in Perth. From his home in Morawa, he went on to be dux at Christ Church Grammar School and he studied at the University of Western Australia. He helped win a WA Football League premiership with Claremont in 1964, and he went on to a great career as a leading public servant in Western Australia. Indeed, the SBS obituary for Irwin Lewis said he was a 'Western Australian Aboriginal footy legend', and in many ways his story itself is legendary—that these institutions that had kept their doors closed for so long to too many finally opened them up and that the university itself was all the richer. What I didn't know when speaking at the NAIDOC Ball was that, at an event of 1,100 people having a great time at Crown, just over the border from my electorate, at the next table was Irwin's son Chris Lewis, who himself was a great player for the West Coast Eagles. He came up to me afterwards and said, 'Nice words about my dad—thank you.' It was a real honour to be able to share his story.

But I've continued to have people contact me about this incredible Western Australian. Pat Pearce reached out. Pat started working at the UWA bookshop in the 1950s after moving from Collie in her 20s. She worked there for decades until she retired. She's now 94 years old and still an avid politics watcher, and she shared this. I'll put it in her words, which I think just talk to what it means when we do our work in this place to open those doors a little bit wider. These are Pat's words: 'I was on the UWA campus the day Irwin Lewis started at uni. The buzz was everywhere. People were talking with excitement about the news of the first Aboriginal student on campus, when they came into the uni bookshop, where I worked. Everyone expressed surprise, and they were happy that he had come so far, expecting that he would be the leader of a new beginning. People were keen to see him.' He himself, she reported, seemed unmoved by all the fuss. She then said:

… the fuss died down pretty quickly because he'd been such a success on the sporting field that the boys from—

in her words—

'those schools' accepted him as one of their cohort.

I think that in that we hear just how challenging it was but also how important it was that we opened up our institutions and universities just that little bit more to more people. That's, again, what this amendment we move today seeks to do: make sure that more people can go to university, stay at university and have all of the opportunities that come from that.

I've talked about Irwin Lewis attending UWA in 1957, but what also happened in 1957 was that my dad was born. He attended Claremont Teachers College in the 1970s and spent decades as a teacher. Just last month, my dad, Ron Gorman, finished up after 24 years at the Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia, where he had worked for decades making sure that we give more opportunity to more young Western Australians to fulfil their dreams. What really touched me about dad's farewell at Clancy's at Fremantle, where he was joined by people who had worked with him across his entire professional career, from teachers, academics and all the rest, was that dad singled out the fact that universities were opened in the 1970s to kids like him.

Dad was the son of a single mum who lived in public housing. If it hadn't been for the decision of the Whitlam government to make our universities more accessible, his life would have been completely different. He felt that even after all that time, all that professional success, he needed to highlight to those who were there to celebrate him that it wasn't just because of what he'd achieved; it was because of the opportunities that were built for him. We continue, decade after decade, to make sure that more and more people can have access to those opportunities. I have been fortunate enough to attend university myself. In February 2003 I rocked up at Curtin University as a student who didn't really know what I wanted to do with my time. 'I'll go to university, figure it out while I'm there.' I had a of job that I loved working at McDonald's. It had to compete with my question: what did I enjoy more?

What university gave me apart from a great education at Curtin University, which also produced excellent academics such as Dr Anne Aly, was I found what I was passionate about. If university is what you need, attending university helps you to find that course in life. Going to university also gave me life-long friends, including the person who now serves as the member for Swan and David Gonsalves among others. While at university I found my passion for ensuring that we do make our universities as accessible and as welcoming as possible so that everyone who wishes to can have the opportunity of getting a great world-class Australian education.

When it comes to what universities we have in Western Australia, we have terrific WA universities like Murdoch University, Curtin University and the University of Western Australia. I have visited its Crawley campus and also some of the other campuses, including in Albany and elsewhere. We also have Notre Dame in Fremantle. I grew up in Fremantle as Notre Dame was growing and growing. My little primary school on Henry Street was at one end of the street, and the ever-growing empire of Notre Dame was at the other end of the street. It's a great university, and makes me think about the future of the other great University in Western Australia, that being Edith Cowan University.

I was fortunate enough to visit the newest campus of the Western Australian university network, so new that it's still being built in my electorate. I visited with the Minister for Education last week, on 29 August. What is being built in the heart of Perth, atop the Perth City Link, is a project championed by the now Prime Minister when he was infrastructure minister. It will be a future home for some 2,000 academics and university staff and some 10,000 students at the ECU Perth campus. I was there for the ground-breaking ceremony back on 20 February this year. What we saw then was dirt, a bunch of politicians in hard hats and some shovels. A few things have changed since then. I was there with then Premier Mark McGowan, and that has changed. But what has also changed is we already have three what they call superstoreys. They're not just your normal storey but superstoreys beaming out of the ground for this campus that will soon be a real jewel in the crown of Western Australia, reminding everyone of both Western Australia's proud heritage as the place that elected the first woman to parliament but also somewhere that truly values both the immediate and the long-term economic and social benefits of a university education. I want to thank all of construction workers who are helping build that dream into a reality. It is so very exciting.

But this legislation is not just about what we build. It's about making sure that, once people enter those buildings or indeed online universities or study remotely, which I have also participated in, the quality of that education is incredibly high. As we seek to open those doors of opportunity just a little wider for more Australians to go to university, we're doing some of the priority actions from the interim report. The minister has outlined from this dispatch box that we're creating more student study hubs not just in the regions but in the outer suburbs because this is something that's proven to work. It's proven to make it easier for students to stay engaged in university, to give them the support they need, to provide the network to get new students in, and when you've got something that's working—particularly working in the regions—why not do more of it? That's exactly what we're doing.

We're going to scrap what is known as the 50 per cent pass rule and instead get better reporting on how students are progressing. Again, we know that once you've invested thousands of dollars in a university student's education, and you know that student probably can get through the course, we're better off to help them through because we've already put the investment in, rather than to just penalise them and kick them out.

We will extend the demand-driven funding that is currently provided for Indigenous students from regional and remote areas to cover all Indigenous students. Again, it makes a huge difference in my electorate of Perth, ensuring that Indigenous students, the Irwin Lewis's of the next generation, can have access to a Commonwealth-supported place based on their capability not based on where they live. That is something that I think we can all welcome. Of course, we have continued to commit to providing funding certainty during the accord process by extending the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee through 2024 and 2025 because we want to make sure that our universities, and their management, continue to deliver those world-class education products. Of course, we'll continue to work with the states and territories to improve university governance.

That's a little bit about what we want to see. We are conscious that what we have commissioned is the largest review of Australia's higher education system in 15 years. We have seen our higher education system tested in many different ways over that time. We saw what happened during the pandemic. We've seen the demands for new skills. We've seen our universities, in the time since then, rapidly expand the sorts of skills they're delivering, particularly when it comes to ensuring cybersecurity, and ensuring that we have the quality teaching and research that is needed for the challenges of the century that lies before us, while maintaining the rigour and tradition that comes from our higher education sector, and that we do recognise that these are essential institutions for the Australian economy. They train so many people who take on important roles. They also provide incredibly important, secure work for many people in my community who deserve to know that their work is both valued and appreciated, and also secure.

When we think about how to put it in really simple terms, in terms of the transition that we're going to go through, currently 36 per cent of the Australian workforce has a university qualification. The interim report estimates that that could jump to some 55 per cent by the middle of this century. We know that we need to invest in change. We know we need to help more people engage in our higher education system.

Deputy Speaker Vasta, I'm sure you'll allow me to do this, as a friend. In the final minute of this speech, I've got to give a shout-out to one particular university student, my wife, Jess Bukowski. Jess is currently in the last two months of her Master of Business Administration which she's studying at the University of Western Australia. Jess, the kids and I are incredibly proud of you making that decision to study. We're so excited that you are almost at the end of it. And because I will be doing the important role of spending time here with you, Deputy Speaker, and many other colleagues, I'll also say a very happy wedding anniversary for tomorrow, which I will not be home for. Thank you.

Dan Repacholi (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to contribute to the debate on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023.

The value of education cannot be understated. It opens doors for people to achieve all that they want to achieve. I would like to think that, in a country like Australia, there are no limits on how big someone can dream or how wild a young person's goals may be. Certain professions require a university degree, which is a necessary requirement for those whose dreams may be to work in one of these professions. This means part of being a country where people's dreams and goals are limitless is also that university is accessible, affordable and something students can look towards as being achievable. University is not for everyone, and that's fine as well. I didn't go to university, and I wouldn't change a thing about my life. But for those who want to study at uni or need to study at uni to achieve their goals, it is vital they are able to and see that as an option for themselves.

Sadly, this is not always the case for many in my electorate. Uni is not something seen as a common pathway. In the Hunter electorate only six per cent of people have achieved a bachelor's degree as their highest level of education. This is well below the 23.4 per cent in New South Wales and the 22 per cent nationally. This means often young people in my electorate grow up not knowing what options are available for them in life, not knowing what opportunities and pathways they could take. The result of this is that their dreams and goals are limited. This is not any fault of their own. But the fact is that it's hard to be someone or achieve something you don't see around you already. This has real impacts: 13.94 per cent of my population live in the most disadvantaged socioeconomic areas of the country. My hope is that, if young people in my electorate can see what opportunities are available to them through higher education, even if the number of six per cent only slightly creeps closer towards the state and national figures, we will see fewer and fewer people disadvantaged and more and more young people dreaming big and achieving great things.

This is what motivates me to give my all to the people of the Hunter, and this is why I'm speaking on this bill, which amends the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to implement priority recommendations of the Australian Universities Accord interim report released by the Minister for Education on 19 July 2023. We are a government committed to opening the doors of opportunity for more Australians to go to university. We are focused on people like those in my electorate, who I know can achieve anything they want to if they just have the chance we are now providing them. While this bill aims at opening the door to go to university, in my electorate it will open many more doors. It will open the door for young people to dream. It will open the door for young people to live a different way to what their parents may have lived. It will also open the door for a better future.

There are five priority actions in the interim report this bill focuses on. The first is to create more university study hubs in the region. I know my electorate of the Hunter would hugely benefit from more study hubs. In my electorate we have Avondale University at Cooranbong, and the University of Newcastle sits just outside my electorate boundary. For some these are accessible by road or public transport, but for others who live further away from Newcastle—in Cessnock, Singleton or Muswellbrook—travel can exceed an hour and sometimes can span more than two hours. For students in these parts of my electorate to go to uni to follow their dreams, too often the only option is to move away from home and live closer to campus or on campus. This is not a practical solution for many, especially when only six per cent of the electorate have previously attended a university. Moving hours away from home is difficult financially but also means they are in a foreign environment away from the support of home. It's not hard to see how this may not be an appealing option for many in my electorate. This is why providing more study hubs is so important to electorates in regional areas. It will mean students in these parts of my electorate have a more practical way to attend university. Suddenly what once seemed too far away to be a reality is now achievable and a door is opened.

Another priority of the interim report is to extend the demand-driven funding currently provided to Indigenous students from regional and remote areas to cover all Indigenous students. We're also providing funding certainty during the accord process by extending the higher education continuity agreement into 2024 and 2025, with funding arrangements that prioritise support for equity students. In order to make university in this country more accessible, it is also important that we work with the state and territory governments to improve university governance.

One of the biggest changes being made by this legislation is the removal of the 50 per cent pass rule, as well as improving student support. As it stands now, students are required to pass at least 50 per cent of the units of study they undertake to continue to be eligible for Commonwealth assistance. The pass rate is assessed after they have completed eight units in a bachelor's degree, or higher, or four units in a shorter course, and currently students who fail more than half lose their eligibility for Commonwealth assistance. Without government assistance, the majority of students at university wouldn't be able to attend. To put it bluntly, higher education would be an exclusive luxury for the top end of town, and it would be closed off to those who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. That's why government assistance is needed. The pass rate requirements don't make sense. Just because somebody is finding university difficult, not passing some courses, does not mean they should be discouraged from continuing their education by having to find a way to cover the costs themselves.

It's not as if this requirement is a longstanding feature of government assistance for university students. The pass rate requirements were originally introduced in January 2022 by the former coalition government as part of the Job-ready Graduates program. The rule has already taken a toll. More than 13,000 students at 27 universities have already been hit by this rule. That's 13,000 students, trying their hardest to graduate with a degree to set themselves up for a future, having financial pressures piled on top of them amid an already stressful uni life. This is not helping Australians to achieve their potential. This is not encouraging our young people to dream big and chase their goals. This is branding individuals as being not good enough to do what they desire to do. This is wrong. Just because a student is struggling does not mean they are not good enough. In fact, some of the best in the workplace were not top of the class at university or school. We should be helping students succeed, not forcing them to quit. The impact of the pass rate requirements has affected students from First Nations, low socioeconomic backgrounds and other underrepresented or educationally disadvantaged cohorts.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this was bound to happen. What did the former government expect the result would be when they removed support from those who usually need it the most? This is why the bill introduces requirements for universities and other providers to have policies in place to help students successfully complete their studies. Under these policies, universities and other providers will be required to demonstrate how they will identify students who are struggling and how they will connect those students with the support services needed to help them.

Education opens doors, whether it's university, TAFE or other forms of study, and these doors should be able to be accessed by all across our country, whether you live in a regional area or in a city, near a university or further away, regardless of your financial situation or your socioeconomic status and regardless of your race and your background. This bill opens doors for all, and I know, if this bill is passed, many in my electorate of the Hunter will be able to walk through newly opened doors. I commend the bill to the House.

Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tertiary education is vital for a robust society that wants to make the most of the capacity of its people, and it should be available for all people who seek it. For some, it's a rite of passage. For others a little bit like me, it's a complete privilege. I was the first person in my family to go to university. I so desperately wanted to go. I can't really explain why it meant so much to me. Was it because no-one in my family had been before and I saw it as something that would be a bit of a tick against my name? Was I flexing against my family? Absolutely not. I wanted to do it because I knew that it would open doors for me, as the member for Hunter has just explained, that might not otherwise be opened. I knew that if I wanted to get the job that I so desperately dreamed of, that was the way to do it.

Our local university is the University of Newcastle. The main campus is located in the outer suburb of Newcastle called Callaghan, around 12 kilometres from the city proper. The beautiful campus is called the 'bushland campus' for good reason. It sits on an impressive 140 hectares, or 346 acres, of natural bushland. Although I have to tell you that sometimes the Hexham grey mozzies are huge! More recently the University of Newcastle opened a city campus, offering an alternative location for more students to attend studies in the arts, legal and business areas. They also have other campuses located at Ourimbah on the Central Coast, in Sydney and one overseas in Singapore. The university is certainly blossoming from what it was when it was first dreamt up by the people who worked at the BHP steelworks who didn't want to have to have their children travel to Sydney to achieve tertiary studies. They fought so hard to get that university started so that steelworkers' kids could be just as well educated as their Sydney cousins. As you can see, I have a love for the University of Newcastle and I am a proud alumni.

I'm a big believer and advocate that tertiary education should be accessible for all Australians at all times, provided that uni is what they want to do and it's the best thing for them at that point in their lives. You don't have to go to uni. I tell you what: there are a lot of electricians and plumbers that are charging a hell of a lot more per hour than people with degrees at moment. So there are many, many ways to deem yourself doing well in life. But I am really proud to say that my own daughter is following in my footsteps. She attends Newcastle uni, where I had such rich and rewarding experiences. I think she can probably drink a little better than I did at uni as well.

This in fact highlights one of the major precursors for students' willingness and ability to attend university or higher education in some form—not the drinking or the social aspect but the idea that, if your parents went to uni, it's much easier for you to get there. Statistics show that, if you have a parent who has attended university, you're more likely to be in a position due to their tertiary education and subsequent financial standing, due in large part to their employability following graduation, to attend university yourself. I know that there are plenty of people with degrees—multiple degrees, in fact—that have found it hard to get jobs, but the statistics really don't lie.

My electorate of Paterson encompasses quite a large area. Many of our constituents are classed as rural, regional or, for some, even remote. We aren't really all that far from the city of Newcastle, however. The distance to travel from place to place can be a challenge regionally, especially for those who have to rely on public transport alone. It is really hard to get there if you haven't got a car, and not everyone is fortunate enough to have that car. This is just one constraint for young Australians when it comes to being able to attend uni.

Our population in Paterson, according to the 2021 census data, sits at around 175,574. A total of 4,921 people currently attend university. A further 4,600, attend vocational tertiary education, such as TAFE and other training providers. I am so delighted to be part of a government that is providing free TAFE places so that people can get the training they need.

This number needs to increase substantially if we are to prepare our country for a greater, more sustainable, economically-secure future. But how do we do that? Well, we do that by supporting the proposed changes that the Australian Universities Accord will develop.

Higher education is transformative for individuals and for the nation. It brings numerous benefits, not only in the economic space but in preparing and establishing our future generations, through high-quality education—pivoting, when required, to adapt to new and emerging technologies; embracing change; and creating a substantial landscape where generations of Australians can thrive.

One immediate example that springs to my mind that is happening right now at the University of Newcastle is aeronautical engineering. We know that we have a military base, Williamtown, where the F-35s are located, and, of the 72 planes that Australia will eventually have, 54 of them will be located at the Williamtown RAAF base. We need people to maintain those planes. We need people to understand the incredible systems that wrap around them. We need people to be able to build those systems and repair them. There is so much componentry and expertise that goes into that, that the University of Newcastle, in the last couple of years, has started an aeronautical engineering course. I was fortunate to meet a couple of the students at that course last week at the Hunter Defence Conference, and they are loving their course. It is really an adaptive situation, where the region calls out for a skill set and the university steps in. In a couple of years, we'll have graduates who will be able to work on those planes and all of the other platforms and systems that wrap around them.

So when I say 'pivoting, when required, to adapt to new and emerging technologies', there's a prime example. But there are many others—indeed, there have been in the medical space over the years. The University of Newcastle, actually, is one of those beacons when it comes to medical study. We had the first experience based learning modules for medicine in Australia. We had the UMAT exam that—I won't say 'made it easier', but opened the doors to medicine to people who had different skill sets; who would have a great bedside manner; who'd have not only the smarts but also the personality. The University of Newcastle realised that they were the sorts of doctors that we would require in the future, and, again, they stepped into that void.

So what are our immediate priority actions? We're extending visible, local access to tertiary education, by providing further universities in regional areas—well, in 'regional university centres'. I should clarify that, because there is an important difference. And we're establishing a similar concept for suburban and metropolitan locations. We might not be building brand-new universities, but, as Newcastle has done, we might be opening newer, more bespoke campuses, in locations where we need to get people along to learn in those environments.

We'll also do away with the 50 per cent pass rule, given its poor impact on students. Rather than saying to them, 'Look, you need to pass 50 per cent of your courses to get your Commonwealth support,' we need to actually monitor those students much better, with reports that check their progress as they go, rather than just getting to the end of a year and saying: 'You've failed. You haven't passed the 50 per cent rule.' We need to find out what they're doing and where they're tripping up and why they aren't passing or doing the best that they could in those learning environments.

We need to ensure that First Nations students are eligible for a funded place at university, by extending demand-driven funding to metropolitan First Nations students. We need to provide funding certainty, through the extension of the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee into 2024 and 2025, to minimise the rise of unnecessary structural adjustment to the sector. Interim funding arrangements must prioritise the delivery of supports for students in need, to accelerate reform towards high equity and high participation. Through National Cabinet, we must immediately engage with state and territory governments and universities to improve university governance as well.

These measures will ensure that Australia's higher education system is robust and is sustainable well into the future. Basically, what I've just said, in a whole range of words, is that we need education in university settings to service the needs of those students, who are paying for it. When they're being supported in Commonwealth places, we need to ensure that that money is being well spent and we need to give them the support they need to see that they do well, not just say, 'Well, if you don't do well then too bad.' We need to ask, 'Why aren't you doing well, and how can we help you to do well?' These measures will ensure that Australia's higher education system is one that does have the governance it requires, and that that governance goes to the administration of universities. I do understand the arguments where people say we can't be handing money over constantly. Indeed we can't; the governance must be right, and it must be well-targeted money. We must meet Australia's growing skills needs and pivot when necessary to meet new and emerging technologies. Our goal must be growth in skills through greater equity, and our government must provide pathways to access tertiary education. We do have a big ambition. Is it achievable? Absolutely. Talking about these ideas will certainly encourage more conversations and better development of initiatives, which will ensure the future for all Australians.

How do we do it? We ensure that we prepare our tertiary students through better access to work-integrated learning, and I am a big fan of work-integrated learning, which is going to ensure that our graduates are job ready. There's no point in people going along to universities and learning skills that they'll never need on the job. I understand that from a research perspective it is important that we extend the thinking of our students and we get them to push those boundaries, and in research settings I think that is absolutely vital. But I do think in courses that are skills reliant and where we have industries that are reliant on getting those students to qualify, they need to be work integrated. They need to be job ready and thinking in the way that a potential employer will need them to be thinking. That doesn't stifle their thinking; it just supports them and gets them better prepared to contribute.

Preparing the next generation is an imperative. Removing constraints such as availability and access to study through the creation of regional university centres will ensure that all Australians, regardless of where they live, will have access to centres of excellence and tertiary learning opportunities. If you live in one of the remote parts of my electorate of Paterson and don't have access to transport, be it public or private, getting to university and staying at university can be seriously compromised. If you cannot afford to live away from home and you still have to get to uni, it can be really difficult. We have also got to open up the opportunities for kids to get jobs like the ones I had when I was at uni. I washed dishes and did waitering to put myself through uni. I was fortunate to live with my parents still, which made it a bit easier. But these things can be tough, especially for families who are doing it tough.

Making tertiary education more available and accessible to those who live in rural and remote areas will increase the likelihood of those in rural and remote areas continuing their higher education and being supported where they choose to study. Australia is an enormous place, and, let's face it, we don't all live in big cities. Making learning hubs available to students in regional and remote areas will increase participation. Currently, living in a remote area is a huge barrier to accessing higher education. These learning hubs will not be restricted to regional areas as students in some outer metropolitan areas have identified the significant constraints that they face as well. This is not a city versus the bush argument; this is a true access argument where we need people who are skilled, thinking, studying and ready to contribute. Establishing university centres for suburban and metropolitan locations will further enhance availability and, let's face it, access for students as well because that is where a lot of them live.

The Australian universities accord aims to create a larger and fairer higher education system delivering equal access for all irrespective of their location, their financial circumstances, their cultural background, their gender or any other factor. At the end of the day people are people. We need them to be educated, and we need them to be thinking and contributing not only to society but also to our economy and to our tax base. When people go to uni, they earn more money and pay more tax. That is one of the big reasons we should be supportive of this bill. We should also support it because it will make our country a smarter and better place to live.

Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My electorate of Wills, which is in the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne, is home to a large number of students and staff that study and work in the university sector. I speak to many of them regularly, as you would, and the issues they identify are pretty clear cut. They talk about access. They talk about quality. They talk about affordability of higher education. We know and we've heard in this debate that higher education is becoming more expensive whilst quality is declining. Class sizes are ballooning. Staff face impossible workloads, limiting access to feedback, and navigating university bureaucracy is often a nightmare.

These are significant issues that are all too common for students and university staff across this country. They are symptomatic of a higher education sector looking more like a corporation than an institution that should be dedicated to delivering quality education and quality working conditions. The model that we see now is simply not sustainable. The issues facing the sector are not sustainable. Our higher education system must be both equitable and high quality in order to best serve our country's interests. When higher education is systematically discouraged, it leads to lower skilled workers, a less competitive labour market, lower productivity and overall less innovation in the Australian economy.

This is the key issue that this Labor government, the Albanese Labor government, is tackling. Of course, it is one of the great Labor traditions to work on policies to ensure that university education never remains out of reach for any Australian wanting to obtain one. That is why the Minister for Education is leading the Australian Universities Accord. I know that he is deeply committed to reforming Australia's higher education sector for the better.

He knows the power of education to change lives for the better. I think we all share an understanding that education is the key that literally opens the door to opportunity. Whatever your socioeconomic background, whatever your diverse background, whatever your identity and wherever you've come from, getting access to a quality education opens up so many doors to opportunity to allow an individual to make a contribution to their community and to their society, a significant contribution that also fulfils their potential as a person. The minister knows, as this government knows, that education is of critical, fundamental importance to so many people in our community.

In November last year, Minister Jason Clare appointed a panel to conduct a thorough review to reform Australia's higher education system and ensure that it meets the current and future needs of the nation. In its interim report, the panel calls for five modest but sensible priority actions to be considered immediately. The panel's recommendations were made by a bipartisan group of Australians with unparalleled experience in higher education, business and public policy. The Albanese government has accepted all five of these recommendations.

Two of these recommendations require legislative amendment to the Higher Education Support Act, the HESA. The first is to extend the current demand driven funding for regional and remote First Nations students to all First Nations Australian undergraduate students, regardless of where they reside. Thirty-eight per cent of Indigenous Australians live in major cities. Most young Indigenous people live in non-remote areas of Australia. The system that we have now leaves a large portion of that population ineligible for funding.

Indigenous students who come from regional and remote areas to metropolitan areas, which is common in my electorate, are already faced with housing and relocation costs. These students must also deal with the challenges of isolation and being away from their families, their communities, their culture, their homes. Without the same Commonwealth support that we provide to rural and regional Indigenous students, metropolitan Indigenous students are placed at a significantly disadvantaged starting point compared to their non-Indigenous peers. Expanding eligibility provides immediate material support in ways that matter the most. Indigenous students make up only 1.8 per cent of the higher education student population. One of the top reasons for Indigenous students not studying for another educational qualification in the last 12 months was that it was too expensive, basically. Other barriers include not feeling like they belonged, moving away from family, and internet access.

There's a lot of work to be done, but this bill addresses the biggest barriers to accessing higher education. Evidence has shown that providing access to support in the form of a Commonwealth supported place and a HELP loan has led to increased access to university for underrepresented groups. They help break down barriers to higher education for those that need it most. We know that higher education is linked to better quality of life, higher lifetime earnings, and increased contributions to the overall Australian economy. If we are to meet the goals of the Closing the Gap initiative, we must expand funding to all Indigenous students.

Secondly, we must remove the 50 per cent pass rule that punishes and abandons struggling Australians. This rule targets HECS recipients only. It does not dissuade all students; rather it discriminates based on socioeconomic status. It privileges those that are able to afford to fail while financially straining those that cannot. Since its implementation, more than 13,000 students at 27 universities have been hit by the rule. Within a span of less than two years, it has wiped out an entire university's worth of students. The scale of the harm caused by the 50 per cent pass rule is unfathomable. Universities Australia said that this rule was unnecessarily harsh. It has disproportionately targeted underrepresented students, including Indigenous Australians. Innovative Research Universities called it punitive. If we continue to enforce the 50 per cent rule, we would be ignoring the voices of our future skilled workers. We've already lost so many high-skilled workers. We must prevent further harm on the Australian economy by abolishing the rule.

The Albanese government is committed to opening the door of opportunity for more Australians to go to university. We are working with the state and territory governments to improve university governance. This requires that university governing bodies include more people with expertise in the operation of universities and a focus on student and staff safety to ensure universities are good educators and good employers. We are extending the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee for a further two years to provide funding certainty to universities as the accord process rolls out. As part of this, universities will be required to invest remaining funds from their yearly grant on additional academic and learning support for students from poorer backgrounds, regions and other underrepresented groups. The panel is also assessing the current HECS repayment scheme, including indexation arrangements, to ensure that it is fair and efficient and does not unduly burden those who made the wise decision to pursue higher education.

I enthusiastically await the final report of the Universities Accord panel. But I think it is true to say that we are not wasting time as a government. We're not wasting a moment. With this amendment today, we are acting on the recommendations that have already been made. The Albanese government is committed to removing barriers and supporting more people to access higher education, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, First Nations Australians and those based in the regions. Our future as a diverse and modern society depends on students from all walks of life being afforded the opportunity of a higher education if they choose so. Not everyone will go to university, but everyone should have the choice. That is what equality of opportunity is about. Every person should have that same opportunity, regardless of whether they live in my electorate—in Fawkner, Glenroy, Coburg or Brunswick—or in remote or regional parts of Australia. The great thing about this country is that everyone should get—at least, we should aspire to everyone getting—the same access to a quality education. As I said earlier, that access to a quality education gives so many of us the opportunities to fulfil our potential and make a meaningful contribution to our community and to the society that we live in. It is about fairness, and it is about equality of opportunity, because education is such a fundamental part of our lives in making the contribution that we seek to make. That's why the Albanese Labor government is so committed to these reforms.

Before I finish, I want to take the opportunity to recognise the staff, the students and the NTEU members at the University of Melbourne, many of whom live in my electorate, who went on a week-long strike last week. The staff and students from the Faculty of Arts, Melbourne Law School, the VCA school of art, student services and the library joined together to call for fair pay, more secure work, manageable workloads, better access to parental and carers leave, greater flexibility in work arrangements and restricting rolling restructures which cause instability. I stand in solidarity with you in your efforts because I know that staff working conditions are student learning conditions. They are key to delivering a quality higher education sector in this country and ensuring equality of access for Australians, no matter their background, where they come from or who they are.

Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's with great pleasure that I rise to make my contribution on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. The legislation before the House acts on two key recommendations from the interim report of the Australian Universities Accord panel, commissioned to review Australia's higher education system. After a decade of sitting on the opposition benches and seeing the former government unpick things that had been carefully put in place to support our university sector, to ensure that our students were being given every opportunity to reach their potential, to engage in meaningful education for life, in a lifelong journey, the impotence that I felt over there can only be eclipsed by having the opportunity tonight to speak to this piece of legislation and to celebrate the actions so far of the Minister for Education, the member for Blaxland, and the speed at which he has moved in the higher education space.

I spent 27 years in classrooms, and I know that in the first decade of my teaching life I was very focused on the students I taught. I was an English teacher, with five sessions a week, five classes of 25 kids, generally speaking. I was intimately focused on those students that I was teaching, intimately focused on being ambitious for them and supportive of them, because I wanted all of those students to achieve their potential. After years in education, you start to look up and look across the school. Becoming a year level coordinator will do this for you. You start to worry about the 250 kids in the cohort that you're responsible for. A few more years, and you're starting to look across the school. A few more years, in the principal class, and you're starting to look at the region, at the system, at the state. It was with great pleasure that I came to this parliament to look at the national progress that we're making in education, and the higher education piece is obviously critical to that.

My life's work has been about supporting individuals to meet their potential, and what this interim report addresses is exactly that. Its crucial function is to look at our higher education system, what challenges are before it and what things we can improve. The interim report has been tabled. The report was commissioned last November. The review is the biggest and broadest in 15 years, looking at access, affordability, teacher quality, research, governance, employment conditions and how the elements of post-secondary education—that is, higher education and vocational education and training—can and should better work together.

The accord panel is led by Professor Mary O'Kane AC, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Adelaide and the first woman to become the dean of engineering at any university in Australia. She is doing this work with Professor Barney Glover, Ms Shemara Wikramanayake, the Hon. Jenny Macklin AC, Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt AO, and the Hon. Fiona Nash, once a senator in this place. This group of people have heard from people all over the country, experts in the field as well as parents, students, people interested in higher education. Their recommendations in this interim report ring true to me. When I read the report, when I listen to them and when I think about the five things that they're calling for urgent action on, they speak to me.

The first is that we create more university study hubs, not only in the regions but also in our outer suburbs. As someone who represents an outer suburban region in the south-west of Melbourne, this rings true to me. We have gone, in my lifetime, from a country town of 13,000 people to a metropolis of over 300,000 people. That is an enormous number of young people who need opportunity, who need the support to make the most of that opportunity. So I welcome the outer suburban hubs.

The second is that we scrap the 50 per cent pass rule and require better reporting on how students are progressing. This speaks to the teacher in me. I was appalled when those opposite introduced this rule, because it was highly predictable what the outcome of this was going to be and which Commonwealth supported students were going to fall foul of this rule. They were going to be the students that I represent, people in my electorate. As it happened, that's exactly who did fall foul of it—people from the outer suburbs, young people from the regions, our Indigenous students. So the worst came to pass.

The third is that we extend the demand-driven funding currently provided to Indigenous students from regional and remote areas to cover all Indigenous students.

The fourth is that we provide funding certainty during the accord process by extending the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee into 2024-25, with funding arrangements that prioritise support for equity students.

The fifth is that we work with state and territory governments through National Cabinet to improve university governance. I'll echo the words of the member for Wills, who preceded me in this debate. The notion is that we are going to pay attention to having people in the governance of our universities who understand the business of universities as much as they understand universities as a business, to put it bluntly. The balance has swung too far away from those who understand education.

The report outlines the current state of play in terms of who makes up the 36 per cent of Australians with university qualifications. This includes, currently, almost one in two Australians in their 20s and 30s and where they live—or, rather, where they are least likely to live. It gives us insight into where we will find the increase in degree educated Australians that this report tells us is going to be required, and the projections are almost staggering. In 2035 we are going to need 1.2 million Commonwealth supported students, an increase of 300,000 on today's figures. By 2050 we'll need 1.8 million Commonwealth supported students, an increase of 900,000.

If we look at that data, it's pretty simple. To find people to fill those places, we're going to have to look at those who are not currently represented. We're going to have to look to our underrepresented demographics, and they are in the outer suburbs, where only 23 per cent have a university education; they are in remote and regional communities, where only 13 per cent have a university education; they are Indigenous Australians, of whom only 17 per cent have a university education; and they are poor families, low-socioeconomic families, across the country, of whom only 15 per cent have a university education. Those underrepresented groups are where we will find the increase in students that we need, and every corner of our country will benefit if we get this right.

This piece of legislation acts on two of those things immediately that require legislation. The first is the 50 per cent rule, which the report calls for to be scrapped.

For me and for Labor this has always been a moral imperative: equity and access—not just because it's the right thing to do, not just because it's the fair thing to do. We've always understood the moral imperative. This report outlines for us a practical imperative, a fiscal imperative, a productivity imperative, that we need to act on now. As I say, I'm a firm believer—because I've lived it every day of my working life—that postcode does not determine talent. It does not determine potential, nor does it determine inherent persistence. What it does is determine opportunity, and we need to change that to ensure we have the skilled population we need to create the prosperity we all desire and to be successful in a competitive global environment.

When you think about the changes in terms of energy, when you think about clean energy and that transformation, and you look at it from the perspective of the requirements for that, it is going to need a skilled workforce—not just skilled through a university degree but skilled through vocational education and training as well. The people that are underrepresented are clearly where we will find the students we need as a country, and this bill enacts the two things that the panel recommends and that common sense prescribes require immediate action.

All the 50 per cent pass rule, as a point, did was punish students who perhaps had potential but perhaps had complicated lives. If you look at the figures, that's what we find. Thirteen thousand students fell foul of that rule. It's pretty easy to fall foul of a study requirement to meet 50 per cent if you're travelling 2½ hours a day to get to university and 2½ hours to get back from university. It's pretty easy to fall foul of that rule if you're the only person in your family who happens to be working, as well as studying full time.

In my time here I've heard many of those opposite, when they were in government, talk about students, and they see students as something out of the 1950s, as though they've got a nice little job in the coffee shop or the hotel down the road and then they're studying full time. Guys, wake up! I have young people who work in my office who work full time and study full time.

In my community, in the middle of COVID, I had principals telling me that, in families in my electorate, 16-year-olds were the only people earning an income. They were doing night shifts at McDonald's to keep families afloat. Those same children could be at university now and could fall foul of this 50 per cent rule, not because they don't have potential, don't have capacity or don't have perseverance or persistence; they demonstrate that every day. What's missing? Support. What's missing is universities actually being held accountable and asked to do the job of every teacher in the country, which is to support the potential of that student, put the supports in place, know where the students are, know how they're coping and know whether they're on track to pass or fail—and to do it regularly. That's what this bill asks of universities. It asks them to do that and it provides them with support to give the support to the students that need to complete their degrees.

This measure was introduced by the former government under its job-ready graduate package, and it'll be removed by this bill. I celebrate that and I know that most teachers that I have worked with in my lifetime in schools would equally celebrate it because teachers understand, as do the universities, that students will meet their potential if they're given the appropriate supports to do so. The new measure will see the universities supported to support students to achieve, make them accountable for that success and make the universities part of the success. It shifts the goalposts and asks universities to fulfil their social contract of providing higher education to Australian students and to live their mission of demonstrating the power of education to enhance life outcomes and create a more educated population.

Let's face it; our universities run because we ask them to run. Our universities are there to provide education for our domestic students as much as they are there to provide education for international students. Universities should be the exemplar in terms of educative practice, and government should support them in this role, as well as hold them to account, just as it do in other sectors.

I'll go back to some of the points the member for Wills was making. I know in my electorate that I have many people who work in the university sector. What we have seen in our university sector across the last decade under that government, without any breaks on this downhill run, has been a casualisation of its workforce. Universities have been denuded of professors. How are you going to maintain international rankings without professors on board at universities? Universities are supposed to be the bastion of education. They're what we should be looking to. To be that you need to value those you're asking to educate.

In this country we demonstrate value by giving people permanency, by giving people what they earn and by showing them that we value their work and we value the support they're giving students. On those opposite's watch they introduced this ridiculous 50 per cent fail rate and then allowed universities to not give support to students. As a result, 13,000 students fell foul, many of them exactly the students that we as a country need to engage—not just this generation but the generation after that. I commend this bill to the House.

Tracey Roberts (Pearce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As someone who has worked in the education sector for many years, I rise to support the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. In November 2022, the Minister for Education announced the Australian Universities Accord panel and terms of reference, and the discussion paper was released in February 2023. Following this, the expert panel released an interim report in July 2023, with a final report due to government in December of this year. The interim report proposed five priority actions to be considered immediately, and the bill implements priority actions 2 and 3, which require legislation, with Minister Clare stating the government would implement all the recommendations. The purpose of the bill before us is to amend the Higher Education Support Act 2023, HESA, to do the following: remove the cap on the number of Indigenous students who can enrol in a Commonwealth supported place by extending eligibility to all Indigenous students no matter where they live, remove the requirement that students successfully complete at least 50 per cent of their first eight units of study of a bachelor degree to be able to continue as a Commonwealth supported student and be eligible for FEE-HELP assistance and encourage universities to provide appropriate levels of support for students identified as at risk of falling behind and to support them to complete their units of study. In the minister's second-reading speech he stated:

… the only way to so significantly boost the percentage of the workforce with a university qualification is to significantly increase the number of students who are currently underrepresented in our universities: students from our outer suburbs—

like my electorate of Pearce—

and the regions, students from poor backgrounds, students with a disability and Indigenous students.

Further, the minister pointed out:

In the outer suburbs of our major cities it's only 23 per cent of young adults who have a university degree.

…   …   …

Only 15 per cent of young adults from poor families have a degree—

and only seven per cent of young Indigenous Australians have one. According to the 2021 census, in the Pearce electorate 7.4 per cent of students were attending TAFE or training by a private provider, 12.4 per cent were attending university and 18 per cent had achieved bachelor's degree level and above. Pearce, like other outer metropolitan areas, is indicative of why we need to increase the number of students from the outer suburbs, as they are underrepresented in our universities. We have a growing industrial base within my electorate, and if we do not address this issue we will find we lack the skills and workforce required for the future.

The government has confirmed it will implement all five recommendations from the interim report, and this legislation is necessary to implement two of these. The five recommendations are: (1) that more universities study hubs are created in the regions and outer suburbs, (2) that the 50 per cent pass rule be scrapped and better reporting required on how students are progressing, (3) that the demand-driven funding currently provided to Indigenous students from regional and remote areas be extended to cover all Indigenous students, (4) that funding certainty be provided during the accord process by extending the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee into 2024 and 2025 with funding arrangements that prioritise support for equity students and (5) that we work with state and territory governments through national cabinet to improve university governance.

In relation to the university study hubs we advise there are currently 34 in regional Australia, and the government plans to establish 20 more in the regions and 14 in the outer suburbs of our major cities, where the percentage of people with a university qualification is low. I would certainly welcome a university study hub, definitely, within the electorate of Pearce. The minister has announced the government will extend the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee into 2024-25, as mentioned in recommendation 4, noting that universities will be required to use any funding remaining from their grant each year on areas such as enabling courses and extra academic and learning support for students from poor backgrounds, from the regions and from other underrepresented groups.

The government has also committed to the fifth recommendation to work with states and territories on improving university governance. Importantly, one of the three areas to focus on is making sure our universities are safe for students and staff. It was deeply disturbing to learn that in 2021 the National Student Safety Survey found that one in 20 students had been sexually assaulted since starting university and that one in six had been sexually harassed. This is unacceptable, and a proper and transparent process must be in place to deal with complaints in a respectful and timely manner. However, we must also ask ourselves how we got to this point in the first place. A substantial number of students come to university straight from high school, at a young and vulnerable age, keen to learn and looking forward to university. Both those students and their parents would have every expectation that the university would have a duty of care to ensure their safety whilst on campus.

As stated previously, the bill implements recommendations 2 and 3. Recommendation 2 amends the Higher Education Support Act to remove the requirement that students must pass 50 per cent of the units they study to remain eligible for a Commonwealth-supported place and FEE-HELP assistance. Currently, students who cannot maintain this pass rate lose eligibility and must either pay for their course upfront, transfer to another course or withdraw from their studies. The pass-rate measures were originally introduced with the intention of dissuading students from continuing in courses that they were not academically suited for, to avoid accruing large Higher Education Loan Program, or HELP, debts without successfully gaining a qualification. However, we now know that the practical effect of these measures has been overly punitive for students and has not necessarily motivated higher education providers to provide better support to students experiencing academic difficulties. The impact of these measures has also fallen disproportionately on students from First Nations, low socioeconomic status and other underrepresented or educationally-disadvantaged cohorts. The minister advised that more than 13,000 students at the 27 universities had been hit by this in the past two years—mostly, those from disadvantaged backgrounds. I agree with the minister wholeheartedly: we should be helping our students to succeed, not forcing them to quit.

I note here the accord panel's priority action 3, which is to ensure that all First Nations students are eligible for a funded place at university by extending demand-driven funding to metropolitan First Nations students. This is consistent with the principle behind the introduction of guaranteed funding for First Nations students from regional and remote areas in 2021. This funding arrangement should apply to all First Nations people undertaking higher education, including in metropolitan areas.

Our country prides itself on the notion of giving everyone a fair go. All disadvantaged students, no matter where they live, deserve that chance. The amendments in part 2 insert a new requirement that higher education providers must have, and comply with, a policy that addresses support for students—a policy that will proactively identify students who are at risk of falling behind and set out what they will do to help them succeed. The accord panel has been clear about increased accountability and reporting processes to support student progress, as this will focus on improving success rates of at-risk students.

We have five universities in Western Australia: University of WA, Curtin, Murdoch, Notre Dame and Edith Cowan, the latter of which is located close to the Pearce electorate and therefore attracts a large number of students from the northern suburbs. Many of these universities have in place or have commenced programs to support students, so the requirement of the bill should come as no surprise and help bolster their existing endeavours. Whether it be providing peer-to-peer support or additional online academic support, there is much more to be done.

A friend of mine attended a session for staff and interested stakeholders at one of our universities a few years ago where the speaker addressed the group using a Domino's pizza analogy about offering tertiary education in a modern world and the need for change. It went something like this: you can make a call or order a pizza online and decide what size, what type, what individual toppings you would like, and when and where you want it delivered. He then asked: 'What do we give our students for their $100,000 degree?' He asked a valid question to challenge them to think outside offering more of the same, and to ask how they were going to support their students going forward.

My nearest university, Edith Cowan University, has a student success team to assist students make a smooth transition to university and help them stay on track with their studies so they can reach their full potential. This includes supporting study progress, health and wellbeing, assessing personal challenges and developing action plans to overcome them and providing referrals to specialist support services, both at Edith Cowan University and in their community. The ECU student success team offers support to all students—domestic students and onshore international students.

The Kurongkurl Katitjin is ECU's Centre for Indigenous Australian Education. Their student success team are responsible for providing dedicated support and guidance to the Edith Cowan University's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. ECU also has a uni prep student success team specially trained to assist commencing students and help them to succeed in their courses of choice. This is just one example of what universities are doing in Western Australia.

The recommendations outlined in this bill are incredibly important if we are to truly help disadvantaged students in my electorate and across the nation to fulfil their potential. I commend the bill to the House.

Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Education is life-changing. It can change your trajectory in life. It can change your entire family's trajectory. We know that people with more education tend to have higher income and all the opportunities that having additional income brings. They also tend to have better health outcomes. Their children are healthier and more likely to complete education. Education can also change the trajectory of an entire country. A higher educated, higher skilled workforce is necessary for higher-income-generating industry and manufacturing, for the production of goods and for the services that bring wealth to a country. We absolutely want good-quality, high-paying, secure jobs for Australians, and we are committed to rebuilding the manufacturing services and supply chains onshore to achieve this. We, therefore, need Australians who are educated, skilled and qualified to take these jobs and also to create these jobs and to develop new knowledge, new research, new skills, new businesses and new industries.

Education is a key to opportunity. When my grandparents left poverty in Northern Ireland to seek a better life for their family and when my parents left the UK to seek a better life for their family, for me and my brother, here in Australia, they knew that education was the key to accessing the opportunities of their new homes. I, like many in this place, was the first in my family to go to university, and it certainly changed my life. It gave me career opportunities that I would otherwise not have had. I was lucky that my family had a culture of valuing education. I was trained from kindergarten to expect that I would concentrate at school and achieve, that I would finish high school—there was no question—and that I would go to university. I was taught that this was the normal course of education, and I was taught that it was achievable for me. I was one of the lucky ones.

But, if we're going to change this country to the economic powerhouse, advanced manufacturing hub, leading scientific nation and country with world-leading health and other services that we know it can be and that it needs to be in the future, we need to ensure education is available to all and that that education is world class. There are too many that get left behind, too many whose families don't see that education is achievable for them, that it is something that they can do in their family. There are too many that face barriers that I didn't face, and we need them to be able to see that education is achievable for them as well.

That was why Minister Clare commissioned three reviews on education—early childhood, schooling and the tertiary sector—which resulted in the Australian Universities Accord. This Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023 is a response to the Australian Universities Accord interim report. They are priority recommendations, and we have a final report expected in December 2023.

The Albanese Labor government is committed to opening the door of opportunity for more Australians to go to university. Whether or not you see university as an option for you shouldn't depend on your postcode or your family background. We need to ensure that students who don't come from a university educated family can thrive and succeed in tertiary education.

The following were identified in the recommendations of the interim report and addressed in the measures of the bill: firstly, that we create more study hubs, not only in the regions but in our outer suburbs—it's amazing how a simple thing such as travel, the unfamiliarity of a big city, or parking can form a barrier to someone feeling confident enough to enrol and attend university; secondly, that we scrap the 50 per cent pass rule and require better reporting on how students are progressing; thirdly, that we extend the demand driven funding currently provided to Indigenous students from regional and remote areas to cover all Indigenous students; fourthly, that we provide funding certainty during the accord process by extending the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee into 2024 and 2025, with funding arrangements that prioritise support for equity students; and, lastly, that we work with state and territory governments to improve university governance. Importantly, the government has confirmed it will implement each of the interim recommendations.

Recommendations 2 and 3 require legislative amendment, which this bill provides by amending the Higher Education Support Act to extend the current demand-driven funding for regional and remote First Australians students to all First Australians undergraduate students studying bachelor or bachelor-honours level courses, other than medicine, from 2024. It also removes the pass rate requirements for students to remain eligible for Commonwealth assistance and introduces new requirements on universities and other providers to support students in successfully completing their studies.

Currently students are required to pass at least 50 per cent of the units they undertake to continue their eligibility for Commonwealth assistance. The pass rate is assessed after they've completed eight units in a bachelor's degree, or higher, or four units in a shorter course, and students who fail more than half currently lose eligibility for Commonwealth assistance. The pass rate requirements were originally introduced in January 2022 by the former coalition government as part of the Job-ready Graduates program to dissuade students from continuing in courses they're not academically suited to. However, the practical effect of these measures has been overly punitive for students. Sometimes you have a bad year. Sometimes it doesn't all come together. Life outside university impacts on your ability to focus, to study and to pass. The impact of the pass rate requirements has disproportionately affected students from First Nations communities and those of low socioeconomic status and other underrepresented and educationally disadvantaged cohorts. These are the cohorts that we want to encourage to see university as something that is for them and their families; we want them to know that they can achieve.

For those already facing too many barriers, who might need to work extra jobs to fund their education, who might have family duties and issues that interfere with their studies, this should not be the barrier that means that they don't have the bright future that they deserve. More than 13,000 students at 27 universities have already been hit by this rule. Removal of the rule has been called for by universities right across the country—universities like the University of Adelaide, in my home town, Monash University, University of Technology Sydney, University of the Sunshine Coast, University of New England, Queensland University of Technology and Western Sydney University. This is something that they see the value of, that they understand. We should be helping students succeed, not forcing them to quit.

The bill introduces requirements for universities and other providers to have policies in place to help students successfully complete their studies. Under these policies, universities and other providers will be required to demonstrate how they will identify students who are struggling and how they will connect those students with support services to help them succeed.

The Department of Education will issue a discussion paper to consult with universities and providers on the content of these policies. They are expected to contain measures such as having processes for identifying students who need help; assessing a student's academic and non-academic suitability for continuing study, particularly when they've triggered an alert; connecting students with support and identifying students who are not engaging with that support before their census date wherever possible; and providing sufficient non-academic supports for students, such as financial assistance, housing information and mental health supports. This is important when students struggle because of non-academic issues—because the rest of their life is interfering.

Other measures include having appropriate crisis and critical harm response arrangements; providing access to trained academic development advisers who can help a student identify what's holding them back and come up with the right response for that student—it's not one size fits all; it's not a cookie cutter—ensuring that academic and non-academic supports are age and culturally appropriate, including specific arrangements for First Nations students; proactively offering special circumstances arrangements where a provider is aware of a significant life event for a student; providing access to targeted individual literacy, numeracy and other academic supports; providing provider-driven evidence based additional support, such as peer support; and providing targeted in-course support from academic staff, such as check-ins and flexibility on assessment arrangements. Universities and other providers will be required to comply with their student support policies, and civil penalties will apply for compliance breaches.

The existing demand-driven measure for Indigenous students was implemented in 2021 in response to the National Regional, Rural and Remote Education Strategy. The proposal aims to increase First Nations enrolment numbers by expanding the eligibility of demand-driven funding to include metropolitan First Nations students studying bachelor and bachelor honours courses, except for medicine, at table A universities. This measure directly supports efforts towards achieving Closing the Gap outcome 6: to increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 25 to 34 who have completed a tertiary qualification—cert III and above—to 70 per cent by 2031. This means there will be no cap on the number of First Nations students who can enrol in a Commonwealth supported place, and table A providers will receive Commonwealth funding for all Indigenous students under part 2-2 of HESA.

The Department of Education estimates this may double the number of Indigenous students at university within a decade. The measure has strong support in the sector—for example, Universities Australia, ANU, UQ, Western Sydney University, Macquarie University, James Cook University, University of Southern Queensland, University of Melbourne, University of Adelaide, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Technology Sydney. The measure builds on the government's election commitment to deliver up to 20,000 Commonwealth supported places and fee-free TAFE.

This bill in response to the interim report of the Australian Universities Accord is the first step to building a brighter future for all Australians and for our country. Education is the key to better outcomes. Education changes lives and changes futures. The link between education and employment, between education and better-paid jobs and between income and health outcomes for individuals and for their families is well established. Being able to financially support your children and family because you have a well-paid, secure job means better outcomes for your children. Children brought up in poverty are more likely to experience poverty as adults.

My electorate of Boothby is home to a number of excellent tertiary institutions as well as many, many tertiary students and tertiary sector workers. Flinders University in Bedford Park is one of three major universities in South Australia. Its innovative approach to modern manufacturing has seen it establish itself within the Factory of the Future in the Tonsley Innovation Precinct, working into supply chains for the defence industry with many of the local innovative industries that have set up in that precinct. It's also a major medical school with campuses across regional South Australia and the Northern Territory and an excellent record of graduating First Nations doctors and other health professionals.

We also have the Waite campus of the University of Adelaide in Urrbrae, which focuses on agriculture and ag science. Of course, South Australia has an excellent wine industry. The research this campus undertakes will be vital for our important agriculture industries as climate change changes the conditions that they're dealing with. Then we have TAFE at Tonsley, which is developing the tradies for the—

Debate interrupted.