Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Education Legislation Amendment (2022 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022, because it is a terrific continuation of the agenda of the previous government, recognising the challenges around higher education. I'll come to the purposes of the bill shortly, but I just want to start by making some comments around the coalition's program on higher education that we were working on.

In its last budget, the coalition government committed almost $20 billion towards higher education. This is part of our record $115.1 billion in total government funding for universities between 2019 and 2024—$95.2 billion in teaching and learning, and $19.8 billion in research. And, in the 2020-21 budget, we funded an additional 30,000 places, part of 100,000 more university places over the decade.

We also have a strong commitment to regional education, so we delivered funding for regional university centres to help students in regional and remote areas access higher education. Our $242.7 million Trailblazer Universities Program is helping support Australia's best minds to produce cutting-edge research that can be used to deliver real-world outcomes. We also provided $32.5 million over four years to develop and pilot microcredentials.

That element of supporting regional universities and regional places is critical. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of attending the business and law school annual lecture at James Cook University. This lecture was given by—well, I'll call him a young man, given he is about my age—a young man who graduated from high school in Charters Towers. He completed his schooling with no real decision about what he wanted to study, and so he put down a range of university options from education right through to law. He said that, when his father called out that he had got into university, when it came out in the papers that morning, he had to ask his father, 'Which course?' because he just wasn't sure. Anyway, he got into law, and he studied law in the old-fashioned way that a number of us here would remember—before computers; before laptops. He used the university library and the Dewey system, and researched, waiting for the best books to become available to complete his studies. And he was finally able to get into a residential college at James Cook University, which allowed him to live and study without riding his bike through the hot and humid weather of Townsville, and to complete that study successfully. This fellow has gone on to become a very well-respected lawyer and barrister in that state. He became a King's Counsel in Queensland, was the first Indigenous King's Counsel in Queensland and is now the first Indigenous Supreme Court judge. So Judge Lincoln Crowley is an impressive individual by any measure, but his ability to study locally and regionally gave him the opportunity to have a university education. It would have been a big challenge for his family if he had had to contemplate going further away to Brisbane or somewhere like that.

So this support for regional education and for regional universities, like James Cook University, Central Queensland University and Charles Darwin University, is important. These are all important institutions that allow our young people from regional parts of the country to have the same access to higher education that those young people who live in capital cities already have and enjoy, where they can live either at home or with family but are not going thousands of kilometres away in order to complete their studies. This is a terrifically important part of an education agenda in a nation as large as ours.

The six measures of this bill that was introduced by the coalition but which lapsed at the dissolution of parliament have been touched on, but I do want to extend a little more detail on them around the extension of the FEE-HELP loan exemptions which will apply until 31 December 2022, with that retrospective effect from 1 January 2022. That is very important because it is now so late in the year. It is important that retrospective element be applied to support the development of the microcredential courses by extending FEE-HELP eligibility for students accessing them. Strengthening the reporting requirements for unique student identifiers is another important of the administration element of this legislation. The legislation clarifies the status of enabling courses in the context of lifetime student learning entitlement, creates consistency for New Zealand citizens accessing Commonwealth assistance by requiring New Zealand citizens be resident in Australia for their eligible unit of study and makes minor and technical amendments to improve the operation of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 and to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Act 2011.

What were also going to be a part of this bill were the legislative changes for the HELP for Rural Doctors and Nurse Practitioners initiative that provides a debt reduction for rural doctors and nurse practitioners who reside and practice in regional, rural or remote Australia. A critically important element is the identification of the MMS areas that this would be applicable to because, as everybody in this place knows, we are incredibly challenged by the number of general practitioners that we have in this nation. The Parliamentary Friends of General Practice—this fabulous bipartisan group, co-chaired by Dr Gordon Reid, Dr Sophie Scamps and I—had a breakfast earlier this week. The point was made by the incoming president that, when she graduated from medicine, 50 per cent of her class went on to become general practitioners. That number has now fallen to 13.5 per cent. That is a significant structural change in the way young people are making a decision about what sort of medicine they are going to practice.

The challenges facing general practice are felt in the cities, but, more concerningly, there is an exceptional shortage of general practitioners in rural, regional and remote Australia. This is affecting the longer-term health outcomes for people who live in those regions, ending up with shorter life expectancy and poorer health outcomes. We've got terrific services like Heart of Australia, which Dr Rolf Gomes leads, taking specialist cardiology services—both CT and MRI—into regional places. There are people who just can't afford to travel to the bigger centres for that kind of medical care, and this is resulting in shorter life expectancy and reduced quality of life. I applaud those specialists who travel to the regions to ensure that regional, rural and remote people don't go without.

The GP challenge is broad, so I look forward to the element that will come forward with support for general practitioners and nurses. It won't just be higher education support; it is also the sort of investment that encourages patients to access high-quality general practice care and that increases the amount for general practitioners who are offering that longer service and more complex patient care. It ensures that people who receive bulk-billing incentives and vulnerable people are all supported well. I'll have more to say on that when we come forward with that second part of these reforms—the Higher Education Support Act amendment measures which will be introduced later.

This is a bill that I recommend to the Senate. I think it has broad support across the Senate because it provides for a continuation of the development and focus on higher education that the coalition had started, and a greater focus on those elements of microcredential courses in particular, as well as the clarification of the lifetime student learning entitlements. I think that the consistency for New Zealand citizens as they access higher education here in Australia will be well received because the most constant complaint of anyone dealing with government is when they find that things are not consistent or that there are definitional challenges.

This is another way to continue constant improvement and ensure that legislation is clear and user-friendly. It helps with the outcome we're all searching for—which is to allow our young people the greatest opportunity to study, to go to higher education, to complete their work and to achieve their full potential, whatever that may be. Hopefully, they'll stay in the regional, rural and remote communities to support those places that they come from—that is a great thing to be able to do. It is the regional universities that provide that ability for young people who live in those remote places. There are some incredible programs going on—hub-and-spoke training programs that the more regional universities provide in terms of aged care and nursing support. They train people in their communities to be able to take on that higher education and to provide the services that are so desperately required in those places.

It is a complex framework, the education system in this country. It has to serve a relatively small population over vast distances, over the states and territories, to try to find a consistent model that allows our youth to have their greatest opportunity as they go forward.

I am the proud parent of three university students next year, and I think it is just terrific to see the myriad opportunities that are available to young people—much more so than when I went to university and we studied something for a career that we thought we would be in for the remainder of our lives. But there are now a broad range of opportunities and studies that allow a level of additional study or focus on specialty areas that provide an excellence that Australia has long been renowned for. I've just finished reading former senator Brett Mason's book, where he celebrates two great Australian academics, Oliphant and Florey, and the work that they did as Australians who went overseas, who progressed their areas of study in ways that were previously unthought of and who, in fact, were part of the solutions that solved the end of that great conflict, being penicillin and microwave radar. Australians do very well in this educational field, and these are just more amendments that will work towards greater simplification of the legislation.