Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in strong support of the Universities Accord (National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence) Bill 2025. This bill enables the minister to make a national higher education code to prevent and respond to gender based violence—not that you would know that from the contribution from the opposition education spokesperson, but I suppose it's pretty typical of the Liberals to ignore and erase women. The national code is in fact about gender based violence, and it's the next step in responding to the Australian Universities Accord interim report, after we've already had the creation of the National Student Ombudsman and the Action Plan Addressing Gender-based Violence in Higher Education. The Greens support this bill, and we welcome this next step in both preventing and tackling sexual violence on campus.

This bill will create, for the first time, meaningful and detailed standards that universities must meet in relation to gender based violence. These standards will be endorsed by a specialist unit within the Department of Education, and, where universities fail to meet these standards for student safety, this unit will finally have the power to enforce penalties, including financial penalties.

I want to extend a deep and heartfelt thankyou to all of the activists and groups that campaigned for this outcome, including Fair Agenda's Renee Carr, End Rape on Campus Australia's Sharna Bremner, the STOP Campaign's Camille Schloeffel, and Dr Allison Henry, who have been working to shape this code. They have been working on the issue of sexual violence in universities for many years. They have done incredible work. It's their advocacy that has seen us pass this bill tonight.

I would also really like to acknowledge the survivors who've faced harmful actions from their universities, compounding the harm of their assault. Too many people, mostly young women, have been left without support for their safety on campus, on res and in exam rooms. They have been left to drop out or fail, as a result of the failure to prevent that sexual assault on campus and as a result of the failure of universities to take action to keep those students safe on a university campus in that setting. It's unforgiveable and it has life-changing consequences for people.

The code as tabled will be transformative for students. It will finally provide an avenue to shift university practices to improve outcomes for survivors, who've been too often left abandoned by their universities. It will also provide an avenue for the new expert unit in the department to enforce compliance, which TEQSA, the tertiary education regulator, has so roundly failed to do. In the Senate inquiry into sexual consent laws in 2023, which I participated in, along with Senator Scarr and Senator Green, who I understand will speak next, it was abundantly clear that TEQSA had utterly dropped the ball on its responsibilities and that women and young people, who had suffered legions of sexual abuse and harassment, were further damaged and utterly retraumatised by the failure of the regulator, TEQSA, to do its job. I am glad that we're here today—essentially sidelining TEQSA for this matter and setting up a process that there is much hope will deliver accountability. We also need to focus on prevention. Through the course of that inquiry, we delivered a unanimous report that recommended an independent taskforce to hold universities to account on sexual violence, as well as an urgent review into the response to sexual violence on campus by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, TEQSA.

The conduct of the universities in covering up sexual assault and harassment on campus, rather than actually addressing student concerns and keeping students safe, which we revealed through that inquiry, was utterly reprehensible. They were more concerned about protecting themselves and their own reputations than they were about protecting student safety, and that's unforgivable. We even learned that Universities Australia went so far as to cancel a student-led $1½ million consent education and sexual assault prevention campaign on campus because a few old dinosaurs, including the then head of Universities Australia, thought it was too risque. It was consent education for adults, student designed so that it would meet students where they were at, and it was cancelled, and that money got unilaterally funnelled into a staff program. I'm really glad that all of that work has culminated in the bill that we are debating and hopefully passing shortly. Repeated examples of universities failing to make real changes to protect students mean that the ombudsman, and now the code, must be equipped to do that.

Universities have to be safe places for students to learn and to thrive. That inquiry and its recommendations wouldn't exist without the work of those courageous advocates, some of whom I've named already. A few additional powerful advocates are Saxon Mullins, Nina Funnell, Grace Tame, Chanel Contos, Sharna Bremner, Camille Schloeffel and many, many more who have consistently pushed for laws and consent education to be informed by the lived experience of sexual assault survivors.

We're really eager to see this code mandated as soon as possible so that no more students have to wait for these safety protections. This is long overdue. These survivors deserve this protection. Those assaults should never have happened in the first place. We've got to work on the cultural changes to prevent them. We've got to make sure that universities don't retraumatise people by utterly failing them when they're most needed. We have great hope that this code, developed by survivors, might get us there.