Charlotte Walker (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about these bills, the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) Bill 2025 and the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2025. They're about something really important: whether our university system is actually working for people, especially young people. Right now I think a lot of Australians are looking at higher education and thinking that it feels expensive, confusing and disconnected from real life and it doesn't actually have people like them in mind. We ask young people to make huge decisions about their future early. We then tell them education is the pathway to opportunity, to a decent job and to security, but then we give them a system that can feel messy, inconsistent and at times completely out of step with what students and the country need. That is why these bills matter.

The bills started out as a report of the Australian Universities Accord. The Albanese Labor government has implemented 37 of the recommendations so far. This legislation is the next step. It creates the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, ATEC—the long-term final boss of the higher education system.

At the moment, uni policy can feel like it does a 180 from one change to the next. There's not always a clear long-term direction. Different parts of the system don't line up properly, and when that happens students are the ones who wear it. They wear it through higher debt, through qualifications that don't always match workforce needs and through barriers that make uni feel out of reach in the first place. These bills are trying to bring a bit more sense, consistency and planning into the system to make things smoother for everyone involved. We can't keep treating education policy like an all-nighter essay—panic driven, last-minute and hoping it somehow passes. It should not be shaped by random short-term thinking; it should be based on what kind of country we want to build, what skills we need and how we make sure people have a fair shot at participating.

That's one of the reasons why I like that these bills put a national objective into law, and that the objective is not about pumping out more graduates for the sake of it; it is about making sure tertiary education supports a strong democracy, economic and social development, and environmental sustainability. It boils down to this: education should help people build decent lives and should help the country meet the challenges ahead—which seems pretty reasonable to me.

But, when you look around, the cracks are obvious. We've got skill shortages in areas we desperately need skills. We've got ongoing inequality in who gets access to higher education and who succeeds once they're there. We've got a gap between universities and vocational education that still makes moving between the two harder than it should be. And we've got students carrying the cost of policy failures they didn't create. There is something genuinely refreshing about setting up a body whose job is to step back, look at the system as a whole and ask: Is it working? Is this fair? Is this sustainable? Are we setting people up well or just hoping for the best? That kind of long-term thinking has been missing.

I also think it matters that these bills put equity front and centre, because talent is everywhere in this country; opportunity is not. There are still too many people, especially students from regional areas, low-income backgrounds and First Nations communities, who face extra barriers getting into higher education and succeeding once they're there. If we're serious about fairness, education can't just be there for people who already know how to navigate the system; it has to work for the people who have been shut out of it too. That's why having a First Nations commissioner is important. That is why having a stronger focus on access and outcomes matters. That is why having someone keeping an eye on whether the system is serving the whole country is fundamental.

There is also a practical side to the bills which makes a lot of sense. Universities will have to be clearer about what they're there to do and what their goals are, and how that lines up with national and local needs—and I don't think that's some outrageous ask. If institutions are receiving public support, it's fair to expect them to be thinking about students, communities, workforce needs and outcomes, not just operating in their own bubble. Some people are worried this could become another layer of bureaucracy. Some are worried it won't be independent enough. Some think the bills don't go far enough. While these are valid things to discuss, for me the big picture is this: the current system is not perfect and pretending it's fine is not a serious option.