As I was saying, this bill penalises providers who exceed their allocated number of Commonwealth supported places beyond a small buffer. That creates a number of adverse consequences and even perverse incentives. It means universities are incentivised to turn students away so they do not risk going over their cap. It also means that taxpayers pay more to educate the same number of students. The evidence was that this bill could result in taxpayers paying $540.8 million more to educate the same number of students. As drafted, it means universities can actually be penalised if they lift their retention rate. That is perverse. It incentivises the universities not to improve. It should change, and the coalition will move amendments in this space.

The fourth issue that I want to address here in the time I have remaining is that the coalition is really against this ministerial overreach. We have belled the cat on this issue. We pointed out that, under a little-known section of the bill called section 36-65, the minister would have the power to impose any condition on any university at any time in relation to any matter whatsoever. The university would then be compelled by law to comply. This power was non-reviewable, non-disallowable, did not require consultation, could be used retrospectively and was entirely unilateral. As initially drafted, it covered any issue whatsoever. The government has tinkered around the edges with this in the House to slightly narrow the scope, but the central problem remains. It is overreach and, frankly, it should just go.

The fifth issue in this bill is the question of quality and transparency. In this respect, the bill has missed an opportunity. It is a chance to emphasise quality—to put it at the heart of what drives our higher education system and steers the ATEC. But the bill just doesn't really address this issue. Quality should start with the overarching objective that guides our national tertiary education system. Right now, that objective, introduced by this government, mentions social development and environmental sustainability. What it does not mention are teaching, learning, research and scholarship, let alone innovation, productivity alignment with the needs of business and industry, student experience, Australian values, efficiency and the reduction of regulatory burden. These things shouldn't be controversial, and so that's why we'll add them. It's a sensible improvement that is in our national interest.

There are other parts of the bill which could also be explored in depth, but, in the interest of time, I'll just mention two more. In the last sitting fortnight, we saw antisemitism once again take centre stage in this parliament and across the nation. We saw the royal commission into antisemitism close without calling the protest organisers, the key leaders in the arts and the university sector or any other government ministers. We know how bad antisemitism has become in this country. We've seen it. We've seen it taken to extremes, and it looks like 15 people murdered on Bondi Beach.

The bill was an opportunity to set a clear national benchmark on antisemitism across every Australian campus. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism—that's what we should see. How can you fight antisemitism if you can't even agree on what it is? The IHRA definition is the same benchmark that the Commonwealth government, the state and territory governments and the royal commission itself use. It should apply on campuses as well. In effect, we ask the government to vote with their own policy.

The final issue is about private providers. On this side of the chamber, we support independent education. We support competitive neutrality, and we will move amendments to put independent providers on the same footing as universities when it comes to consulting about international students, and we will move amendments to list providers who have met all the requirements, as listed in table B universities. That should be a no-brainer.

I rise to support the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. This bill is about opening the doors of our universities to more Australians and making sure that, once students get through those doors, they have the support they need to succeed. In February 2024, the Albanese Labor government released the final report of the Australian Universities Accord. It is a blueprint for higher education reforms over the next decade and the decade after that.

The accord recommends that, by 2050, at least 80 per cent of the working-age population have a tertiary education. That means more people going to TAFE and more people going to university, and it means we need to start building that system now. The government has already implemented more than 30 of the accord's 47 recommendations in full or in part. We have made HECS better and fairer by cutting 20 per cent from student debts, capping indexation at the lower of CPI and WPI, raising the minimum repayment threshold and moving it to a marginal repayment system. We have introduced paid prac for teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students. We're doubling the number of university study hubs, with 20 new regional university study hubs and 14 new suburban university study hubs. We have increased the number of free university bridging courses, introduced the National Student Ombudsman and the National Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence, made demand driven Commonwealth supported places available to all First Nations students who meet the entry requirements, and established the Australian Tertiary Education Commission as a steward of the tertiary education system.

This bill takes the next major step. The Australian Universities Accord recommended a new approach to funding higher education, planned and managed through the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, as well as a stronger focus on increasing the numbers of students from backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented at university. This bill delivers on that recommendation through a new managed-growth funding system and demand driven needs based funding. Together, these changes represent an additional $3.6 billion investment in higher education over the next decade and are expected to support an extra 230,000 commencing domestic university students between 2027 and 2036. That is a significant expansion of opportunity.

The managed growth funding system will better align Commonwealth funding with the number of students universities actually enrol. Importantly, it will effectively uncap the number of places for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and regional areas. Higher education providers will also be supported to transition to the new funding system. That matters because talent and potential are not determined by a postcode, a family income or whether your parents went to university. For Tasmania, this is particularly important. We are a regional state, and where someone lives should not determine whether a university education feels within reach.

But opening the door is only one part of the job. It's not enough simply to increase the number of students who enrol. We also need to make sure students have a genuine opportunity to succeed once they get there. That is where needs based funding is so important. Universities will receive additional funding to support students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, First Nations students and students studying at regional campuses. The principle is straightforward: the more students a university has who meet those criteria, the more funding it will receive to help those students participate and succeed. It is similar in principle to needs based funding in our schools.

The bill sets a base equity amount of $1,535 and a base regional amount of $1,398. In some cases, that will be more than double the amount of funding provided per student compared with similar previous programs, where the average amount provided could have been as little as $600. Universities will be able to use that additional funding in practical ways. It can go towards tutoring, mentoring and other academic supports. It can provide direct financial assistance through scholarships and grants, and it can help meet the higher cost of operating campuses in regional and remote areas. Getting into university is only the beginning. If we are serious about opening the doors of opportunity, then students need to be supported not just to enrol but to stay, succeed and complete their qualification.

The bill also formalises ATEC's role in allocating Commonwealth supported places. It establishes a framework for ATEC to allocate international student places where the Minister for Education makes an international allocation pool determination, and it makes technical amendments to improve information sharing between the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency and ATEC.

Since the bill was introduced, the government has continued to listen and work constructively with the sector and across the parliament to strengthen these reforms. The government is moving amendments that will require ATEC to consider student demand when allocating Commonwealth supported places. The amendments will also clarify that a student's eligibility for needs based funding is not reassessed each time that student enrols in an individual unit. They will reduce or remove the scope of some ministerial powers relating to designated courses and designated course allocations. The amendments will also confirm that only areas categorised as non-metropolitan under the ABS remoteness structure will be eligible for the regional contribution amount. These amendments do not change the purpose of the bill. They strengthen the way the new system will operate. They respond to issues raised through scrutiny of the legislation and provide greater certainty for students and universities. I welcome the fact that these reforms are attracting broad support across parliament. Reform of this scale should be built to last.

The central purpose remains clear: Australia needs more people with tertiary qualifications. We cannot meet that need by continuing to draw university students from the same parts of our population. We need more people from regional communities to have the opportunity to study. We need more people from low socioeconomic backgrounds. We need more First Nations students. When those students take up that opportunity, universities need the resources to help them succeed. The universities accord itself was informed by more than 820 public submissions and extensive consultation. Further consultation on the managed growth funding system and needs based funding involved universities, higher education peak bodies and other organisations across the sector.

For Labor, education has always been about opportunity. Australia should be a country where every generation can aspire to something better, and education is one of the most powerful ways we make that possible. It can be the path from disadvantage to opportunity. It can open doors that might otherwise remain closed. It can give people the chance to fulfil their potential regardless of where they grew up or what their family circumstances are. We know ability is not confined to any one postcode or background. The opportunity to use that ability should not be either.

This bill will support more Australians to get a university education, it will provide additional support to students who need it most and it will help build the skilled workforce Australia will need in the decades ahead. For Tasmania, my home state, it means more opportunity for students from regional communities and more support to help them succeed. That is good for students, good for communities and good for Australia. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Universities should be fee free and fully funded for teaching, learning and research. No student should live in poverty while studying or be burdened with a lifetime of debt. Higher education, like all education, should be a public good built on equity and democracy. These are the basic propositions that shouldn't be hard to achieve in a country as wealthy as ours. But this Labor government keeps choosing to keep students poor and in debt. Labor's decision to continue the Liberals' uni fee hikes and funding cuts forces students to take on crushing debts in crowded classrooms at unis too often beset by governance crises. Staff are battling wage theft, job insecurity, course cuts and, increasingly, the threat of executives seeking to replace them with AI.

As the cost of living worsens and students cry out for help, the test for any higher education legislation that speaks the language of opportunity is whether it rises to these challenges. The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026, as it stands today, does not meet that challenge. It falls far short of delivering the change university students and staff deserve, both in policy design and in funding. The bill promises equity, yet, four years after being elected, the Albanese government still refuses to address higher education's most egregiously inequitable policy—the Liberals' fee hikes and funding cuts, which have sentenced students to forever debts and fifty-four thousand dollar arts degrees and priced out low-SES students, whose commencements have decreased by almost 10 per cent. This policy alone has cost students at least $2.1 billion in the past four years.

How can you all sit here and tell students that you are opening the doors of opportunity when support payments like youth allowance and Austudy are well below the poverty line? When you're forcing students to starve just to afford their degrees, all while with the cost-of-living crisis is increasing under your watch, how is that opportunity? Tell me, what door is it that you are opening for students? It certainly isn't a door to an affordable home with food on the table. Labor can dress this bill up in words like 'equity' all it likes, but the bill itself does nothing to change the fact that too many young people are struggling through uni or have stopped going to uni altogether.

The committee inquiry into this bill made clear that there are many things in this bill that need to change, relating to student choice, growth, ministerial powers, postgraduate students, international students, equity students—and on the list goes. My team and I have been through these with the minister and his office, with good faith from both sides, I might say, and I will be moving amendments to address many of these issues. It's not just a couple of amendments but pages and pages of amendments. You do have to wonder why a bill that needs so many changes was even brought into parliament in the first place.

The higher education sector is in such crisis that it has been cornered into accepting the bare minimum, cornered into accepting crumbs when what is needed is a bigger pie of funding. If the Albanese government is serious about improving equity, then it needs to get serious about fully funding fee-free higher education. I urge the education minister to keep pushing the Prime Minister to invest much more in the future of higher education and our young people and our country. Otherwise, we'll always be doing gymnastics without actually solving the real problem.

A primary concern I and many others have had from the start is the bill's potential to curtail student choice. Students may not get a Commonwealth supported place, CSP, at the university and course of their choosing because places are capped. Instead, the minister and ATEC are attempting to funnel students into institutions and courses they may not want to go to—and to do what? To patch funding holes of the government's own making because they refuse to fund universities. The Greens will be protecting student choice by ensuring that ATEC must take student demand into account when setting allocations and by expanding the overenrolment provision from a hard cap to a buffer.

This bill also allows the minister to set CSPs for a designated course to zero. You can just imagine that under—God forbid!—a coalition or One Nation government they would seek to ban degrees and courses that they don't like in the name of being against 'wokeness'. No minister should ever be able to tell a student what they can and cannot study. The Greens will be bringing an amendment to remove this provision.

The problem is not where students are choosing to study but decades of Labor and the coalition deliberately underfunding and cutting funds to higher education. Universities, staff and students are bearing the brunt of this. Our regional universities are also suffering. If regional universities are to thrive and be attractive to students, they must be fully funded, including through dedicating funding for infrastructure and research investment. That is actually what the accord recommended, not this half-assed response that we have today. Tying funding to student places and hoping that they will come is not really a solution.

The Greens support needs based funding, yet the funding could all be squashed by one single section that allows the minister to set the equity support amount provided to university to zero dollars. You cannot say that you are providing needs based funding and then leave it open for a future government to make that funding zero. The Greens will be moving an amendment to fix this.

In the inquiry, we also heard countless witnesses share the absurdity of the bill calculating the applicability of needs based funding at the time the person enrols in the unit. This means that a low-SES student living in a regional area who moves to the inner city for university is apparently no longer disadvantaged. So we are going to rectify this perverse application as well.

It appears that Labor has sought to limit the eligibility of needs based funding to as small a cohort as possible. The only reason for this is their refusal to fund universities properly and fully or even fund every equity student a Commonwealth supported place in the degree and university of their choosing. Instead, they would rather splurge and waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on fossil fuel subsidies and non-existent nuclear submarines.

Numerous submissions from universities, students, the NTEU and academics raised concerns that the current definition of a low-socioeconomic student is inadequate and unfit for purpose, utilising an outdated postcode determinant. The planned definition does not account for income, employment, family education history, occupation, housing, caring responsibilities, cultural barriers, disability or language proficiency. The Albanese government's response is, 'We'll look into it.' Well, you've had four years in government to look into it and you have fallen short yet again. This bill was the perfect opportunity to fix this outdated and blunt measure. I do hope that Labor is sincere when it says that it will now start this work.

A highly criticised aspect of this bill is an overall lack of accountability and transparency combined with excessive ministerial powers. We will be moving a number of amendments that go some way to addressing these issues. ATEC will be required to publish its reasons when making allocations, and the minister's unfettered power to make conditions on funding grants will be removed. This power could have been used to further crack down on students raising their voices for justice for Palestine, for example, or even forced universities to adopt the highly controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The interventionist precedent this power would create should alarm everyone, and it is unacceptable to the Greens. We will be removing the section.

The bill, as it stands, allows the minister to set a course and provide a level of allocations for international students. There are people in this chamber who, if they had this power, would actually set this allocation to zero. I think you all know who I am talking about here. Unsurprisingly, this is the Albanese government having another swing at migration policy and trying to disguise it as education policy. As Mr Richard Lee from the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations shared, 'International students are not a tap to turn on and off.' The continual scapegoating of international students for the government's own policy failures is damaging. It causes harm to students and migrants. Minister Clare has admitted that international-student visa fees, tripled since 2024, are being used to fund the accord reforms. International students are not cash cows or political playthings.

The Albanese government must stop wrecking international education to pander to One Nation's racist, antimigrant stance. It is disappointing that the government decided not to support expanding the evaluation of the act to include reviewing the allocation of international students. Their politicisation of international students trumps good policy once again, and it is students and universities who will suffer. The Prime Minister is really in a shameful race to the bottom with One Nation on migration, and he's made it clear that he doesn't care about international students being collateral damage or about our higher education system suffering.

I want to go to postgraduate students for a minute. With the exception of First Nations students, the bill excludes postgraduate students from needs based funding. While the bill allows a university to determine how it uses its allocation of CSPs, tying needs based funding only to undergraduate students creates a perverse incentive for universities to use all, or a large portion, of their allocated CSPs for undergraduate students. Needs based funding must cover the full pipeline of university education and all equity students, without which the door will remain tightly shut to postgraduate degrees and to research as well.

Without the Greens in the Senate, this bill would have handed the minister of the day diabolical interventionist powers over higher education, placed unacceptable limits on student choice and failed to deliver equity. I want to thank my team, especially Sienna and Lauren, who have worked so hard for us to get to this outcome today, with 12 amendments being made in the Senate and a couple in the House. The 12 amendments we have secured demonstrate the importance of the Greens in the Senate.

I'll finish where I started. This bill has no additional funding beyond what is already budgeted for universities. For a sector whose expenditure totalled $43.1 billion in 2024, a mere $3.66 billion over the next decade is crumbs. If the Albanese government wants to improve equity, they must repeal the fee hikes and funding cuts they've kept on the books for four years—not in two years time, but today. We will not see true equity in Australia's higher education system until universities are fee-free and fully funded for learning, teaching and research. All I ask is that the Prime Minister give young people what he himself enjoyed: free education at a well-funded public university.

Opening a door will not do much good until and unless the government addresses student poverty, abolishes student debt and increases student support payments, PhD stipends and housing affordability, all of which impact students' ability to walk through the door and out the other end having completed their degrees. We know there is so much work to be done to ensure staff have the governance structures to be able to run their universities democratically and the resources, pay and conditions for world-class teaching and research and to ensure students have the best learning conditions and are not crushed by ever-increasing fees and debt.

It is possible; the only thing standing in the way is the Albanese government. The Greens will always put students first. We will continue to fight for universities and institutions to serve the public good, not to serve the government or the corporations of the day.

With that, I move the Greens' second reading amendment:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate:

(a) notes that:

(i) students and young people are facing the worst of the cost of living crisis, and 'opening doors' for students is not enough if they are not supported to complete their studies,

(ii) students are being shackled by a lifetime of debt which is making the cost of living crisis worse, locking people out of the housing market and crushing dreams of going to university,

(iii) the punitive Job-ready Graduates scheme fee hikes, which have led to $54,000 arts degrees, have now been in place for longer under Albanese's Labor Government than they were under the Morrison Government,

(iv) while degree costs skyrocket, student payments like Austudy and Youth Allowance remain well below the poverty line,

(v) higher education, like education at every level, is an essential public good that should be free, accessible and equitable, and

(vi) all students undertaking mandatory placements should be paid for every hour of work they are required to do, at least at minimum wage, not a lesser supplementary amount; and

(b) calls on the Government to:

(i) invest in, and fully fund, higher education for leaning, teaching and research,

(ii) increase Austudy and Youth Allowance,

(iii) wipe all student debt and make university and TAFE fee-free for all,

(iv) urgently reverse the fee hikes and funding cuts of the Job-ready Graduates scheme, and

(v) pay all students doing mandatory placements at no less than minimum wage rates".

I also rise to speak on the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. The Australian Universities Accord final report was released in February 2024 and outlined the blueprint for higher education reform over the next decade and the decade after that. Over the next few decades, the University Accord says that the number of people in the workforce with a certificate, a diploma or a degree will need to increase by about 80 per cent—that means more people at TAFE and more people at university. It is critical that, as a government, we act now to help set up our tertiary education system to deliver on Australia's future skills needs.

The Australian Universities Accord final report found that significant changes are needed in Australian higher education to produce the skills, knowledge and intellectual ambition to meet the challenges that Australians face now and into the future. The Australian Universities Accord recommended adopting a new funding model for higher education that is planned and managed by the ATEC through mission based compacts. It also recommended increasing the number of higher education students from underrepresented backgrounds, matched by a focus on the success of these students.

This bill directly responds to the recommendations and findings of the accord by enshrining a needs based funding model in legislation to help support students from low SES backgrounds, First Nations students and those studying at regional campuses to get into university, complete their studies and graduate with a qualification. The bill also embeds the new managed growth funding system to support growth in domestic students and formalises the role of the ATEC in allocating Commonwealth supported places and international student places.

The new managed growth funding system will effectively uncap the number of places for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and regional areas. The new system will address existing issues in the higher education funding system and will better align Commonwealth funding with enrolments. As a result, it is estimated that an extra 230,000 domestic students will commence university over the next decade.

Demand-driven needs based funding will provide extra support to students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, First Nations students and students studying at regional campuses. Under this new needs based funding system, the amount of funding per student will more than double next year, in some cases. That's extra funding universities will be able to put towards things like tutoring, mentoring and other academic support; direct financial assistance, like scholarships and grants; and offsetting the higher costs of campuses in regional and remote areas.

These changes inject an additional $3.6 billion into Australia's higher education system over the next decade to increase the number of students at university and to meet Australia's future skills needs. These measures have the potential to be truly life-changing. They change the course for so many young Australians who recognise and want to access higher education and all that it can offer. Of course, not every Australian wants to go to university, and that's fine. For those who do, their ability to access higher education should not be defined by where they live or where they were born. This is about fairness, and it's about creating a more sustainable, more equitable education system for all of those Australians who choose to access it.

The Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee, of which I am chair, conducted an inquiry into this bill. The inquiry spanned two months and received 62 submissions from a diverse range of stakeholders, including public universities, peak bodies, and staff and student representative organisations. I would like to thank all of the senators who participated in this inquiry. I thank Senator Faruqi, who is in the chamber, for her constructive engagement with it. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to reflect on you, in the chair, Senator O'Sullivan—

I'll allow it!

but I acknowledge your work on the committee and the work of all of the members of that committee. As usual, we were able to conduct an inquiry which had a great degree of civility, and I appreciate the engagement and work of all senators on it.

Throughout the inquiry, there was broad support among participants for the bill's intent to ensure that more Australians can access and succeed in higher education, regardless of their background or where they live. The committee heard that the managed growth funding system will ensure the higher education system is sustainable and directed to the priorities of the nation. We also heard that needs based funding is one of the most important improvements to university funding in a generation and that it has the potential to be the most significant and enduring reform arising from the universities accord.

However, the committee also heard concerns that the bill lacked a legislative floor of student places and provided the minister with additional powers. The committee noted that the Minister for Education listened to the concerns of the sector and noted his work in moving amendments in the House of Representatives to clarify provisions of the bill, limit ministerial powers and increase transparency. Nonetheless, the committee did acknowledge the concerns around ministerial powers and the definition of 'low-SES student' and encouraged the government to consider undertaking further work to address these matters.

Overall, this bill is another meaningful step to implement the recommendations of the accord. So far, the Albanese Labor government has implemented more than 30 of the accord's 47 recommendations in full or in part. We have made HECS better and fairer. We've cut the HELP debt of all Australians with a student loan by 20 per cent, wiping $16 billion in student debt. We have capped indexation on HECS debts to the lower of CPI and WPI, moved to a marginal repayment system and raised the minimum repayment threshold.

We've established the Commonwealth prac payment for the first time to support teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students while they are completing their practical training at university, and now we're expanding this important program. On 1 July 2027, the Commonwealth prac payment will be expanded to include more students undertaking mandatory placements in priority disciplines, including physiotherapy, paramedicine, clinical psychology, radiography and pharmacy. I've talked to a number of these students, who are absolutely delighted at what this will mean for their ability to stay engaged with their studies, continue on their course and be able to make ends meet while they undertake this critical training, which will lead them to work in professions which we all benefit from and which we all need.

Previously, we heard from students who were left with no choice but to resign from their paid part-time jobs to attend their placements or who had to move back home, if that was an option, because they simply could not cover the rent whilst juggling their placement and their paid work. For those students, these changes are absolutely life-changing. They're not just relevant to the students who receive that payment—these are students undertaking training in professions that we all need. They're undertaking training in the professions that care for us now and into the future. I think it's a really important policy, and it's one that is being received very well. I'm absolutely delighted that we have extended it to those skills as well.

Our government has also doubled the number of university student hubs by establishing 14 suburban university study hubs and 20 new regional university study hubs, one of which I was proud to open just recently on Kangaroo Island in my state of South Australia. Now students in Kingscote can remain connected to their families and community whilst also investing in their future by undertaking university-level studies close to home.

I've visited a number of these study hubs right around our state, both those in regional areas and the suburban ones. When you talk to the students who are utilising them it's really extraordinary, because we know it's often students from remote areas or from the outer suburbs, in South Australia in particular, who find it particularly difficult to take up university education with the pressures on the cost of living. Just being able to move away from home to undertake studies is out of reach for too many young people. I was really fortunate to be able to leave Adelaide with a scholarship when I was young, at 18, and go study interstate, but that is becoming less and less possible for young people now, given the cost of rent and the cost of living, which can make that difficult. To have these study hubs close to home means you can still participate and engage in a university education but hopefully live with mum and dad or live in an area with more affordable rents or live in your local community. For instance, Kangaroo Island is a fair way from the mainland. To be able to stay on the island makes a big difference for those students.

It also has an impact, we know, in the retention of those young people in their community afterwards. When they're studying for those degrees and those qualifications which local communities need, there's a greater likelihood that they'll stay there if they also stay for their education. The one up at Elizabeth is doing fantastic work. I give a shout-out to Matt Burnell, the member for Spence in the other place, for his advocacy in getting that established.

We've also established the National Student Ombudsman and the national code to prevent and respond to gender based violence. Earlier this year, we formally established the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, the ATEC, as a steward of the tertiary education system. These are all really important reforms in higher education. They form part of the broader spectrum of work we're doing in education from those very early years right through to tertiary education.

I'm a bit of a broken record in this place on how I believe investment—particularly in the early years but right through the spectrum of education—creates absolutely life-changing, transformative potential for individuals and benefits all of us. We all benefit as a nation when we invest in the education of our young people, whether that's investing in our young children at preschool learning to read and write and count and sing and the impact it has on their later education or investing in tertiary education and the skills that Australia needs and the skills that our workforce needs.

It's not just about the individual who receives that education; it's about the contribution that they then are able to go on and make to our nation, whether it's in the caring professions, in the medical professions or in our broader economy and the sectors which are growing and changing and employing Australians. It benefits all of us when we have a highly skilled, highly educated workforce, and it benefits all of us when every young person in Australia is given the opportunity to reach their full potential and make their fullest contribution. That's why investment in education is so important. It's not just a social policy measure; it's absolutely a fundamental economic measure and productivity measure. We are doing some really important work as a federal government in this space. This bill represents part of that agenda.

So, again, I'm really proud to chair the committee that looked into this bill. I'm very grateful for the engagement of all the senators who come to that committee with the same degree of passion for our education sector and what we can do to make it better. Of course, we will at times have differences of opinions in how to do that, but it's important work. It's nation-building work. I think this bill is very, very important because every Australian who chooses to go to university should have that opportunity and that option that's good for them and is good for all of us. Achieving this new funding system will be essential in meeting that goal and helping Australia meet its future skills needs. On that basis, I commend the bill to the Senate.

The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 is an important bill and one that I'll be supporting. But it's also a bill that misses some of the problems affecting Australians who choose to pursue higher education. The increased funding, particularly for cohorts who have historically faced more adversity when seeking to attend university, is welcome. This follows the investment from the government in the expansion of the Commonwealth prac payment scheme to a number of new disciplines, including physiotherapy, speech pathology, radiography and pharmacy. As a former pharmacy student, I understand how intensive and time consuming these courses can be, so I welcome this expansion, which comes into effect as of 1 July 2027.

However, one cohort which missed out from the scheme was medical students. When people think of medical students, they associate the highly paid career that studying medicine leads to with a student body of relative affluence. While this is the case for some, as in all disciplines, it isn't true for all. I've heard harrowing tales of the poverty that some medical students experience in order to meet their placement requirements. These young Australians who are working towards the goal of being able to serve and help our communities are missing meals, sleeping in cars, considering and attempting suicide and taking on a mountain of debt. Why have these students been left behind?

This bill provides for needs based funding grants to higher education providers to support, among other groups, Indigenous students. The Australian Medical Students' Association found that one in two Indigenous medical students will drop out because they aren't able to support themselves through placement. If the government were serious about supporting First Nations people to become doctors, they would support them not only to get to university but to make it all the way to graduation. In a country as rich and as fortunate as ours, how are we letting these students down so badly? It just isn't good enough.

For some students, their troubles don't end at graduation. The Senate Education and Employment References Committee has been examining outcomes for Australian university graduates. That report is due to be tabled in November. I don't intend to pre-empt its findings, but I want to share a few stories from submissions received by the committee. Many young Australians, particularly those in fields like information technology and computer science, feel like they have been sold a lie. I discussed this during a debate on the inquiry, and numerous submissions refuted what I said. They said there was no promise that a university degree would entitle young Australians to easy employment. Indeed, a university education should not be looked at solely as a process by which a job is acquired, but to say that there is no contract, implicit or otherwise, between universities and young Australians is just not right.

'Learn to code' was an oft repeated mantra of the late 2010s and early 2020s. One graduate outlined in a submission to the inquiry what following this advice had led to:

I am a recent computer science graduate from the University of Queensland. I completed a Bachelor of Computer Science in 2023 and then completed an additional thesis-based honours year in 2024, graduating with First Class Honours. Despite this, and despite securing an internship during my studies, I have been unemployed for over a year, from most of 2025 through to mid-2026.

A student who graduated at or near the top of their class, with internship experience, has been unemployed for more than a year. How is that possible? Something is clearly wrong, and yet the submission from the graduate's alma mater, the University of Queensland, contends:

A university education remains a great investment …

The graduate's submission notes that, in 2024, a third of computer science graduates had not achieved full-time employment within six months of graduating, more than double the rate for nursing and engineering students. Another important point is made by the submission:

… Australia's R&D expenditure sits a critical low of 1.68% of GDP, well below the OCED average of 2.7%. The United States more than doubles us at 3.8%, South Korea more than triples at 5.13%. This is during the time of a global race of potentially one of the most important technologies in history.

Graduates of the sciences are keenly aware of this. Unless you want to research new ways to extract iron ore or make things that kill people, a career in science outside of academia usually entails a move overseas.

Another submission illustrates how graduates find themselves in a job market where the odds are stacked against them. Mr Nasir, a graduate of the University of Sydney, outlines his experience applying for an entry-level data analytics position with his current employer:

The hiring manager appreciated my initiative to meet him in advance and promised to keep a tab on my application. After applying, I waited for my call-up to an interview, but it never arrived. I later found out that at least 220 applicants applied, of which only 10 were longlisted, and only 5 were progressed to the interview stage. I made it into the top 10, but my experience at the time was not enough to compete with the top 5 shortlisted for the interview.

Competing in such a field for what is supposed to be an entry-level position puts a graduate at an inherent disadvantage from the outset, when ads for these roles inevitably attract applications from individuals with more experience than a graduate can hope to have. This leads to an inflation of requirements for entry-level positions, which, again, defeats the purpose.

A concern that was frequently raised is the use of international students as cash cows to fund universities. The inequity of international student enrolment is considered by Emeritus Professor Richard Heller, who submitted that international students do not reflect global needs for higher education:

Individual ability to pay fees appears to be the driving force, and universities attract who they can and who will pay fees. The pattern of enrolments serves no clear strategic purpose for Australia, or the need for boosting a country's knowledge stock; it has become an income generation exercise for Australian universities. Universities rightly fear the vulnerability of their heavy reliance on international student fees to cross-subsidise teaching and research.

The government has indicated that it wishes to reduce the number of international students coming to Australia each year. This bill and the funding for domestic students that goes with it somewhat softens the blow for the universities, but the development of the reliance of universities on international students occurred over a period of many years, and the process of returning university funding to a more stable footing will take time. This bill will support some Australians to attend university, but I think it will leave others behind.

Much more also needs to be done for Australians who graduate university to help them achieve their maximum potential. This is good not only for the graduates but also for the economy. Modelling by Pearson suggests inefficient education-to-work pathways cost the economy $12.5 billion a year. Unless we work to develop the conditions necessary for a robust and complex economy, we will remain a country that digs rocks out of the ground and makes matcha for one another, leaving us at the mercy of international conditions. A sound university system with genuinely strong graduate outcomes and a private sector with a level of R&D investment which encourages graduates to stay in Australia will result in a more complex economy which is more resistant to external shocks.

I rise to support the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. Like a lot of legislation that comes to this place, there is a fair bit of machinery underneath that title. We're dealing with concepts like managed growth funding, needs based funding and the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. But the principle underneath it is pretty straightforward. Where you grow up should not decide how far you can go. Your parents' income should not decide whether a university is for you, and living in Burnie, Queenstown or Smithton should not mean that higher education is something that only happens somewhere else.

The universities accord makes clear the scale of the challenge ahead of us. By 2050, around 80 per cent of working-age Australians will need some form of tertiary qualification—a certificate, a diploma or a degree. That does not mean, though, that everybody needs to go to university. It means we need more people at TAFE and more people at university, because Australia is going to need more nurses, teachers, engineers, technicians and skilled workers. So this is about opportunity, but it's also about productivity. If we want higher wages and a stronger economy over the next 20 or 30 years, we need to build that skills base now.

That is why this government has already implemented more than 30 of the accord's 47 recommendations, either in full or in part. We've cut HECS debt by 20 per cent and made indexation fairer. We have raised the minimum repayment threshold and moved to a marginal repayment system, and we've introduced paid prac for teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students. We've also expanded the university study hubs and free bridging courses, established a National Student Ombudsman and opened the first demand driven Commonwealth supported places for First Nations students who meet the entry requirements.

This bill is the next big structural step in that tertiary reform program. It establishes a new managed-growth funding system and demand driven needs based funding over the next decade. These reforms will inject an additional $3.6 billion into higher education and are expected to support around 230,000 extra commencing domestic students. That's not simply about creating more places; it's about opening more places to people who have historically been least likely to get one—students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, First Nations students and students in regional Australia.

Under the new system, places for low-SES and regional students will effectively be uncapped. Universities will also receive more funding when they enrol students who need more support to succeed. The principle is similar to what we have with needs based funding in schools. The greater the need, the greater the support. The base equity amount will be $1,535 per eligible student, and the base regional amount will be $1,398. In some cases, that is more than double what universities received per student under comparable previous programs, and that funding can be used for support in tutoring, mentoring, scholarships, grants and the higher costs of providing education in regional communities.

For Tasmania, that piece matters enormously. The University of Tasmania is our only university. In many respects, it operates as a whole-of-state university system. UTAS has told the Senate inquiry that it supports this bill and regards needs based funding as one of the most important improvements to university funding in a generation. Its central point is also a sensible one: supporting disadvantaged students means supporting the institutions and campuses that reach them where they live. Sixty per cent of Tasmanians live outside of Hobart. UTAS campuses in Launceston and Burnie, along with regional and online delivery, are often the pathway that lets people study and build a career without having to leave their community.

The evidence shows why that matters. UTAS reports that its Tasmanian campuses have very strong participation from low-SES students. Its regional campuses, in particular, reach Tasmanians who've traditionally been much less likely to access higher education. Indigenous participation is also above the national average across UTAS's Tasmanian campuses. An extraordinary figure is from UTAS reports in Burnie—20 per cent of its first and second year medical students are Indigenous, more than 140 nurses completed the Bachelor of Nursing on the north-west campus over 2024 and 2025, and the first pharmacy graduates from the north-west are now all working in the north-west region. That is what regional higher education can do. It builds a workforce, it keeps skills in the community, and it helps put nurses in hospitals and health professionals in places that have struggled to recruit them and where they're needed most. There are human stories underneath those numbers too. Take Cleo Gower, who was able to study nursing on the Cradle Coast campus. She was among the first to graduate in Burnie and now works as a registered nurse at the North West Regional Hospital. That is opportunity becoming workforce capacity in the same community.

UTAS has also raised constructive questions about the further implementation steps behind this bill. It has made the case for recognising the real cost of smaller scale regional delivery, for making sure disadvantage is properly recognised as students move through their studies and for ensuring bridging and outreach programs can help people become ready for tertiary education. These are important considerations as ATEC and the funding guidelines put this new system into practice because opening the door is not enough if a student cannot get to the door. A university place only matters if students can afford to take it up, if they have the support to succeed and if they can access the course in the first place.

I also want to be clear about what these reforms are not. These are not about lowering standards. Students will still need to meet rigorous entry requirements. They will still need to do the work. They will still need to pass the subject. What this bill does is tackle barriers that have too often had very little to do with ability, issues like family income, geography and whether someone happens to live close to a large metropolitan campus. Addressing those structural barriers is good social policy.

As an economist, I also see this as good economic policy. Australia cannot reach an 80 per cent tertiary attainment rate by educating the same people from the same places in the same way. Tasmania cannot afford to leave talent sitting on the sidelines because someone grew up in the wrong postcode, and regional communities cannot build the workforces they need if the only path to a qualification is to leave.

This bill changes the funding system so that growth follows need, support follows students and opportunity is spread fairly. That is the direction set by the universities accord, it is the direction this government is delivering and it is a direction that matters deeply for Tasmania. I commend this bill to the Senate.

I'd like to start by saying that I welcome the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 and the reforms it contains to how we fund universities, and I intend to support it. However, the very clear consensus from evidence presented to the Senate committee inquiry is that it needs amendments before it should pass the Senate.

First and foremost, while fixing how we fund universities, the bill does nothing to address student contributions and the crushing debt impacts from Job-Ready Graduates. After four years in power and having railed against Job-ready Graduates in opposition, it should be unbelievable—unfortunately, it isn't—that the Albanese government have failed to act on JRG. First they kicked it to ATEC. Now ATEC is saying there'll be no advice until next year and no change until 2028 at the earliest. In that time, students will continue to accrue $50,000-plus debts for a humanities degree, a degree that we know is more important than ever in the face of AI.

I'm moving an amendment that would seek to expedite this process. The overwhelming consensus from the Senate inquiry was that the most concerning thing about this bill is the extraordinary powers that it gives the current minister and any future minister to intervene in our universities. While some of these powers have been wound back, they remain excessive. I believe further amendment is required specifically to remove ministerial power to set course-level caps for international students, cap demand-driven places for Indigenous students and set provider-specific funding conditions. As a Senate, we should be a check on executive power and we should fight tooth and nail not to provide this level of power to any future minister. These sorts of changes should be subject to scrutiny. They should have to come through this parliament and be judged by elected representatives on behalf of the people that send them to this place.

In circumstances where this bill passes unamended, QUT highlighted the potential perils and vulnerability to politicisation of standard university operational decisions. I'll quote from their submission. It said:

The Bill would create an avenue for stakeholders dissatisfied with such decisions to seek Ministerial intervention in operational matters that should remain within established institutional governance processes.

It said the existence of these powers:

… would encourage stakeholders to seek Ministerial intervention whenever an institutional decision becomes contentious. Refusing to intervene could then become as politically consequential as intervening.

I don't understand why the minister would even want these powers. Can you imagine the lobbying that it opens them up to and the public criticism where they do or don't make a decision that may or may not be ideologically aligned with a certain group? Not only could a minister ban a specific course for ideological reasons or at the behest of a vested interest; they could also mandate that certain courses be taught. Given what we've seen overseas, it's really not hard to imagine a government banning all sorts of things, such as welcomes to country or pride events on campus, or interfering with what universities teach about climate change, genocide or the Holocaust. No government should have this sort of power to impose ideologies on our universities. As Doctor Byron succinctly put it, while the government could be worried about a future rogue Senate, the Senate should be worried about a future rogue government. That encapsulates the concerns about handing this sort of extraordinary power to the minister.

Both I and the coalition will move an amendment that would seek to remove these powers. In my second reading amendment, I talk about the need to better define equity. The University of Canberra highlighted the shortcomings with the current definition:

… the ACT is largely excluded from the Government's Needs-based Funding model, with no support for Low Socio-Economic Status (Low SES) or regional students. Proposed methodology of using Low SES does not recognise any disadvantaged University of Canberra students from the ACT. We have not received support funding in 2026 for most of our disadvantaged students and now expect to be underfunded into 2027.

The 2021 Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) are not adequate in identifying disadvantage in the ACT. Using these tables there are no Low-SES areas in the ACT. This is a product of good urban planning but statistically hides disadvantaged individuals.

Canberra has pockets of extreme disadvantage, and this needs to be recognised. We have to have a system where students who need more support get it and universities who need to provide that support are provided with additional funding to do exactly that. This really rough way of calculating low-SES or regional students just doesn't cut it. We have to do better as a country in terms of collecting data and ensuring that universities like the University of Canberra aren't missing out.

The purpose of this bill is managed growth, but, as experts like Doctor Andrew Norton highlighted, 'the bill does not appropriate any new funding for additional student places'. He said:

By contrast, the bill has two new features that will reduce how many student places universities can offer.

This clearly stands in contrast to the stated aim of managed growth. Another of my amendments seeks to set a floor in the total allocation pool. A further concern is around parliamentary oversight. The two determinations that set the size of the whole system, the domestic total allocation pool and the international pool are expressly exempt from disallowance. Every decision beneath them is declared not to be a legislative instrument, including place allocations, core and growth determinations, and international allocations. We should not be allowing this as a Senate. We should have a say on these decisions of the executive. They should be up for debate. They should be up for disallowance. I urge fellow senators to ensure that we do not hand these powers to the executive in perpetuity. One of my amendments seeks to change this and give the parliament, rather than the minister of the day, oversight of these crucial matters—crucial not just for our university sector but for the future of our country.

I'd like to thank my team for the huge amount of work that they put into this bill and this inquiry. Based on the evidence provided to the Senate Committee, I requested 23 amendments to this bill, all based on what I'd heard from the university sector and from experts. Unfortunately, at the time of making these remarks, only five have been circulated, and I note the Greens are yet to circulate any amendments. For a bill this important, I think it speaks to a failure of process. As senators, we need to have the opportunity to move amendments to bills, and that requires access to drafting in a timely way that enables us to discuss with colleagues and to seek support before the bill is in the Senate like this. I'd like to thank those in the drafting office for the amazing work that they do. We know that you're under the pump.

But, as a crossbencher, again I would like to raise with the government, with the President, the lack of drafting resources for the crossbench. I can't speak of how the major parties experience it, but, as a crossbencher, it is incredibly difficult to get anything drafted in a timely manner, and I don't think that's good enough for our democracy. Elected representatives, regardless of where you're from, who you're here representing or which state or territory you're representing, should have access to drafting, where you can put forward your amendments in good faith, have conversations with colleagues, and then, when it comes down to it, they're either supported or not supported.

Finally, I'd like to thank the committee for all their work and stakeholders for their comprehensive, detailed and constructive submissions on this legislation. Too often the public does not see the genuinely good faith work that happens in this place—the collaboration and the collegiate way that Senate committees can work a lot of the time, obviously not all of the time. I think we should continue to highlight that as senators. So while I have these concerns, I thank the government for the direction they are heading in, and I commend my amendments to the Senate. I foreshadow my second reading amendments.

I rise first of all to acknowledge the work of my colleague Senator Faruqi in this space, endorse her comments and particularly note the raft of concerns about this bill that remain unaddressed including the genuine cost-of-living crisis that we know students are facing with ever mounting HECS debt. I haven't spoken to a student who remembers getting a haircut on the HECS debt, but I've spoken to plenty of students who are looking at a lifetime of debt for simply wanting to get an education to contribute to society.

We still don't see a solution for the so-called Job-Ready Graduates scheme that saw these appalling cost hikes for arts degrees. It was a conscious attack from the coalition to dumb down our universities and to attack critical thinking. We're five years—it feels like forever—into a Labor government, and they still haven't addressed that despite repeated offers from the Greens to solve that. Degree costs have continued on their upward path. Student payments remain below the poverty line. These are the core issues in the university sector that despite the name on the box of this bill—it's called the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. Again, as we know, the doors of opportunity are very narrowly open under Labor, particularly for students who don't have family support, those who are first generation at university, those who are considering career that isn't in the finance sector or a highly paying sector but is essential for our society like teaching, nursing, social work, critical thinking. They're the ones who continue to be under the gun despite five years of a Labor government.

There's one other thing that I think absolutely needs to be addressed with urgency in the university sector, and it's playing out in university campuses in my home state of New South Wales. It's playing out on the campuses of the University of New South Wales, of the University of Sydney, of UTS, of Macquarie University, but I know it's playing out across universities Australia wide. While there's talk of building opportunities—what this bill talks about—what students and academics are facing right now are universities reaching for AI to dumb down degrees, to replace staff and to put at risk the reputations of some of our finest institutions. Last week, the University of New South Wales said it had signed this so-called strategic partnership with OpenAI—a US owned, tech-bro owned vampire company who has no interest in building Australia's education sector, who has no interest in educating Australians and who definitely has no interest in our universities being competitive. Without putting any guardrails in, without talking to the staff and without articulating what the strategic partnership will mean for job security, for the quality of degrees, for teaching, they make this big announcement. This is the statement that UNSW made:

The collaboration, one of the largest AI education deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, aims to help ensure graduates are equipped to use AI critically, ethically and effectively.

Who are they partnering with? OpenAI, the same US tech-bro owned corporation that let its agents escape the sandbox and run wild.

What are the what are the checks and balances being proposed here? Where are the restraints in how our university sector rolls out AI to endanger our research capability? It's not all upside with AI. There's serious risk of deskilling our researchers, rogue AI agents taking that research and heading off heaven knows where. There's complete silence from this government about—not a whisper about one of our premier universities and, at different times, one of our highest ranked university on global ratings uncritically rolling out a foreign multinational AI player right throughout its universities in what it describes as 'the largest AI education deployment in the Asia-Pacific'.

That's not a good news story. That's a flashing-lights warning story. It's not just that. Less than a week after that, the University of Sydney made an announcement as well. The University of Sydney comes out and talks about 'a university-wide investment in AI to ensure every student and staff member has free and equitable access to advanced AI tools'. And then we get this guff:

Tomorrow's leaders will also need to understand AI's ethical, social and environmental impacts, and possess the ability to work with this technology critically and responsibly. We will support you for that future by providing equitable access to advanced AI tools.

Whatever the University of Sydney's Vice President of Operations, Ms Gower, might say about it being a human centred approach to AI, ask the staff—the academics, the people who are going to have to deliver for this. How they see this deal of the University of Sydney with the same bunch of US tech-bro AI vampires is as a threat. Because, at the same time that the university went out and made its announcement that they're going to be incorporating a foreign owned AI into every aspect of the university's operations, the NTEU members, the people who actually have to teach, do the research and undertake the critical thinking at University of Sydney, were out on strike seeking enforceable consultation protections around AI. This is how this is how managerial and out of touch management at our universities is—these vice-chancellors and their cronies that hang around them, paid a million bucks a year and more. I think, in Sydney, they also get a free, posh residence. You get a million bucks in your bank account and a free, posh residence if you're the vice-chancellor in Sydney, and then you use that privilege to roll out AI and take away the jobs of the actual teaching staff.

And we get Labor coming in here with their—what is it named?—Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill. Well, under Labor, the door's been opened to vampire, US owned AI to come and march through our universities and take away jobs, destroy the critical thinking that we're going to need for our students and continue to empower the managerial class to run through our universities.

I want to say, on behalf of my party, the Greens, that we stand in solidarity with the NTEU members who are on strike, asking for genuine, enforceable consultation protections before universities like Sydney or UNSW enter into these multiyear deals. And we want to make sure that they're enforceable rights so that the vice-chancellors on their million bucks a year and their $500,000, $700,000, $800,000 per annum human-development staff-squashing managerial teams don't get to destroy our universities. The only door of opportunity that seems to be opening here is the door of opportunity for US big tech to come in, deskill and put at enormous risk some of our most important institutions.

I would urge the government to go and look at what the community thinks about this and the lack of action on protecting our universities from the rollout of US owned AI, because you have a look at the comments on social media about Sydney university's post and they're not saying: 'Oh, amazing—wonderful opportunity. I'm glad you've invited these robber barons in to come and attack our university.' They're calling it 'despicable garbage'. They're calling it 'fascism-maxxing'. They're naming it for what it is.

There's some marginal good in this bill. The marginal good is great. But there's this massive risk, and it's not academic; it happened last week—the week before this bill got rolled in to literally destroy the integrity, the reputation, the qualities of our universities, because, under Labor, US big tech, US AI companies, are marching through our universities, and the staff are on the front lines fighting it, going into industrial action, saying, 'You can't do this without us.'

What's the answer from Labor? Nothing, because it turns out that the same big tech companies that are talking to the vice-chancellor at Sydney university and schmoozing with the vice-chancellor at UNSW are in there with a ready-access door to the Prime Minister, trying to do a job on creatives and trying to get a red carpet to roll out their AI vision right across this country—to steal our water, our power and our data and, in this case, to have that march through some of our most important institutions.

Unless this government is willing to come and work with the Greens to address the risk of AI through our universities—you can pass as many 'opening the doors of opportunity' bills as you like, but, unless we address the risk of foreign owned AI through the march of our institutions, this won't amount to a hill of beans.

The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 is dressed up as opening doors. What it actually does is hand the keys to Canberra. It is disheartening to see universities being asked to give up their autonomy and just as disheartening to see how many of them are eager to oblige.

Until now, universities have decided how many students they would teach and in what courses. While that hasn't been perfect, it was, at least, guided by competition. Popular, high-quality universities grew because students chose them. Unpopular ones had to lift their game or shrink.

Minister Clare calls that the hunger games. He says this bill ends it. What he calls hunger games is actually a market. Competition drives quality and innovation. Students vote with their feet. Universities that deliver quality teaching and better outcomes attract more of them. Universities that do not don't. We want that contest. We don't want student places doled out by the bureaucrats in the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. Let the universities compete on their merits.

But, to Labor, merit is a dirty word. They only talk in terms of equity, where they sit on high and decide what is fair. They decide which groups are deserving of funding. This is the political capture of our higher education system. We opposed the ATEC legislation on exactly this point—an independent commission in name but a central planner in practice. The government had to peel back some of the minister's most naked powers after the sector and the Senate pushed back on this bill.

Make no mistake. A great deal of control remains. The minister still sets the total pool. The minister can vary it. Those determinations are not disallowable. Labor has stripped out parliamentary oversight of these figures. It's not surprising that they don't want that oversight. After all, the Labor government's record on overseas student numbers is abysmal. Under this government, Australia has, by far, the highest number of foreign students per capita in the world. Around 2½ per cent of our population are international students—one in 40 people. That's two to three times the level of places like New Zealand and the UK. Under Labor's watch, almost 30 per cent of our student population are international students.

Where is the fair go for Australian students? We're hearing about tutorials and lectures being held entirely in foreign languages because the majority of the students are from overseas and don't speak adequate English. That's completely unacceptable. At the University of Sydney, now, over half of the students are foreign students. At the University of New South Wales, it's 47 per cent. This has been complete mismanagement, on the side of Home Affairs, of our student load and ensuring Australian students get the first look-in.

ATEC must allocate its placements with regard to government priorities. The minister can, once again, steer the ship. The minister still has the power to impose conditions on university funding. Labor have shown their fondness for aggressively expanding ministerial powers. Look at the powers they want to hand the Minister for Communications. They want their ministers to be able to determine what online harm is. They want them to have full control over what we can and can't see online. The government becomes more totalitarian with every passing bill, aided and abetted by their buddies in the Greens.

There are some elements of this bill that are worthy of support. One Nation supports help for students who are genuinely disadvantaged but meet the standards to attend university—regional kids who face higher costs through accommodation or travel, students from lower income families who need a leg-up. We understand and support helping these kids into university, provided they have met the standards to be there. This is not based on identity; it is based on the circumstances of the students.

But this bill, in line with Labor's identity politics, goes further. It builds extra money around cohorts defined by the colour of their skin and by postcode, and it leaves the detail of 'equity groups' to guidelines that can be altered without changing the act. This means that, down the track, a minister could alter the needs based funding grants guidelines to add whatever they like. This opens up our university funding to political games and favours. Need is a very subjective measure, and, if the political carrot is there, it can be a very malleable subject. Any additional funding should follow only genuine need and academic readiness, not immutable characteristics, not race or gender. Equality of opportunity is a laudable goal. Equality of outcome—that's the 'equity' term that's bandied about in here—always results in worse outcomes for all.

The committee evidence given by universities on this bill is inconvenient for the government's story. The cohort that continues to lag badly on course completions is the existing demand driven cohort. Throwing more money at a category does not magically lift attainment. It can do the opposite. Universities chase the money. They enrol students they are not set up to support or those who don't meet the standards, simply to chase the additional funding. In these cases, unsurprisingly, we are seeing poor results for these cohorts. Those outcomes are not positive for the failing students. Completion rates stay poor, the student is left with debt and no degree, and the university keeps the loading. That is the outcome of a pervasive incentive.

There are also issues with how the money is directed. At present, it goes to the university, with only loose guidelines around how they have to use it. It is only primarily, not exclusively, for support services, which leaves room for it to be used on the other programs.

If you want to reduce barriers to entry for students with genuine needs who have met the standard, send the money to the student. Who better to decide whether they need rent help, a laptop or help with travel costs than the person actually sitting in the lecture theatre? Instead, universities receive the grant and are trusted to spend it on wraparound services. We already know what it looks like: bloated administrations, DEI officers, gender departments—entire units that have nothing to do with teaching a student how to be a nurse, an engineer or a teacher. Student money and taxpayer money disappear into the bureaucracy black hole. Slim the administrations down. Stop wasting the surplus on ideology.

This bill would be useful if it could put a cap on the number of student visas, but, sadly, Labor couldn't even bring themselves to include this. An oversubscribed university may continue accepting international students, and ATEC merely takes that into account in the following allocations—no penalty, no punishment. We will continue to see Labor pumping in international students who treat our education system as a pathway to residency. What we continue to have is poorly targeted, high-volume student migration that strains housing, strains infrastructure and turns too many universities into businesses that live off full-fee overseas enrolments. Australians should come first. This bill merely creates a pool and an allocator; it does not fix the underlying addiction.

One Nation has released our well-considered policy to combat Labor's out-of-control mass immigration scheme. We will cut immigration by over 750,000 in the first three years, with 470,000 of these visas coming out of the student and graduate visa categories. Australia's uncapped education visa program has been abused for far too long under Labor. Massive numbers of dependants and family members have come with these students, putting pressure on housing, infrastructure and services. Under One Nation's plan, our education visas will be targeted to high-quality, high-value study for the skills that Australia needs. They will not be used as a back door to bring in families and dependants. Australians will be given the first look in at university placements, not overseas students, who universities have been targeting for fees. One Nation is here to fix a very broken system.

Here's what we will and will not support in this. We would support extra help for regional Australians and for students who have earned a place but face obstacles due to where they live. We would support directing growth toward genuine workforce shortages in nursing, teaching, engineering and agriculture. We would support money going directly to students that need it, to prevent universities from chasing extra funding from underprepared students. But we will not support central planning of university places by ATEC and the minister. We will not support funding that follows identity categories instead of genuine needs and merit. We will not support more money flowing into university administrations that have already grown fat on DEI and activism.

If you've earned a place, you deserve to have the opportunity to continue your education, and One Nation supports this. This is not what is happening here. This bill concentrates power in Canberra and weakens competition and quality. It focuses on immutable characteristics as the basis for funding. One Nation will oppose it. The door this bill opens leads to more bureaucracy and more government control, not opportunity. I foreshadow my second reading amendment.

I rise to speak on the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. The government has presented this bill as an equity reform, and there are elements of this bill that are intended to improve access to university for students who've traditionally been locked out of higher education. The Greens support the principle that where you grow up, how much money your parents earn, whether you live in a city or in regional Australia or whether you're the first person in your family to go to university should not determine whether you get an opportunity to pursue higher education. Of course we support that.

But, if we're going to talk seriously about equity in higher education, then we have to look at the whole system, and the reality is that our universities have become increasingly inequitable because, over decades, governments have pushed them towards a semiprivatised, market driven model. Universities have been forced to behave more and more like businesses. They've been expected to compete for students, compete for revenue and increasingly rely on student fees and private income to keep themselves going. When you structure higher education that way, students and staff pay the price.

This bill doesn't deal with one of the most fundamental barriers confronting students right now: the actual cost of being a student. It doesn't fix student poverty. It doesn't properly address the cost of university fees. It doesn't deal with the enormous debts young people are asked to carry simply because they want an education. It leaves the deeply flawed Job-ready Graduates system in place.

The universities accord itself recognised that Job-ready Graduates needed urgent remediation, and yet Labor has still refused to scrap it. The Greens estimate that students have paid an additional $2.1 billion under Job-ready Graduates since its introduction. That is money coming out of the pockets of students, who are already being squeezed in every direction. They're paying more for rent. They're paying more for groceries. They're paying more for electricity. They're paying more for fuel and transport. On top of all that, they're being asked to pay more for their education.

For many students, going to university now means trying to combine full-time study with enough full-time paid work to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. This is not an incidental problem because it goes directly to whether students can succeed. You can't seriously talk about opening the doors of opportunity if students get through the door and then discover that they can't afford to stay there. If we want students to be able to focus on their education, we need to make sure that they can afford to live while they study. That means increasing youth allowance and Austudy. Income support payments used to support people. They shouldn't leave students choosing between attending a class and picking up another shift at work because they need to pay the rent.

Labor should scrap the parental income test for students over the age of 18. Once someone is an adult, they should have the financial independence that comes with adulthood. Their ability to study should not depend on assumptions about the financial circumstances of their parents or whether their parents are prepared or able to support them. Access is only part of the equation; we also have to make sure that students can stay at university. We have to make sure that they can stay and finish their degrees. We have to make sure that, when they arrive at university, there are actually staff there to teach them, to support them and to provide them with the high-quality education that they all deserve.

That brings us to another problem that this bill doesn't address: the chronic underfunding of our public universities. The government talks about growing the number of university places and providing additional needs based funding, and that additional funding is welcome. But the scale of the investment still falls well short of what is required to repair a system that has been pushed towards greater dependence on student fees and other private sources of revenue. This bill only provides a mere 1.7 per cent increase in university funding, pushing more universities to rely on student fees and ever-growing HECS debts. That financial pressure has consequences. Across the sector we've seen universities become increasingly reliant on insecure and casualised employment. We've seen staff asked to do more with less. We've seen workloads increase. We've seen academic and professional staff stretched beyond their reasonable limits. You cannot separate the learning conditions of students from the working conditions of the people who teach and support them. If we want good universities, we need properly funded universities. If we want high-quality education, we need university staff who have secure jobs, decent pay and a manageable workload.

This is particularly important in regional Australia. Regional universities do so much more than just provide degrees. They are major employers. They train the teachers, nurses, doctors, vets and other professionals that regional communities depend upon. They undertake research specifically relevant to those communities. They keep skills and expertise in regional areas. They give young people the opportunity to study without having to leave their communities and move hundreds or thousands of kilometres away.

That is why what is happening at James Cook University in Townsville should concern us. JCU is considering changes that would see its veterinary diagnostic pathology laboratory close. This is not some peripheral facility. It processes samples from throughout the Townsville region and is one of Queensland's major veterinary microbiology centres. But perhaps the people we should listen most closely to are the students themselves. JCU students have launched a petition calling on the university to save the laboratory. What they say should give everyone in this place real pause for thought. The students point out that veterinary science, biomedical science and medical laboratory science students all benefit directly from the diagnostic service, from the practical teaching it provides and from the expertise of the scientists, the technicians and the veterinary pathologists who work there. For these students, this is not an abstract argument about university administration. It's about the education that they came to JCU to receive. They say their practical sessions are crucial to their learning and their professional development. The students are worried that losing the lab would mean future graduates leave university without the depth of practical experience that currently gives JCU students an advantage when they enter the workforce. That matters enormously in a regional university. The students describe JCU's veterinary program as a backbone of rural veterinary service in Queensland, producing more than 50 graduates each year and attracting students from around Australia and overseas to Townsville. The students make a very obvious point:: if you diminish the quality of the practical education available at a regional university, you make it harder to persuade students to relocate there in the first place. Regional universities already face challenges attracting and retaining students, staff and specialist expertise. The university shouldn't be making that task harder.

The students at JCU are also deeply concerned about what happens to the people who work in the laboratory. These are highly skilled scientists, technicians and veterinary pathologists. Many of them have worked there for over a decade. Students warn that losing these people would mean a loss of expertise, not just from the university but from the veterinary profession across North Queensland. Expertise like that cannot simply be switched off and then recreated later when somebody decides they need it again. The students describe the potential loss as a 'brain drain' from the university and point out that replacing this kind of specialist expertise is difficult enough in our major cities, let alone in a regional centre like Townsville. There will be consequences for the broader community as well. The lab supports diagnostic services for pets and livestock and contributes expertise to histological, microbiological, veterinary and biomedical research. If that local capacity disappears, diagnostic work and research services currently undertaken in Townsville may instead have to be outsourced, including to Brisbane. That means more distance, more expense and generally more delays. When you are waiting on diagnostic results for a sick animal, time matters.

The students also say that this proposal was developed without consultation with laboratory staff, academics or students, and that students were not given a meaningful opportunity to have their voices heard, despite the consequences it would have for their studies. That's not good enough. Students are not customers passing through a business. They are members of the university community. The academics who teach them, the technicians who work alongside them, and the professional staff who make their education possible are members of that community too.

When decisions are contemplated that could fundamentally change the quality of a course, remove practical learning opportunities and cost experienced people their jobs, those people deserve a genuine voice in that process. What I find particularly striking is that students who chose to study at James Cook University are now having to campaign to protect the very educational opportunities that attracted them to go there in the first place. That tells us something about the broader problem with the way we run and fund universities in this country.

We can't talk about opening the doors of opportunity, particularly in regional Australia, while regional universities are simultaneously cutting staff, reducing services and weakening the educational experience available on the other side of those doors. We can't say that we want to train the next generation of vets, scientists and regional professionals and then allow the infrastructure and specialist expertise used to train them to just disappear. And we can't talk seriously about equity while students are wondering whether the course they enrolled in will still provide the education and practical experience that they expected.

Opening the doors is not enough. What matters is what students find on the other side. Do they find lecturers and tutors who have enough time to teach them properly? Do they find laboratories, libraries and student services that are properly resourced? Can they afford their rent while they study? Can they afford food? Can they survive on youth allowance or Austudy? Can they finish their degree without accruing an extraordinary debt? And when they graduate, what kind of university system are we leaving behind for the students who come after them? Those are the questions that an equity agenda has to answer.

The Greens have long argued that education is a public good. It benefits the students who study—of course it does—but it also benefits all of us. We need teachers. We need more nurses. We need doctors, engineers, scientists, social workers and vets. And we all benefit from the research, knowledge and discovery that goes on in our universities. So governments should be prepared to properly fund the institutions that educate these people and provide that knowledge. Students should not be treated primarily as sources of income, and staff should not be treated simply as costs to be cut wherever a balance sheet needs improving.

If the government genuinely wants a more equitable university system, it needs to go much further than this bill. It needs to deal with student poverty. It needs to increase youth allowance and Austudy. It needs to end the parental income test for adults, and it needs to undo the damage caused by Job-ready Graduates. It needs to tackle the cost of degrees and the debts that students continue to accumulate. And it needs to properly fund universities so that staff have secure employment and students receive the education that they deserve. Our job is to build a properly funded public higher education system that gives every student who walks through its doors a genuine opportunity to thrive. That is what the Greens will keep working for in this place.

The name of this bill is the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. If Labor really wanted to open the doors of opportunity in the tertiary education sector in Australia, they would make university education free. They would erase all current HECS debts in this country. People might say, 'Oh, well. Here go the Greens again. You know, money doesn't grow on trees. How could you possibly fund such an extravagant commitment?' Firstly, it's not an extravagant commitment; it's an investment not just in the future of this country but in the future of millions of Australians who aspire to be tertiary educated.

But there are so many choices that Labor could make in order to be able to afford wiping HECS debts and making tertiary education genuinely free. I'll reel off a few right now: make the super wealthy one per cent in this country pay a wealth tax; make big corporations pay their fair share of tax; walk away from the AUKUS nuclear submarines, which are on track to cost over $350 billion dollars; walk away from the $10-billion-plus handouts that you give, every single year, to publicly subsidise the burning of fossil fuels, in the middle of a climate crisis. There are so many ways that Labor could afford to genuinely open the doors of opportunity in the tertiary education sector, but Labor is not doing that. Labor is not doing that.

This place, the Senate, and the other place, the House of Representatives, are riddled with people who got the opportunity for a free university degree. The cabinet is riddled with people who got free university degrees. Those were the good old days. I had the opportunity to get a free university degree. The Prime Minister had the opportunity to get a free university degree. One of the differences between us is that I am here arguing that university degrees should be free today, while the Prime Minister is happy to require young people, mostly, to mortgage their futures in order to get a decent tertiary education. If we want to talk about opening the doors of opportunity in the tertiary education sector, let's actually talk about some of the things that the government is choosing not to do that would genuinely open the doors of opportunity.

There's a whole range of issues with this legislation, and I want to thank and congratulate my good friend and colleague Senator Mehreen Faruqi for the work that she has done with the government to develop amendments, many of which I understand will pass through this Senate. Let's be very clear that Senator Faruqi has delivered significant improvements to this legislation. However, despite its title, 'opening the doors of opportunity', it does represent a significant missed opportunity, and, despite Senator Faruqi's outstanding work, there are still opportunities that have not been grasped by the government in relation to this legislation.

This bill has been marketed by Labor as equity reform, but I want to talk about the Job-ready Graduates scheme—one of the most unfair, inequitable, egregious policies in higher education that, since its introduction just five years ago, has cost students $2.1 billion. Instructively, between 2020 and 2024, low SES student commencements have decreased by nearly 10 per cent. Is that telling us something? Is that telling Labor something? If it's not telling Labor something, it absolutely should be. What it should be telling Labor is that the people who are the poorest in this country, the least well-off financially, are finding it harder and harder to enrol and sustain themselves while they are studying for a tertiary education.

Of course, since the Job-ready Graduates scheme was introduced in 2021, grocery prices have gone up 27 per cent. I'll add there that the price-gouging supermarket duopoly is responsible, through its greed and through its unconscionable behaviour, for a significant part of that increase in grocery prices. You've got utility prices up 39 per cent, nearly 40 per cent. Fuel prices are up over 40 per cent. Rents for students are up 40 per cent since 2021, yet you've got youth allowance and Austudy remaining far, far below the poverty line. Not only are we saying to young people, to students, 'you need to mortgage your futures through the unfair HECS system, which the majority of people in this place and the other place didn't have to do'; we are also saying to them that the allowances, in terms of youth allowance and Austudy, that you are being paid, if you are being paid, will remain well below the poverty line. This is real-life stuff. This is students skipping meals to be able to afford to pay their rent. I don't know about you, colleagues, but I reckon, if you're worried about being hungry, those are not optimal conditions for high-quality study.

Again, this government has missed a significant opportunity to genuinely improve the lives of students. We could in this country actually be prepared to take on the big gas corporations who are contributing so massively to climate change, which is, of course, another threat hanging over the heads of all of us but, in particular, young people. We could be taking those gas corporations on and making them pay, for example, a 25 per cent tax on gas exports, and we could fund universities, we could remove the job-ready graduates scheme, and we could increase Commonwealth supported places and, in fact, provide every student with a Commonwealth supported place. Labor could use that revenue to make universities genuinely free again, which is, of course, the opportunity that Prime Minister Albanese had when he was younger—how quickly people forget themselves when they come into this place.

The Prime Minister loves to tell his log cabin story about the struggles that he and his family faced when he was growing up, but I'll tell you what, you can tell those stories all you like, but you will be judged, Prime Minister, on your actions not your words. If you want to do something genuine to help other people who are struggling today as they are growing up, then one thing you could do is take on the big gas corporations, make them pay a 25 per cent minimum gas export tax and use that money to make tertiary education genuinely free. That would build our country. It would provide the opportunity that is contained in the title of this legislation, 'opening the doors of opportunity'.

The Greens are here, ready to work with Labor to deliver some of those things, but Labor will choose not to work with us, so we will, as Senator Faruqi has so admirably for so long, continue to be shoulder to shoulder with young Australians, to fight to make universities genuinely free and to fight to wipe all HECS debt and to relieve some of that burden, which is overwhelmingly placed on young and younger people in this country.

I join my colleague in recognising the incredibly long-held positions of Senator Faruqi and her advocacy on behalf of Australian university students and Australian universities more broadly. The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026, which we are debating today, does a couple of fundamental things. It changes the way in which funding is managed in this system to one which is needs based. Managed growth entails a number of different flow on mechanisms to be put in place.

To be quite honest, when the bill was delivered by the government to the parliament, initially there was one way to describe it, and that's half baked. It really was half baked. Now, thanks to the work of Senator Faruqi, a number of the Greens amendments and a number of the red flags around this legislation that we communicated have been taken up and accepted. Some of these concerns have been addressed in the bill. In fact, I think a majority of the initial concerns have been addressed by the adoption of our amendments.

I remember when this legislation was initially bowled up to us. I reflect on how fundamentally slapdash some of the legislation coming out of this government so often appears to be. Given the big game that Labor talks in relation to the university sector and the university policy, you would expect them to come up with policy that is well rounded and consulted on thoroughly with open ears to those who live, work and have built their careers within the university sector and to students who overwhelmingly would have voted at the ballot box in the previous election to put the absolute political boot into the Liberal Party and deliver a more progressive parliament. Yet the legislation, as it initially came to us, was undercooked. Senator Faruqi's intervention has addressed a lot of that. But I do have to ask: with a 94-seat majority in the other place given to them by the Australian people, is this the best we can do? I shudder to think what the coalition would have done with a similar mandate. I'm not sure we would recognise Australia in this moment had they been given such an endorsement and such an opportunity to right the wrongs as they see them in Australian law. And yet here we are, getting to the point where an election is about a year away, and we're relying on the crossbench in the Senate to fix up a bunch of problems in relation to a piece of legislation that really didn't cut the mustard in the first place.

And if anyone thinks I'm making just a generic political point here, let me take you to an explicit piece of my portfolio focus. I'm the health spokesperson for the Greens. I have been for the last couple of years. In that role, it's been my obligation and my job to meet with Australians and to travel the country to collaborate with those in all the different parts of our health sector. One of the things that has been put squarely back to me over and over again is that, if we are to build an accessible and affordable healthcare system that meets the contemporary needs of the Australian community, we need to be looking at how we support students who wish to train and educate and enter the health workforce to be able to do that effectively and as quickly as possible while maintaining the highest level of expertise. In so many areas there is huge community demand, and yet there is a small and sometimes shrinking workforce.

One of the clearest ways—one of the most effective ways—to begin solving these workforce challenges is to support students who are seeking to go into health care in the various different areas to be able to study and to be able to carry out the practical elements of their study in a way that is sustainable for them. As is right and correct for many of these areas of expertise and focus, there is a need to move from a space of academic theory to practical application before you then go on to work directly with Australians—with patients—to deliver health care and support good community health outcomes. While you're doing that work—while you're training and while you're putting it into practice—it is really difficult to also hold down a job. Sometimes, it's impossible to do that because of the level of focus that is required and the hours that are required.

This phenomenon is acknowledged in some parts of the system. We have the Commonwealth prac placement support programs that have existed. Quite tangibly, they have come in the form of weekly payments. Now they sit at about $338 a week. It's means tested. It's tagged to the Austudy levels—and we do know that those levels are too low and they need to be increased, but it is something. What we have seen over the years is other areas of the health profession advocating to the government that this program be expanded to include additional professions. We did, at last, see the government make a much-needed, long-overdue overhaul of this program so that professions such as occupational therapy, psychology, speech pathology and about 10 others are now able to access this program. That's to be welcomed. That was a good step forward. I know many OTs, speech pathologists and other allied health professionals who welcomed that move, at last, and think that it is a step that will bring us closer to addressing those workforce shortages in those areas.

But, again, what do we see? We see policy that is half baked. Who did they, once again, leave out? They left out medical students, meaning that people training to be doctors—people training to go into these vitally needed areas—will not receive that payment despite the relentless advocacy of their peak bodies to draw the government's attention to the fact that, without these types of supports, we are seeing students who are training to be our next generations in these critical fields go without meals while they're on the job, training to do some of the most complex procedures and medical work that is able to be done. This is resulting in serious problems for medical students as a whole. We see, in the data, the impact of this falling on those who were already disadvantaged when they entered the field of medical studies and decided to be students.

Again, I'll give you a practical, tangible example brought forward by the association. A lot of people have spoken for a long time in this place about the need to get more First Nations people into the process of becoming medical students and then through to qualification, for all of the reasons that should be well understood—the value and benefit of somebody with lived experience training in the profession.

Senator Steele-John, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it being 12.15, I shall now proceed to Senators' statements.