Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026

Mr LEESER (Berowra) (12:15): I rise to speak on the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. I'll start by saying this. I was amused to hear the minister tell me last week my own position on this bill.

Apparently I oppose the bill and so does the coalition. Well, I hate to disappoint, but the minister's wrong on that. We haven't finalised our position on this bill, and that's because the coalition take this bill seriously.

We approach it seriously and we will refer it to a Senate committee for inquiry and report and make our decision based on the evidence. We want the committee to examine this bill closely. That's the right course of action.

It's the sensible and orthodox course of action. It's the course of action you take when the detail matters. When the drafting makes a difference, you examine it closely.

It's worth spending a minute on this, because I'll tell you what we're hearing already. We're hearing that the universities didn't see this bill before it was tabled. We're hearing there are elements of the drafting that have surprised the sector.

We're hearing that the decision to avoid an exposure draft was deliberate. We're hearing that the consultation was so thin that it disappears when you view it from side on. We're hearing about stakeholders being shown a PowerPoint presentation and, extraordinarily, a non-disclosure agreement.

It's not the type of process Labor promised in opposition, but it is the type of process they've delivered in government repeatedly. So, as I said, we will give this bill scrutiny. I'll also say this, and let me be very clear both for the benefit of those in this building and for those in the sector who are watching: I will talk to the government.

There is a world in which the coalition ends up supporting this bill, but there's also a world where the coalition ends up opposing it. I could summarise it this way. The whole structure, design and intent of this bill is to hand unprecedented powers to the minister.

That is the inevitable consequence of moving the university sector into a centrally planned economic model. It is a return to 'Moscow on the Molonglo'. This is not a bill about equity.

It is a bill about power—about ministerial power—and it's antithetical to my Liberal instincts. It's not about using competition and deregulation to drive innovation and growth. Instead, it ends financial independence, competition and, by necessity, autonomy within the sector.

But, on the other hand, the message vice-chancellors and the university sector have sent so far is this is what they want. You do not want to have the freedom to compete. Those institutions do not want to have the freedom to compete, to attract the student pool that they want to attract and to run their institutions in the way they see fit.

This will instead be in the hands of the current minister and any future minister. More importantly, the powers are so far reaching they actually offer a pathway to resolve desperately pressing problems outside the university sector: Labor's uncontrolled migration and the pressure it's placed on housing, infrastructure and services; the fracturing social cohesion that has its very roots in the university sector; insufficient support for private higher education; and neglect and limited economic opportunities in the outer suburbs and regions.

This bill gives a pathway to address all of these issues. If this bill comes to a vote in this chamber before the committee hands down its report, which I should indicate would not be my preference, we will not oppose it here. We will finalise our position based on the committee findings.

Let me then turn to the bill itself. Apart from the fact that it has a terrible name and should have been called the 'Managed growth bill', what do we know about this? It's a bill that does four basic things.

First, it allows the minister to determine the pool of Commonwealth supported places, which will then be distributed by the ATEC. Second, it allows the minister to determine the pool of international students, which will then be distributed by the ATEC. Third, it confers extensive powers on the minister to allocate places directly, including to individual powers; to give binding directions to the ATEC; and to impose conditions on universities and other higher education providers.

And, fourth, it establishes the needs based funding system to support students from identified backgrounds in accordance with guidelines that are to be determined by the minister. There's a common thread that links these four points. It's not the ATEC.

It's not the student places. It's not opportunity or increased spending in the sector. It is the minister.

That should be no surprise, because, despite the sales pitch about dollars and university places, this is a bill that is designed to centralise power over Australian universities in the hands of the minister. In passing, it's worth briefly commenting on the sales pitch, because all we heard about were the dollars of additional funding the minister's announcing and additional university places he'll buy.

The minister said it in his second reading speech: an additional $3.6 billion over the decade and a further 230,000 university places. He said it in his press release, he said it in the media, but he didn't say it in the explanatory memorandum. On the very first page of the explanatory memorandum, the minister tells us: The Bill supports an additional investment of $2.5 billion by the Australian Government in the higher education funding system over the medium term and is expected to result in an extra 200,000 commencing domestic students at university over the next decade.

In the financial impact statement of the EM he went on to qualify that quote. Those measures were announced in the 2024-25 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook: the government will invest an additional $2.5 billion in net funding over 11 years from 2024 to 2025. It's an extraordinary discrepancy.

Why the sudden jump from $2.5 billion to $3.6 billion? Where does the extra $1.1 billion come from? Where did they find the extra 30,000 places?

Why is there a $1.1 billion discrepancy between the minister's second reading speech and the explanatory memorandum he tabled on the very same day? It's not the first time the minister has changed the figures he uses in announcements. On 25 March this year the minister stood in front of this chamber to talk about some other expenditure for which he was responsible—this time on schools, not universities—and told us he was spending 'an extra $16.5 billion over 10 years'.

Nine weeks later, on 27 May, the same minister referring to the same expenditure stood in this chamber and told us he was actually spending '$20 billion over the next decade'. There was no new spending decision, but there was suddenly an additional $3.5 billion in the nine weeks to May. The minister has never given an explanation.

It was concerning back in May in relation to schools, and it's concerning again today in relation to universities. It goes to the issue of whether the government is being transparent with the Australian people. Why do the relevant MYEFO papers show $2.5 billion spending over 11 years when the minister is announcing a $3.6 billion spend over a decade?

If numbers change, why didn't the minister include that update in this year's budget? How can Australians trust that the $3.6 billion the minister is talking about today won't become a higher number tomorrow? What prompted the minister to contradict his own explanatory memorandum in his speech and his press release?

Where's this money coming from? Was it offset through the government's savage cuts to research or simply more debt to be added to Labor's trillion-dollar pile? All these things are for the minister to explain.

Coming back to the central theme, though, this bill is not really about funding. The funding decisions about the amounts to be spent on the sector and the number of places to be purchased were all made separately as part of the budgetary process. They were in MYEFO 18 months ago and perhaps should also have been in this year's budget.

But that's not what this bill deals with. The budgetary decisions and the legislative drafting are related but separate. The decision to spend money to increase university places in particular could have been made with or without this bill.

The minister could have increased funding under the current model. Equally, he could have switched to a managed growth model without changing the funding envelope. So, in examining this bill, it's appropriate to put any budgetary decisions to one side.

They can and should be examined on their own terms. Instead, let's look at the statutory mechanisms that are introduced by this legislation. Let me be very clear, as I was a few moments ago: this bill is about centralising power in the hands of the minister, because under this bill nearly every aspect of the future financial viability of our higher education institutions will be in the hands of the current minister and every future minister.

The minister, whomever he or she happens to be at the time, will control the size of the domestic student load and will control how it's allocated both indirectly and directly. The minister, for all intents and purposes, not only will have the power to set an overall cap on international student numbers across all institutions but also can control how they're allocated.

The minister controls needs based funding grants through the needs based funding grants guidelines that he will write, which will, in substance, determine how much funding will be delivered and to whom. In effect, this bill ensures the minister controls student fees and Commonwealth contributions, which are the financial lifeblood that allows our institutions to keep operating.

It's worth noting aside that the minister has increased reliance on that lifeblood by cutting research funding elsewhere. There has been a $2.2 billion cut to research from the Economic Accelerator, a $925 million reduction in the research capacity program compared to when the coalition left office, the end of hundreds of millions of dollars in research investment through trailblazer universities and myriad other cuts.

The government has slashed the sector's other sources of income, reducing income diversification and concentrating reliance on allocated student places, which will now be determined by government. Deputy Speaker, through you, I want to speak to all the university vice chancellors who are either watching this or will be reading this later. I'm surprised you signed up for this.

You told us you wanted managed growth. I'm surprised you don't also want your independence. On the theme of independence, those in the sector who are watching or who are on the crossbench of this parliament may have been told that many of the decisions about funding will be the domain of ATEC and that's okay because ATEC is independent.

Let me say a few words about that. Independence is when you can't be sacked, when your funding can't be taken away and when you're not subject to direction. That's how we've guaranteed the independence of judges since at least the Act of Settlement 1701.

But that's not how the ATEC is set up. ATEC commissioners are subject to termination at the satisfaction of the minister under section 67 of the ATEC act. All that's required is for the minister, whoever he or she may be, to be satisfied that the commissioners performance has been 'unsatisfactory for a significant period of time'.

What constitutes unsatisfactory performance and a significant period of time are not defined. That's not independence. As for remuneration and resourcing, the remuneration of ATEC commissioners is, of course, determined by the Remuneration Tribunal, but the resourcing of ATEC is highly dependent on the minister.

The ATEC Act makes it clear there is no ability for the ATEC to employ its own staff. Instead, the ATEC Act specifically stipulates in section 22: The staff assisting the ATEC are to be APS employees in the Department whose services are made available to the ATEC by the Secretary … Indeed, other staff are able to assist the ATEC only where the relevant agency head agrees, and the ATEC cannot even engage its own contractors or consultants.

Section 24 of the ATEC Act says that this must be done by the secretary on behalf of the Commonwealth on terms and conditions that the secretary determines in writing. This means that ATEC commissioners are completely dependent on resourcing allocated to them by the minister and the secretary to perform their functions. That's not independence.

As for freedom from direction, there's no such thing. ATEC commissioners are explicitly instructed by statute to take account of the minister's short- and long-term priorities, which are set out under section 15 of the ATEC Act. The ATEC is also directly subject to ministerial direction about how they carry out their functions, with a couple of minor caveats under section 71 of the ATEC Act.

Just in case those caveats turn out to be a little too constricting, this bill introduces a new special power for the minister to stipulate 'matters the ATEC must comply with' in relation to the allocation of international students. I'll come back to that. To drive the point home, the words 'independent' or 'independence' only appear five times in the ATEC Act.

Two of those occurrences describe statutory reviews that must take place after two and five years. The other three occurrences relate to a requirement for commissioners to be independent of tertiary education providers. None of them describes any requirement for the ATEC or its commissioners to be independent of government.

The coalition did not support the establishment of ATEC. We thought it was a wasteful, unnecessary and duplicative bureaucracy—bad in principle. More to the point, this bill allows the minister to bypass the ATEC in a number of significant respects, effectively making it irrelevant.

He can do this in a number of ways. First, he can decide to directly allocate places to institutions. This is because the minister has the power to allocate demand driven higher education places under the new section 30-55 of the HESA.

He can allocate those places in specific courses to specific institutions. He also has the power to decide under section 30-60 whether a course is a demand driven higher education course. The ATEC does not have the power to allocate demand driven higher education course places.

This means the minister can take places out of the hands of the ATEC and allocate them himself. Of course, the minister also has the power to determine the total allocation pool. He can pause any growth in that pool.

He can then ensure any future growth in student numbers comes from demand driven places which he controls. In theory, he has the power to exercise total control over future domestic student growth. Of course, like all good regulatory tools, it's likely he would never need to exercise those powers.

But their mere existence—the threat of an adverse ministerial decision—would almost always be sufficient to bring a recalcitrant sector into line. But the power is there, just in case. That is just one of the powers the minister would acquire under this bill.

A future minister would have those powers too. The second area in which the minister can bypass ATEC independence is in relation to decisions about international students. The minister decides the number of students available.

He can control how they're distributed. He can do that by making an international allocation pool determination and then giving directions to ATEC under the new section 46B of the ESOS Act. It's worth saying that, as a matter of drafting, it appears likely that the minister has the power to make course-level caps.

This is either because the drafting refers to the minister's power to make allocations in relation to 'a course of education' or because his power to stipulate matters the ATEC must comply with when it allocates students is completely unconstrained, doesn't require consultation and is not disallowable. This means the minister has huge flexibility to determine the quantum, the location and the field of study for any future international student growth.

Third, the bill gives the minister unilateral power to impose conditions on higher education providers under the new section 36-65 of the HESA, which is introduced by this bill. The current version of section 36-65 of the HESA requires that there be an agreement in place with the provider. The new version does not.

It appears the minister can at any time for any provider in relation to any matter whatsoever impose a condition on that provider for the purpose of a Commonwealth grant, which they are required by law to comply with if they take the Commonwealth supported places in that year. This power appears to be limited only perhaps by the Australian Constitution or administrative law statutory interpretation constraints as to the scope of the primary legislation.

There's no requirement to consult. There's no requirement to involve AAT. This so-called system steward, ATEC, can be bypassed at any time by a minister choosing to exercise this power.

Again, this means universities are, under this bill, subject to extraordinary control by this minister or any future minister. Fourth, the ATEC is not involved in decisions about needs based funding, which instead is controlled by the minister. Under the new section 39-15 of the HESA, institutions receive needs based funding grants that comprise two components: the total equity component and the total regional component.

The coverage of the equity component is unclear. It covers international students, but whether or not a person is otherwise eligible depends on whether they can satisfy criteria under the needs based funding grant guidelines, which are to be issued by the minister. It's unclear how much they'll be paid.

The legislation sets a base amount, but this is multiplied by an equity modifier amount. The equity modifier amount is again specified in the needs based funding grant guidelines. Presumably, in theory, any future minister could simply determine that the equity modifier amount is zero.

A similar arrangement applies for the regional component. In short, the amount of equity and regional funding you will receive under the needs based funding grant guidelines are within the control of the minister. The ATEC is not involved.

To the vice-chancellors, I say: this is how you will be funded into the future. It's worth noting a few points about oversight and review of the decisions made under this bill. In this bill, the minister's decisions about domestic student pools are not disallowable.

The minister's decisions about international allocation pools are not disallowable, as I mentioned. The minister's decisions about the allocation of places for demand driven higher education courses are not legislative instruments and therefore not disallowable. A determination by the minister to impose a condition on the specified higher education provider is not a legislative instrument and is therefore not disallowable and is not subject to merits review.

Conditions opposed by the minister in relation to needs based funding grants are also not legislative instruments and therefore not disallowable. ATEC decisions about core student load, additional growth allocation, transitional places and a range of other things are not subject to merits review by the Administrative Review Tribunal. Presumably, if you're a university and you get a bad decision, then your only recourse is judicial review, litigation or a constitutional writ.

It's not a great option when the target of your litigation will be the minister who will make the future decisions that shape your ongoing financial viability. Again, I say to the university vice-chancellors that called for and welcome this bill: I'm surprised you signed up to this. I'm surprised you welcomed this legislation.

These are matters that go directly to your institutional independence and autonomy. This is apparently what you wanted, though. Let me say this clearly: if it's not what you wanted, I do not think degradation of your independence and institutional autonomy can be fixed through piecemeal amendments.

Ministerial control over the sector is embedded in every part of this bill. You cannot remove it through keyhole surgery. If you do not like it and do not want to accept it, you will need to persuade both the coalition and the Greens that the bill should be opposed.

That's the lay down on the bill. This bill is quite extraordinary in the amount of power it confirms on the current minister and indeed any future minister. But let's be honest.

From this side of the chamber or, indeed, any part of the chamber, I doubt there's a politician in this place who would say that all is well with the sector. From concerns about quality to how universities are grappling with the challenges of artificial intelligence, the shocking failures in relation to antisemitism, the problems around international students and a general slide in rankings, the problems of our higher education providers are manifold.

The suite of powers in this bill provides a pathway to fix many of them, and it provides a pathway to address some broader societal challenges as well. First, on migration, when I spoke at the Universities Australia conference earlier this year, I said: Australia's migration program must be designed to restore our standard of living and protect our way of life.

Our migration settings must be appropriately balanced against the capacity of our housing, our infrastructure and other services. Currently, the pressure on infrastructure, services and housing—particularly in our cities—is being felt acutely across the board. International students make up the largest component of Net Overseas Migration.

In any attempt to address the NOM, international students will play a part. I said very clearly that I understand the value of international students to Australia. I also said: We will want to make changes to the settings around international students, but I want the sector to know that we want to work closely with you to develop these policies and announce them in due course.

This bill provides a powerful pathway to bring down the NOM. In effect, it transitions the international student temporary migration program from a capped to an uncapped system, without needing to engage with the complexities of the Migration Act or the visa system. To get a student visa, you need a confirmation of enrolment.

Unless a university is allocated international student places, they will not be able to issue that confirmation. The ATEC must consult with public universities before making an international student allocation. It is not required to consult with private providers.

In any event, it must comply with the matters specified by the minister. The minister doesn't have to consult. In short, this is a powerful tool to bring down the NOM in the way we've outlined.

Second, on social cohesion, Blind Freddy could tell you that the universities have been one of the key sources of socially destructive trends, particularly around antisemitism in the progressive left but also in relation to the broader adherence to Australia and its values. In February this year, I commend the minister for saying this, he rightly called for schools to teach students that Australia is, 'the best country in the world'.

You will never hear that in our universities. He said that Australian kids should be taught Australian values, which he defined as democracy, the rule of law, basic freedoms and a fair go. This bill would give a future minister the power to ensure that universities teach national pride in Australian values, as defined by the minister, as a funding condition for receiving a Commonwealth supported place.

This should not be controversial. It is what the minister should do, and it's what any coalition minister would do. The new condition-making power in section 36-65 of HESA allows the minister to impose conditions unilaterally on providers.

As a condition of being allocated Commonwealth supported places, this power could be used to require a recalcitrant university or higher education provider to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. It could be used to require the teaching of Australian values, as defined by the minister of the day, rather than a divisive, progressive agenda.

The control that the minister can exert over international students could no doubt have the same effect indirectly, if not in name. To any who object, I say state your case. Why should our universities not teach pride in our country?

Why should a minister not have the power to enforce that? Why would a responsible minister allocate international students that allowed Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Socialist Alternative to run encampments and take over the student representative councils? Why would we want to export our problems to the world by exposing international students to the worst aspects of woke ideology that have run amok on our campuses?

My colleague and friend Senator Bridget McKenzie recently gave a speech where she outlined concerns about the state of the sector, concerns that I know are shared by many parents, many students and my coalition colleagues about students spending years being grounded in woke ideology and even antisemitism and those ideas being passed on to the broader society.

This bill empowers the minister to turn back the tide. Third, on private higher education and sector reform, this bill allows the minister to prioritise growth both for Commonwealth supported places and international students outside the public universities. It envisages Commonwealth supported places going to private sector institutions for priority classes of courses.

This is a new notion which replaces the much less flexible notion of a national priority that's in the existing legislation. New sections 30.35 and 30.40 of the HESA make clear that the minister can easily list a particular course as a priority for the specified non-table A provider and thus open a gateway to CSPs. The pathway is much simpler and gives the minister a much more granular level of control than is currently the case.

The minister simply needs to amend the Commonwealth Grant Scheme Guidelines. For effective and efficient private providers who do the right thing, why should they not play a part in educating our future students? You never hear about the socialist alternative taking over the campus of a private provider.

You never hear about them having a problem with antisemitism. You never hear about them teaching our students to be ashamed of Australia. Why shouldn't we take some of the taxpayer funding that goes to public universities and give it to much better private bodies?

My fourth point is on economic opportunities in the outer suburbs and regions. A former leader of the National Party is sitting next to me at the table today. The suite of powers in this bill would allow a future minister to prioritise economic growth in these key areas by directing our student load and international cohort where it's needed, which is out of our CBDs and into the regions and the bush.

This could be done by any of the following: giving directions to ATEC, under section 71 of the ATEC act, to prioritise student growth in those areas; determining that specified courses are not higher education courses in the hands of ATEC but are instead demand driven, which allows domestic places to be allocated directly by the minister; or directing ATEC to prioritise the allocation of international students to outer suburban or regional campuses under the new section 46B of the ESOS Act.

This gives a future minister the ability to respond much more flexibly to the economic and future workforce needs of our vital regions in the suburbs and the bush. In short, the powerful tools in this bill provide a pathway for a future coalition government to respond to broad societal changes in the national interest. Let me again say to the vice-chancellors: is this what you really want?

Those things aside, there are also clearly reasons to oppose this bill. This bill is not the way that we, on this side of the chamber, would approach university reform. We believe in competition and deregulation as formidable tools to drive innovation.

That philosophy is not found anywhere in this bill. In fact, this bill ends competition between institutions and brings them under the heel of the minister and his ATEC. I want to say a few words about that.

Bizarrely, this bill appears to be premised on the idea that competition between universities is a bad thing. Indeed, the minister made this his centrepiece; 'The hunger games are over,' he said. For those who've read The Hunger Games or watched the movies, we know the idea of The Hunger Games is that different districts are made to compete by selecting champions who then fight to the death to win food for their home towns.

It's a sloppy metaphor when we're talking about universities. It only makes sense if the students are the food. In marketplaces, competition is the friend of the consumer.

In a competitive marketplace, you win consumers by offering a higher-quality product at a better price. The winner is the customer. That's the whole purpose of competition policy.

In higher education, universities compete to attract students. They compete on academic prestige and research output, on student experience and on career outcomes. A university attracts students because they have a stronger offering.

Competition means universities are incentivised to improve what they're offering to students. What the minister is saying is he wants to end that incentive. It's bizarre, because it puts the interests of students second to the interests of institutions.

I understand the point that there are megauniversities which are rapacious, and the viability of the smaller players is under threat. But that's an argument about market power and relative size of the big institutions. The answer to a misuse of market power is to address that conduct, not to end competition altogether.

Another concern is that this bill strips institutional autonomy and independence from our universities. Higher education providers under the managed growth regime become highly reliant on the largesse of the minister and are subject to a range of intrusive powers. The billions of dollars in cuts to research funding limit the ability to rely on alternative sources of funding.

A further undesirable aspect of the bill is the strange rejection of efficiency and productivity in the sector, which is demonstrated by its antipathy to overenrolment. A university's fees are made up of two components: Commonwealth contributions and student contributions. Under the current system, if a university enrols more students than they're funded for, they don't receive the Commonwealth contribution, but they may still receive the student contribution.

This allows universities to innovate and find economies of scale that allow them to educate more students for the same amount of taxpayer dollars. This is referred to as overenrolment. However, this bill significantly disincentivises overenrolment.

If a university goes more than five per cent over their cap, they'll lose not only their Commonwealth contribution but also the student contribution. It's a de facto financial penalty. Why would we want to penalise universities for finding ways to educate more domestic students for the same amount of taxpayer money?

And why would we want to deny students their first choice, to prop up competitor universities that they simply don't want to attend? How is this fair to students or their families? It's wrongheaded and inexplicable.

A further issue is that there appear to be unqualified financial risks in this bill. Under the current arrangements, universities receive a maximum basic grant amount and their load planners determine the types of places they'll offer. This bill changes it from capped funding to capped places, but the places cost different amounts depending on the course.

The Commonwealth contribution to a history degree is $1,316; agriculture costs $32,400. Could a university which typically teaches history be allocated 100 places and decide to convert them to agriculture? (Extension of time granted, on the motion of Mr Leeser) And would this increase the financial risk to the Commonwealth?

In theory, it's possible. Given the regulated nature of the industry, it seems unlikely, but it needs to be explored. Finally, because the needs-based funding grant guidelines are so dependent on the minister, they too appear to represent an unknown budgetary expense.

That's something that should also be examined. All of these matters are things that we will consider through the committee stage. The pathway forward is simple.

We'll refer the bill. We will listen to the sector. We will think about the good of Australia and Australians and how the coalition would use these powers in the bill in the future, and we will make a decision in the best interests of the country.

I thank the House.