Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026

Mr MATT SMITH (Leichhardt) (11:30): I rise to speak on the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. This bill is a lot of things—a future for our universities, more opportunity for our uni students, better outcomes for Australia—but it's important to remember that these laws are part of a much larger body of work. In February 2024, the government released the final report of the Australian Universities Accord.

It's a blueprint for higher education reform over the next decade and the decade after that. The universities accord says that, over these next few decades, we'll need to increase the number of people in the workforce with a certificate or a diploma or a degree to about 80 per cent. That means more people at TAFE.

That means more people at university. We need to take action now to make sure our tertiary education system is set up to deliver the skills that the future of Australia requires. The Albanese government has implemented more than 30 of the accord's 47 recommendations in full or in part.

This includes things like making HECS fairer with a 20 per cent reduction and changes to the way the marginal threshold repayment is made, introducing paid prac for the first time, and doubling the number of university and study hubs. All these things are great, but they're all very abstract when they're read out. I grew up in a town where the options were basically 'you go work on the rigs' or 'you go away for university', and that was kind of it.

A lot of guys did the rigs. A few guys did university. One of my mates became the first person from his family to go to university, and now he's the CEO of a company in Perth.

That's a long way from Sale. When we were in year 12, back in the late nineties—I've just aged myself—his mother was having a conversation with my mother. My family are all tertiary educated.

What his mother didn't know was: How was he going to get to school? What was it going to be like? What were his opportunities going to be?

What did this mean for her and her family? And she didn't care, because, whatever it was going to take, she was going to get her eldest son to university. He got there and he excelled.

His children will go and so on and so forth. This is about providing opportunity. Sometimes, in the regions, we don't always see the opportunity that is available in the cities, because we're further away, because of geography, because of a whole bunch of reasons.

That's why, in the last few weeks, there have been a lot of really exciting announcements up in the Far North. There was the opening of the Yeinie Building by JCU. Cairns is lucky; we have not one but two world-class universities.

Now, at JCU in Cairns, you can become a doctor from go to whoa—right the way through. And we know this for sure: if you train in the regions, you stay in the regions. This is a great outcome.

On top of that, just last week, the sod was turned for the new CQU campus in Cairns. This will be offering a plethora of allied health opportunities: medical imaging, OT, speechies, pharmacies—all of the things that we're told every day are needed in the bush. People will come from Cairns.

They'll fall in love with the Far North. They will stay and they'll deliver health outcomes for the region. It's also doing engineering.

The great thing about that, though, is that no-one has to leave. Everyone gets to stay. That is an important part of the education process.

I want my daughters in Cairns to believe that their future belongs in Cairns, that they can go to university in Cairns and that they'll stay and make the Far North a better place. Speaking of openings in the Far North, I was on Thursday Island very recently with Minister Giles. We visited the Thursday Island TAFE, which opened just a couple of years ago.

It was really exciting because it had been doing a bit of health work and stuff, a bit of nursing stuff but now you can complete your diploma of nursing on Thursday Island right the way through. You can stay there and go straight into the hospital or one of the many health clinics that are on the 17 islands right across the Torres Strait and the Cape, and that's really important.

For people in regional areas, particularly remote regional areas, travelling away is difficult. If you live in a place where there are no traffic lights and you move to Sydney for higher education, that's a bit of whiplash. I was in the Daintree a few weeks back and I had to go to Sydney for a committee hearing.

It gave me whiplash—a lot of big shiny buildings, a lot of noise, a lot of traffic. For a young kid who is 17 or 18 years old, to have to try to cope with that is really hard. It leads to dropping out and leads to people not completing what they've started.

A bit of homesickness makes it harder. This investment in trying to get regional kids to be able to study near home, be it through the study centres, be it through TAFE, be it through university, is so important to give those opportunities where people are and to make sure that the people who get those opportunities stay in those areas, the places they belong.

I'll give you a tip about country kids, and I know you know this, Deputy Speaker Boyce: country kids want to be in the country. We don't like cities. It's not who we are.

It's not what we're used to. You want wide open spaces. You navigate by the tree or the hill or the creek; you don't go by 'big silver building third on the left'—they all look the same.

I'm excited to commend this bill. I'm excited about the future of regional education. I'm excited about fee-free TAFE and what that means.

I'm excited about all those new nurses who've taken the opportunity with the paid prac and fee-free TAFE, who've taken mid-career breaks. I met a woman named Terri at the Cairns TAFE, who, for a variety of reasons, had fallen into admin work. Life had taken her away from her dream as a child.

Then with fee-free TAFE, she put her hand up in her 50s. She's an enrolled nurse now. She's walking the halls at Cairns Base Hospital as we speak, doing the things she wanted to do as a little girl.

I have a litmus test for jobs—that is, if you can go to Kmart and you can buy a kid's outfit for that job then that's a job that people are going to want to do going forwards, like carpentry, police, fire, nursing. These kids get to be who they want to be, what they wanted to be as a four-year old because of fee-free TAFE, because of university in the regions.

I think that a lot of people would love to go back to their four-year-old selves, five-year-old selves, and take them by the hand and go, 'Look, we've done this. It might have been a circular route. It might have had a few speed bumps along the way but, because the government is investing in the education of regional people, now we are doing what we wanted to do as a young'un,' and their parents will be proud.

To see it in Terri's face is to understand what that meant to her, what it meant to her family. Because of paid prac, she had that safety net. She didn't have to sleep in her car—as we sometimes hear—or live on those two-minute noodles.

She was able to get sustenance. She was still able to get her kids to school. With all of the things involved in her day-to-day life, TAFE supported her to live out her best version of herself.

In her being the best version of herself, she improved the lives of countless Far North Queenslanders because she is going to work every single day excited. She's not going to burn out. She's not ever going to be, 'Oh, I don't want to do this,' because she waited 50 years to do it—a half century, a lifetime.

But she got there in the end, and I couldn't be prouder to be part of a government that has provided that to her. It goes beyond the story of Terri. Minister Giles related the story of Ash, one of the first people who will be graduating from the Thursday Island TAFE as an enrolled nurse.

He can go back to Darnley and work in the health clinic there and be a part of his community and be a part of the change to make sure that those comorbidities that we're seeing so often in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are got on top of, because we know that community wants to listen to community first and foremost. They don't want locums.

They don't want people flying in, flying out. They do a great job; don't get me wrong. But you want to have your own telling you, helping you through, showing you and guiding you in a way that you understand, that works with your culture and that works where you live.

That's not unique to Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities. That's right across the gamut. People want to know from people like them.

Country people want to hear from country people about what's right for them. That's what this bill does. It provides the regions with the workforce moving forwards that will allow us to thrive.

We are the beating heart of Australia. We generate the food. We generate the energy.

We generate the heart. The more workers that we have, the more education that we have, the better off Australia will be because of this. This bill opens so many doors.

Your education and your health are everything. This is such a big part of this, and I commend this bill to the House.