Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026

Dr TRISH COOK (Bullwinkel) (11:53): I rise today to speak in strong support of the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. The title of this bill is not just a piece of legislative phrasing. It is a profound statement of intent.

It is a promise to the young people in our outer suburbs, to the families in our regional towns and to every single Australian who has ever looked at a university campus or a TAFE facility and wondered, 'Is that a place for me?' For too long, for too many Australians, the answer to that question has been determined not by their talent, not by their drive and not by their work ethic, but by their postcode, by how much their parents earn and by how far they live from a capital city.

With this bill, the Albanese Labor government is drawing a line in the sand. We are opening those doors wide. We are reshaping the landscape of Australian higher education—not just for the next parliamentary term or for the next decade, but for the decade after that.

This landmark legislation did not appear out of thin air. It is a culmination of rigorous, systemic and deeply consultative work. In February 2024, our government released the final report of the Australian Universities Accord.

It was, and remains, a generational blueprint. The accord laid bare a stark reality about the future of our national economy. It told us that, over the next few decades, the nature of work in this country would be shifting rapidly.

The jobs of tomorrow—in clean energy, in advanced manufacturing, in health care, in education and in tech—will require higher skills. To meet that challenge, the accord set a clear, ambitious national target: we need to increase the total number of people in our workforce with a tertiary qualification—whether that is a certificate, a diploma or a university degree—to approximately 80 per cent.

That's quite a number. Eighty per cent of our workforce will need to be skilled and tertiary trained. This means that we'll need more people at TAFE and at university, and we cannot possibly hit the target if we continue to leave brilliant minds on the sidelines just because of structural inequities in our current funding model.

We need to take action right now to set our tertiary education system up to deliver on Australia's future skill needs. And this is exactly what this bill does. Under the Albanese Labor government, we don't just commission reports and let them sit on the shelf; we're delivering on them.

I'm incredibly proud to stand here today and note that our government has already implemented more than 30 of the accord's 47 recommendations, either in full or in part. We are transforming higher education right now, block by block. Let's look at what we've already achieved.

We've made HECS fairer and better. We didn't just tweak the system; we cut 20 per cent off HECS debt for millions of Australians. We capped indexation to the lower level, which is the CPI and the wage price index.

We shifted to a fairer marginal repayment system, and we raised the minimum payment threshold. We are wiping away the anxiety of compounding debt for young workers. We introduced paid prac for the very first time.

For decades, student teachers, nurses, midwives—like me—and social workers were expected to work full time for weeks on placement for free, whilst studying, whilst managing kids and whilst maintaining their part-time jobs. Basically, they were forced into placement poverty. We've stepped in to provide financial support so they can complete their degrees, with support, and get into the workforce.

We've doubled the number of university study hubs. We've established 20 new regional university study hubs and 14 suburban university study hubs, bringing higher education directly into the communities—including the ones in Northam and York in my electorate of Bullwinkel—that need them the most. We've increased free university bridging courses, ensuring that students who didn't get the traditional ATAR score still have a clear, fully supported pathway into higher education.

We've established the National Student Ombudsman and a national code to prevent and respond to gender based violence, ensuring safety, accountability and respect on our campuses. We've also made demand driven, Commonwealth supported places available to all First Nations students who qualify for the course, removing arbitrary caps on Indigenous opportunity. Every one of these actions is about equity.

And today, with this bill, we take the next monumental step. We're tackling the core funding architecture of the university sector itself. The Australian Universities Accord explicitly recommended adopting an entirely new funding model for higher education, one that is carefully planned, transparently managed and intensely focused on student success.

This bill enacts that exact commitment, injecting an additional $3.6 billion into Australia's higher education system over the next 10 years. At the heart of this reform is the formal establishment and empowerment of the a ATEC, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. ATEC will serve as an independent expert steward of our tertiary education system.

Rather than universities operating in silos, ATEC will manage funding through mission based compacts, ensuring that federal funding is perfectly aligned with actual student enrolments and real-world national skills shortages. This bill establishes two revolutionary funding mechanisms: a managed growth funding system and a needs based funding. The new managed growth funding system will effectively uncap the number of places for students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and regional areas, and, as a member of a seat with a regional area, I'm particularly happy with that.

It sweeps away the old rigid caps that starved universities of the resources that they needed to expand. Our changes are expected to result in an extra 230,000 commencing domestic students at university over the next decade. Think of the family, the lives and the communities that will be permanently transformed by these 230,000 opportunities.

Getting a student through the door of a university is only half the battle, and the accord was very clear that an increase in underrepresented students must be matched by an absolute focus on their success. It's not enough to enrol them. We have to support them to graduate.

That is where demand driven, needs based funding comes into it. Members in this chamber will be very familiar with the concept of the Gonski funding for our high schools and schools. The idea of that is that funding should follow equity, providing extra resources to schools that take on students with greater needs.

This bill brings the Gonski philosophy to higher education. The more students a university has who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds or from First Nations communities or who study at regional campuses, the more funding that university will receive to help those students participate and succeed. Direct financial assistance, like emergency grants and equity scholarships, are provided as well so that a broken laptop or an unexpected bill doesn't force a student to drop out.

By offsetting the significantly higher operational costs of running regional and remote campuses, it will ensure that students in the regions get the same quality of infrastructure that those in the major cities get. This is a structural shift from a system that simply funds places to a system that funds people. Alongside these monumental funding reforms, this bill also introduces critical measures to ensure the integrity, safety and long-term sustainability of the sector.

The bill sets out a clear, robust framework for ATEC to exercise its existing function to allow international student places, specifically in scenarios where the Minister for Education makes an international allocation pool determination. This ensures our international education sector remains world class, sustainably managed and aligned with our national infrastructure and housing capacities.

Furthermore, the bill makes small but vital technical amendments to modernise information sharing between the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency and ATEC. By cutting the red tape and allowing these regulatory bodies to securely share data, we ensure that student complaints, safety issues and systemic risks are identified and acted upon swiftly.

It creates a seamless net of safety and quality assurance across the entire tertiary landscape. As I conclude, I want to bring this back to what the bill really represents at its core. When we look back at the history of this country, the great leaps forward have always occurred under a Labor government opening up the doors of education.

It was true when Whitlam abolished fees, it was true when Hawke and Keating expanded the system and it's true today under the Albanese Labor government. This bill recognises that our greatest national resource isn't what's buried in the ground; it's in the minds and the potential of our people. When we give a young person from a regional town or an outer suburban community like Bullwinkel the opportunity to go to university, we aren't just helping them.

We are training the nurse who will look after us baby boomers in hospital in the very near future. We're educating the teacher who will inspire the next generation in the classrooms of the schools that come to visit us in this place. We are equipping the engineer who will design a new renewable energy grid.

The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 is a visionary, fully funded, structurally sound package that sets Australia up for a prosperous, fair future. It says to every single Australian: no matter who you are or where you come from, your potential is our nation's potential. As a recent graduate of university, I'm particularly thrilled that our universities are going to get the support they need to expand and continue to deliver on the great education that they provide their students.

I commend this bill to the House.