Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026
Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (12:16): In a first-year uni lecture in February, every seat is taken, and there are people sitting on the steps. Go back to the same subject at the end of the year, and there are some gaps. Some of those gaps are because people have changed their minds, and that's okay, but some of them are people who could not make it work.
The gaps are not spread evenly. If you grew up in a house where money was tight or a long way from campus, you're up to twice as likely to be one of those gaps. Nobody has ever left university because they stopped being clever.
They leave because the textbooks came to $400 in March and then rent went up in April. They leave because the unpaid prac placement is three months. They leave because they picked up an extra shift and then another one, and, by week 9, they were far too behind to catch up and too embarrassed to say so.
Governments of all persuasions have spent a great deal of time in this place talking about who gets through the front door of our universities, but very few have spent the time on what happens in week 4. With the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026, our government is doing both. Close to half of all of Australians in their 30s now hold a university degree.
That is genuinely a remarkable number. Inside one lifetime, it has gone from something a few families did to something a whole generation grew up expecting, but it is about half that if you grew up in a poor family or in the regions and less again in the bush. A young person from a family without much money is less likely to get a crack at university in the first place, and then, if they do get there, they are less likely to finish.
That is about not ability but opportunity. It is about who gets the chance to use what they've got. Every one of them is something this country loses, and we never find out what we've lost.
My community is about a maximum of 20 minutes away from some of our country's top universities. If you get on the 59 tram at Airport West on a weekday morning, you are sitting among people who are going to work and people who are going to lectures—and a fair few of them doing both. Distance is not the problem; the money is.
There are families in Tullamarine and Avondale Heights where the question at the kitchen table is not whether a kid could get to university; it is whether the family can carry three years of textbooks, transport and rent while that kid earns less than what they could do in a full-time job. That conversation happens every summer between the ATAR results coming out and preferences closing.
More often, it is the kid who calls it off, because they can see what it is costing the home and their family, and they decide not to be an additional burden. Last year, Victoria's first suburban university study hub opened at Broadmeadows, which is just up the road from my electorate. This study hub is part of our government's network of study hubs.
There are 20 new regional ones and 14 in the outer suburbs. The evidence is clear that, where you put one up, participation goes up. That tells us something quite plain about what has been holding people back.
It was never the talent; it was the practicalities. Since coming to office, our government have been working on the principle that the doors of opportunity should be open to all, and it is worth going through how we have sought to achieve this, because this bill is an element and a continuation of it. Starting in the early years, our three-day guarantee helps open that first door of educational opportunity.
We changed the law to the access of three days a week of early education to ensure that it is guaranteed for everyone, because the old activity test locked out precisely the children who benefit the most. Before I came to this place, I worked with early childhood educators. I can tell the House what they had been saying for over a decade to the coalition government, but they just simply refused to listen.
Then we have the extra $20 billion into our public schools over the next decade—the schools that do the heavy lifting and who teach the children most likely to start behind. Every dollar of it is tied to reform—phonics checks, numeracy checks, small-group tutoring, catching kids up, keeping them up and getting them to the end of year 12. Then a young person who walks out of public school in Ascot Vale at 18 with the marks and the motivation to walk through the next door of higher education—until now, we have left that door with a latch.
This bill is what seeks to lift that latch, to address a gap that did not open on its own but was widened deliberately by those opposite. In the middle of the pandemic, when nearly every other major employer in the country was thrown a line, those opposite wrote the rules so universities were locked out of JobKeeper, and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs.
They capped the funding. They let equity programs wither. They churned through minister after minister with no plan for any of it, and they made an arts degree cost more than a medical one.
There is only one reason a government does this, and it is to talk young people out of aspiring to higher education. They had the better part of a decade to build the skill base this country was always going to need, and they spent it treating one of our greatest national assets as a cost to cut and a culture war to fight. We are not tinkering with a system that's not working; we are rebuilding one that was run down by those opposite.
That is why this is the seventh accord bill not the second. The accord itself is the biggest look at our higher education since Bradley nearly 20 years ago, with 47 recommendations. This government has now implemented more than 30 of them either in full or in part.
We cut student debt for 3.2 million Australians by 20 per cent, and more than $16 billion has been wiped off. In my electorate, that was over 27,000 people who woke up one morning owing less on their student debt than they did the night before. We capped indexation at the lower of CPI and wages so the debt can never again grow faster than what people earn.
We moved to a marginal repayment system and lifted the minimum threshold so somebody repays what they can actually afford instead of a number set in another decade. We brought in paid prac for the first time for teaching nursing and midwifery and social work students, and we're expanding that—another clear example where the talent was never the reason preventing people studying these essential degrees.
It was the unpaid work they couldn't afford while rent was due at the end of a degree, where walking away costs the most. We made university-ready bridging courses free. We set up the National Student Ombudsman and the national code to prevent and respond to gender based violence so the young a young woman's degree does not end because of what somebody did to her on campus.
We made Commonwealth supported places demand driven for every First Nations student who gets the marks, and we established the Australian Tertiary Education Commission so somebody is finally stewarding the whole system rather than each piece of it in isolation. That was the first six bills. This one changes who gets in and who gets to stay.
The first half of this bill is the managed growth funding system. The minister sets a total allocation pool—the number of fully funded places available each year. The commission allocates them, and each university allocation is built from two parts: a core student load so nobody goes backwards and a growth allocation on top of it.
The growth allocation is where the commission can direct places to students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, from the regions and from the bush. If the commission judges that the pool is not big enough to meet demand from those students, it can go back to the minister and ask for it to be lifted. I know there are people in this place who have decided to call this 'capping'.
I would say to them: look at the mechanism. This isn't a cap; it's a floor, with the ceiling taken off for the students who have been missing. We have already done exactly this for First Nations students.
We legislated in 2023 and we have the results that show it works. There will be 16,000 additional places next year and the year after that and the year after that. From 2030, it rises to 19,000 a year.
Over the decade, we expect to fund an additional 230,000 commencing students, backed by $3.6 billion. The bill also cleans up the mess underneath. Right now, in the scramble of enrolment, some universities are taking on students that receive no Commonwealth funding at all.
The accord was blunt about what that is doing to the system. Around 20,000 additional places are expected to go to those over-enrolled universities next year. Under-enrolled universities get a temporary funding floor to the end of 2031 so the transition does not cost anybody their staff.
The second half is needs based funding, and it is the same idea that we've already accepted in our schools—a student who starts further back needs more support to get to the same place. A campus in the regions costs more to run. Nobody in this chamber argues about that when it comes to a primary school.
The money goes to the unglamorous things that actually keep a struggling student enrolled—the tutoring, the mentoring, the academic support, the scholarship or emergency grant that covers the textbooks or the transport fare. There are programs that have tried to do this before but they were capped. Last year, that came out to be as little as $600 a student.
This bill sets a base equity amount of $1,535 and a base regional amount of $1,398, both indexed every year so they do not go backwards—more than double—and it is demand-driven. The more students a university enrols who need the help, the more help they get, which means a university can no longer be rewarded for recruiting a cohort and then losing them. This bill does one more thing.
It puts the allocation of international student places for individual providers in the hands of an independent commission, where the minister sets an overall pool. There is no statutory cap on international students today, and this bill does not create one. What it does is take a decision that currently sits with the government and hands it to an independent body, which is what the universities themselves have asked for.
About 60 per cent of students in Commonwealth-supported places across this country are women. Of the students this needs based funding is built to reach, two in three are women. We talk a great deal in this place about the gender pay gap and too often we talk about it as though it's a question of confidence or negotiation or a choice an individual woman makes.
It's not. Our government knows it is structural and it is set early in the years before a woman ever gets a chance to sit down to have a conversation about salary. The most reliable thing we can do about what a woman earns across the whole of her working life is to open the door to a qualification and make sure she can afford to stay until she has it.
There is a hard-headed argument here too. The court said that by 2050 we'll need about 80 per cent of the workforce holding a certificate, diploma or degree. That is what it will take to staff our hospitals, to build more houses, to run the clean energy economy we're building right now and to do the jobs that don't even exist yet.
Every one of those workers is a person who has to get a qualification first. Every student we lose in second year is a nurse we're short of in 2040, and we pay for that shortage one way or another. But we do not get to this 80 per cent by sticking to the status quo and simply hoping.
This bill does not reach back. It does nothing for the people who left after the first year and never went back, or the ones who looked at the whole thing at age 17 and decided it was not for them. There are a lot of them.
Some of them are my constituents. They do not get those years back. Here is what this bill does: it means a kid from my community whose single mum is working two jobs just to stay afloat gets a funded place because her ATAR is great and not because there happened to be room left after everyone else had been sorted.
It means the first person in a family to go to uni has somebody to ring in week 4 of the first semester when it has all gotten away from them and they are one decision away from not coming back. It means the hundreds of dollars for textbooks in March is not the reason somebody quits in April. This is not the last bill our government will seek to deliver on education.
There is a great deal more work to do to make sure that our country's system is as fair as it should be, from the earliest years all the way through. But it is a next step, and it is a big one. Nobody has ever left university because they stopped being clever.
They leave because we let them. This bill is us making it easier for them to stay. This bill is our government opening another door of opportunity for working families in Maribyrnong and right across the country.
I commend the bill to the House.