Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026

Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (12:30): Before I was elected, I was fortunate to spend part of my career in the university sector, where I saw firsthand the public good that universities deliver not only through educating the next generation of Australians but through research, innovation and engagement with the communities that they serve. A former MP for Kooyong, Sir Robert Menzies, when he was almost quadrupling university funding in 1957, said: … universities are to be regarded not as a home of privilege for a few, but as something essential to the lives of millions of people who may never enter their doors.

He believed education improved Australia's wellbeing and its living standards and that universities were a nation-building project. The people of Kooyong still believe passionately in the importance of universities. In the last four years I've spoken with many university leaders, researchers, lecturers, students and parents about the state of our education system.

It is clear to them and to me that our higher education sector is under significant pressure. In fact, it's under threat. Students are graduating with unprecedented debt.

Some face lifelong debt resulting from their tertiary studies. Many tell me that they didn't understand what they were signing up for when they took on HECS. Researchers face chronic underfunding and increasing career uncertainty with unreliable grant schedules and dwindling success rates.

Academic staff are expected to teach larger and larger classes with fewer and fewer resources. Universities are increasingly reliant on international student revenue to cross-subsidise teaching and research. But, at the same time, employers are reporting shortages of doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers and other skilled professionals.

At the same time, politicians are dog whistling about the impact of international students on our society, ignoring the fact that they have been responsible for as much as half of our economic growth in recent years. The universities accord final report recognised that Australia's prosperity depends on a stronger, more accessible, better supported higher education sector.

The accord carried an ambitious vision, recommending that by 2050 Australia should increase tertiary attainment to at least 80 per cent of the working age population. It recommended growing the number of Australians aged 25 to 34 with a university qualification from 45 per cent to 55 per cent, and it recommended doubling Australian Commonwealth supported students to 1.8 million.

While they are very ambitious, these targets reflect the scale of the workforce challenges facing Australia, challenges in key sectors in a rapidly changing global economy. The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 represents a significant legislative response to the accord's final report. The government claims that this legislation will enable the creation of up to 230 additional student places over the next decade, with a particular focus on expanding opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and regional and rural communities.

Widening Australia's higher education participation is absolutely crucial, but, if this government is serious about opening the doors of opportunity, it must ensure that this bill genuinely expands opportunity rather than imposing unintentional restrictions. One of the central reforms in this bill is the move to a managed growth funding model. Currently, Commonwealth funding for student places is allocated through the maximum basic grant amount.

In 2026, $7.75 billion was allocated for student places. Under this model, the total number of Commonwealth supported places, or CSPs, across Australia has not always been clear, and this bill does change that approach. Instead of allocating a dollar amount, the minister will determine a total allocation pool of Commonwealth supported places.

In 2027, it's supported that the total allocation pool will deliver about 625,000 CSPs. There are benefits to providing greater visibility about the size of our education system. Universities need certainty on the number of places available so they can plan workforce infrastructure and course delivery.

The minister has announced that the government will grow the total allocation pool by an additional 16,000 places in each of the next three years. All of this sounds fine. However, there is no obligation for the Minister for Education to grow the size of the system.

In fact, under this bill, the pool could actually shrink below the existing core student load. It's an unintended consequence of the legislation. It leaves the door open for future ministers who are less well disposed to the sector to unilaterally cut student numbers.

Given the well and often stated hostility to the university sector by the Liberal Party, the National Party and One Nation, this issue needs to be fixed. At this point, the total allocated pool is a ceiling with no floor. The bill should establish that the minimum total allocation pool must equal the existing core student load of table A universities.

Without this, universities will have no guarantee that the system will in fact grow under this and future governments. This issue is to be addressed by the member for Curtin in her amendments later in this debate, and I support her proposal. Once the minister has set the total allocation pool, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, or ATEC, will then allocate places between universities.

This means that, from 2027, universities will receive an allocation of student places rather than a funding amount. The change will improve transparency, but, at the same time, it will reduce the flexibilities that universities have traditionally had to adapt to changes in student demand. For years, universities have operated under a soft cap with the ability to overenroll students.

This has given them the ability to create additional places when demand has exceeded supply of CSPs. In many cases, those additional students did not pose a financial impost, because universities could retain the student contributions for those over-enrolees. Under this bill, however, universities will have limited capacity to exceed their allocation.

Overenrolments will be capped at either five per cent above the original allocation or 750 places, whichever is lower. If the universities exceed this threshold, they will lose student contribution revenue for those additional students. Documents released under FOI showed that, in 2024, nine Australian universities delivered student places worth five per cent or more above their maximum funding.

There is no clarity or transparency on how many universities are in that position now. The minister has argued that this change will end a Hunger Games system in which popular universities attract more students than others, but there's a definite risk that the opposite occurs—that students lose opportunities because universities become overly cautious about making offers, wary of the potential financial penalties, even where those universities do have the potential capacity to support those students.

At the very minimum, this legislation should ensure that a student who has already begun a Commonwealth supported place can't lose that status. The government has to provide this express guarantee. For example, it could do that in section 30-30 of the bill.

The government should also provide in section 30-20 that the ATEC must allocate each tertiary provider a domestic student profile that is not less than the provider's core student load. These safeguards are the bare minimum, and I again commend the member for Curtin's amendments, which will deliver some of these changes. There is a trade-off inherent to these reforms.

This bill will facilitate increased CSP participation through the minister growing the total pool allocation, but, at the same time, the bill introduces new restrictions on the ability of individual universities to respond to increased demand through the imposition of hard caps on the domestic student profile. In that sense, the reforms in this bill are internally contradictory.

Total allocation pool enrolments will increase overall by 230,000 over the next 10 years and will increase in a managed way—but possibly by less than the growth that would have occurred in a system with more flexible arrangements, like our current system. University growth has occurred in unmanaged and unintended ways, which is why the accord recommended, and the government is introducing, a system of managed growth.

But the bill fails to address one of the key reasons that universities have experienced unintended growth across certain disciplines: the Job-ready Graduates, or JRG, Package. The JRG Package was introduced in 2021 to steer students towards particular fields by restructuring student contribution amounts. Under JRG, by next year, students in the highest contribution band will pay more than $54,000 for a standard three-year bachelor's degree and over $90,000 for double degrees.

At the same time, though, universities will continue to have to absorb an annual funding shortfall of $800 million, because JRG reduced Commonwealth contributions for degrees by more than it increased student contributions. Just remember: it's $54,000 for an undergraduate bachelor's degree. Innovative Research Universities found that, in 2024 alone, the students in the highest-charging fields paid up to $1.3 billion more than they would have if JRG hadn't existed.

Recommendation 16a of the Australian Universities Accord final report called for student contribution rates in the highest-charging fields under JRG to be urgently remediated. In February this year, the minister recognised that JRG has failed, and yet section 33-7 of this bill entrenches existing Job-ready Graduates funding clusters. Managed growth is an important reform to meet Australia's educational attainment goals, but we can't promote those while imposing punitive debts on students and while undermining the sustainability of university teaching.

Those aspects of growing the universities sector are at odds with each other. Managed growth might widen and might even open the door to opportunity, but this bill leaves in place a very nasty surprise waiting on the other side of that door. I ask the minister to explain to the House why, having redesigned almost every other part of the higher education landscape, the government has chosen to leave its most widely criticised—even internally criticised—element in place.

On current advice, the ATEC is developing a new higher education costing and pricing framework, with advice expected in the second half of 2027. The summary of progress to date on that work revealed that the forum was not intended to revisit the Job-ready Graduates Package, but rather to focus on understanding costs. So, three years after the accord called for urgent remediation of Job-ready Graduates, we'll receive a report that doesn't even consider the fact that arts and law and finance students are paying more than $18,000 a year, and that they've been doing that for far longer under the Albanese government than they did under Scott Morrison.

On the current trajectory, it will take at least eight years and two parliamentary terms to begin to reverse JRG. It will take at least eight years after Labor first labelled this scheme 'highly inequitable' and 'dubious' for them to even approach it. Without an explicit direction to bring that work forward, students will commence and continue to study in 2027 and 2028 under a contribution schedule that every review to date, including the government's own, has found to be broken.

The government legislated the universities accord act earlier this year. It drafted that act with ministerial powers. I want the minister to use the powers that he gave himself, and so I call on him to, firstly, immediately advise the ATEC that reviewing the funding arrangements introduced under the Job-ready Graduates Package is a short-term, urgent and strategic priority under section 15 of the act; and, secondly, immediately issue written directions by legislative instrument under section 71 of the act requiring the ATEC commissioners, in carrying out the commission's functions, to prioritise providing advice and recommendations to the minister on options for reforming the funding arrangements introduced under the Job-ready Graduates Package.

This bill does do important things to open the doors of opportunity. It legislates needs based funding for disadvantaged First Nations and regional students. It's a meaningful acknowledgement that a university place in this country means something very different depending on where you grew up and your family's financial circumstances, and this bill sets Australia on a path towards the attainment targets that the accord identified as essential to our national prosperity.

But the doors that prospective students walk through will not be defined by opportunity while the Job-ready Graduates scheme remains in place. In recognising that, I move: That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House: (1) notes that: (a) next year, university students will be paying over $54,000 for standard bachelor's degrees; and (b) this bill fails to address the unfair and punitive funding arrangements introduced under the Job-ready Graduates Package; (2) calls on the Government to exercise powers under the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) Act 2026 (Cth) to: (a) immediately advise the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) that reviewing the funding arrangements introduced under the Job-ready Graduates Package is a short-term, urgent strategic priority; and (b) immediately issue written directions, by legislative instrument, requiring the ATEC Commissioners, in carrying out the Commission's functions, to prioritise providing advice and recommendations to the Minister on options for reforming the funding arrangements introduced under the Job-ready Graduates Package".

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Garland ): Are the amendments seconded? Ms Chaney: Yes. I second the amendments and reserve my right to speak.