Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026

Ms MASCARENHAS (Swan) (12:53): Neither of my parents finished high school, and my nana-in-law, Nana Dawn, never got to start high school. What's interesting is that sometimes you might think that these people do not value education, but I'd say that it is exactly the opposite. These people did not have access to education, and they wanted their children to make sure that they had access to good-quality education.

I was born in Kalgoorlie and grew up in a nickel-mining town called Kambalda in regional Western Australia. My dad was a metal worker. My mum was the lollipop lady and a kindergarten cleaner.

My parents migrated from Kenya to Kalgoorlie, and they did that because they fundamentally wanted their children to have access to something that they did not have, which was a better education. Education has always been important in my family, and I know that for many families across Australia it is exactly the same. One of the proudest things for my parents was seeing both of their daughters finish high school but also go to university.

When I was 15 years old, my old man was made redundant. He had worked for Western Mines for 19 years and he was really distraught that that had happened. He had worked for four decades.

But he wanted to make sure that that did not distract from my goals and what my future would be. Money was really tight. As a high school student, I worked at Woolworths.

I never asked Mum and Dad for money. I paid for my own ball dress. For me, going to university, I was really worried about the cost and so I applied for as many scholarships as I could.

I applied for scholarships where you talk yourself up. So I talked about my academic record, my volunteer work in the community and my academic achievements. They're not the scholarships that I was offered.

I also applied for some HECS exemption merit scholarships where I talked about all the things that weren't in my favour. That included being from a regional town. It included being the child of migrants.

It included studying in a male-dominated area and also the fact that my old man had been made redundant. So I ended up getting offered a HECS exemption scholarship, and I have to say that that was life changing. I'm really grateful that that happened.

But I know that not all students have access to that. Sometimes there are these barriers that get in the way. So the thing that excites me about this particular bill is that, if I was finishing school in the goldfields, the odds of going to university would be significantly increased.

Under this bill, a student from the country is not left hoping to win a scholarship. A funded place built in the system for them will now be law. Some regional kids want to study in the regions.

Then there are some that don't. That was me. In the town where I grew up, it sometimes felt like the options were to get stoned, get pregnant or work on the mines.

For me, I wanted to get out. I still had a career that was on the mines, but I absolutely wanted to move to the big smoke and go to university. I have to say that my first year of university in particular was amazing.

I got to meet students from all across WA—from regional places but also the city, from private schools and public schools. The double degree of chemistry and chemical engineering at Curtin University was phenomenal. I made lifelong friendships, including with some amazing women: Pippa, Yong, Vanessa and Joelle.

They were amazing girlfriends who I'm still friends with today. I want to make sure that more people have access to the opportunity of going to university. The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 builds on the work of the Australian Universities Accord: final report, which is one of the most significant reviews of higher education this country has undertaken in a generation.

That review set out a blueprint for reform not just for the recent budget or for this term but for the next decade and the decades that will come after. The Albanese Labor government has already implemented a majority of the accord's 47 recommendations. This is the seventh bill to come out of that work.

This bill changes how university places are funded and allocated in the first place. It puts new funding behind students who need extra support once they get there. At the centre of that first change is something called the Commonwealth supported place, a university place where the government covers part of the cost of the student's degree so that a student pays a subsidised fee instead of the full cost upfront.

My electorate of Swan is home to Curtin University, one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse electorates in Western Australia. The students who walk onto that campus every day come from all across Perth, all across WA and sometimes all across the continent. But there are many students that come from Cannington, Belmont, Vic Park, Rivervale and Como.

Some are the first in their family to study at university. Some are new to this country. Some are balancing study with work and family responsibilities that their peers just don't have to think about.

There are often invisible stresses that push more and more young people away from attending university because, when signing up to further their education, they're also signing up to debt, which sometimes can follow Australians for a large part of their lives. For years, the number of these places a university could offer was based largely on how it had enrolled in the past, not on what students actually needed in the present.

That meant that a student's chance often came down to timing and luck as much as ability. This bill is changing that. It hands the job of planning growth in our university system to the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, the independent body this parliament established to steward the system as a whole.

Under the new system, the government sets out a total number of funded places available each year. The commission then allocates them to universities in two parts. The first is its core allocation.

It locks in the number of places a university already has so that no university sees its funding cut or its student numbers shrink because of this change. A growth allocation is then applied on top, directed to where it's needed most, including to students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and from regional and remote Australia. If the commission decides that it isn't enough to meet demand, it can ask the government to lift the pool.

In practice, for these students, the cap comes off. If you have the marks, if you have what it takes, you get a place. Over the next decade, this reform is expected to fund an extra 230,000 commencing domestic students backed by $3.6 billion.

That's 230,000 more students walking onto university campuses all around Australia. That's 230,000 chances for a young person from Rivervale, Cannington or a mining town like Kambalda, where I grew up, to do exactly what I was able to do. This bill also cleans up a system where some universities have been enrolling students they cannot be fully funded to teach.

It gives underenrolled universities a temporary funding floor while they transition, and it hands the allocation of international student places to the commission as well within an overall pool set by the government. The part of the bill that I want to return to is the part that speaks most directly to students like the one I once was. Getting in the door is only half the job; staying there is the other half.

This bill legislates needs based funding for students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, First Nations students and students studying at regional campuses. The more support a student needs, the more funding follows them. Universities can put this funding towards tutoring, mentoring, scholarships and emergency grants.

It's the kind of support that helps a student not just start a degree but also finish it. The bill sets the base equity amount at $1,535 and the regional base amount at $1,398, both indexed every year. Under the old scheme, the universities received as little as $600 per student.

This more than doubles it, and it's demand driven. The more students a university enrols who meet the criteria, the more funding it receives. A student's background should never decide their future.

It's interesting when I think of my time at Curtin University. Often the first year was the year when you would see the most people drop out of university. Often it was because of these barriers that related to financial circumstances at home or to moving from one town to another or, alternatively, to just not having the right supports in place.

I think, if you are lucky enough to get a place at university, we should be doing everything that we can to make sure that we help you actually finish your study. That principle doesn't just stop on university campuses. It should follow students to their learning within the workforce.

That is why the government has also acted on paid prac, a complementary accord reform sitting alongside the changes in this bill. A few months ago, a young woman who was studying physiotherapy called Gabby came to see me in my office to raise her concerns about the hardships allied health students face in being able to afford to live, study and complete unpaid clinical prac placements.

Gabby's in her second year at Curtin University. She moved from down south to Perth, and she's passionate about her physiotherapy career. Like every physiotherapy student, she must complete 1,000 hours of unpaid clinical prac placement before she can graduate.

For a long time, that meant weighing up her degree against her ability to pay rent or pay for groceries. This is where we have said that we want to make sure that we fix this system. Paid prac was already supporting teachers, students, midwives and social workers.

As we announced last month, the Albanese government is now extending Commonwealth prac payment to 10 more frontline health professions, including physiotherapy. This is a huge testament to Gabby and the other advocates who had the courage to step up and speak out for their peers, who now have access to paid prac. For students relocating to complete placements in regional and remote Australia, where health workforce shortages are most often more acute, the support can be the difference between undertaking the placement at all or turning it down.

As Education Minister Jason Clare said, students on placement deserve to be able to afford something that's more nutritious than two-minute noodles. For Gabby, this announcement has lifted a huge weight off her shoulders. In her words, she feels relief.

This announcement means that she can finally focus more on now, rather than fearing homelessness and hunger while she trains to help others. Gabby also asked me to pass on her gratitude to everyone who's fought for paid prac over many years so that she can graduate without burnout before her professional career even begins. I want to add my thanks, too, to Gabby, for having the courage to come speak to me and to speak to her local member of parliament, and to every physiotherapy, nursing, psychology or allied health student across Australia who's training to look after the rest of us.

Gabby's story is one of a thousand students' across this country who have benefited from this government chipping away at the barriers to higher education. Since we've come into office, we've cut student debt by 20 per cent for 3.2 million Australians, wiping off more than $16 billion in the process. We've capped indexation to lower the CPI and wages so that debt can never again grow faster than what people earn.

We've doubled the number of university study hubs, with 20 new regional hubs and 14 in the suburbs. We've made bridging courses free. We've also established the National Student Ombudsman and a national code to prevent and respond to gender-based violence so that a young woman's degree does not end because of what someone did to her on campus.

We've made the Commonwealth supported places demand driven for First Nations students who get the marks. And we've established the Australian Tertiary Education Commission so that somebody is finally stewarding this whole system, rather than each piece working in isolation. Every one of these changes was a door opened a little wider, and this bill is the next step.

For me, my path went from Kalgoorlie to Curtin to Canberra, and I now represent the electorate of Swan, where I live, where I studied and where I met my husband on campus. What I would say is that there is more work to do, but a substantial next step is the chance for a student like Gabby to stay and finish her studies. It's a chance for a student like I once was to actually start university.

I commend this bill to the House.