Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026
Mr NEUMANN (Blair) (10:22): I'm pleased to speak in support of the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. I am surprised to see how few speakers on this bill are from Liberal and National Party electorates in regional and rural areas. This is the sort of bill that would help people in the communities that they represent, like regional Queensland, who struggle to get to university and who really need their regional universities funded better, and would help make sure that those kids get every opportunity in life.
I'm very surprised that there are so few speakers from the conservative side of politics speaking on this legislation. Labor governments have always been about opening the doors of opportunity. I grew up in a working-class family in Ipswich.
My dad was a cleaner at a meatworks, and my mum was a shop assistant. I was the first person directly in my family ever to go to high school, let alone university. It was the teachers in year 12 at Bundamba State Secondary College which gave me the aspiration, the inspiration and the opportunity to go to university.
I'm the first person from my high school to ever study law at university. I would not be here today in this place if not for the interest and support of my teachers and for the opportunities given to me, a working-class boy from Trumper Street in East Ipswich, at the back of a flood affected house, in the back of a school in a battling suburb in Ipswich. Education raised my expectations.
It gave me a chance to be in this place. It gave me a chance to build, along with, at first, my fellow business partners and then my fellow directors and shareholders, a multimillion-dollar business as a lawyer in the Brisbane CBD. Education changes lives, and it certainly changed mine.
Education lifts people up, including kids in regional and rural communities and in working-class communities like the one I grew up in Ipswich. On the night of the last election, the Prime Minister talked about how Labor governments opened the door of opportunity and how this government will open it just a bit more. And that's what this bill is about—opening the doors of opportunity wider for more Australians.
The Albanese Labor government has introduced this legislation to help more Australians get to and through university. The bill makes two major reforms to our university system and how we fund our universities—not for us. Australian workplace agreements and Work Choices and the defunding of universities, should those universities not take up that pernicious system of Work Choices, were inflicted upon us by those opposite back in the Howard days.
We have a different approach to universities. If the member for Wentworth is unhappy about our more centralised approach, I believe government has a role to play in public policy to drive the university sector and drive education to make sure it's available to everyone, not just in wealthy electorates but in regional and rural electorates like mine. Firstly, this bill establishes a managed growth fund to build a bigger and better and fairer education system that gives more Australians the chance to go to university.
Secondly, it puts in place needs based funding so young people from disadvantaged backgrounds will get the support they need to succeed at university. This is the seventh piece of legislation introduced by our government to implement the universities accord. It's part of a broader response to that accord, and it means an extra $3.6 billion in funding for universities over the next decade.
Specifically, what has it done? Firstly, on managed growth funding, this year more students are starting university, and we're building on that by funding more university places. Over the next three years, there will be an additional 16,000 places for students in the system each year.
From 2030, this will increase to 19,000 additional places each year. Over the next decade, we expect an additional 230,000 students commencing university studies. We're funding that growth and giving the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, or ATEC, the tools to manage it.
As part of this bill, the government will set the total number of Commonwealth supported places, and ATEC will allocate those places to universities. We think that's the best approach, not a situation of competition like the member for Wentworth talked about. The ATEC will also have the power to allocate additional places where it thinks they are needed to meet the demands from students from disadvantaged backgrounds and from regional and remote communities.
That's why it bewilders me that there are not enough and not more speakers from conservative regional and rural communities across Queensland and elsewhere speaking on this bill. This bill will effectively mean places for those students will now be uncapped. Moving on to needs based funding, we know the Gonski model for student funding in primary schools and secondary schools provides schools with extra funding based on where they are located and the needs of the students they educate.
Students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds receive additional support and so do schools in regional and remote communities. The Minister for Education put it well, I think, when he said this bill is like Gonski for universities. I agree.
Universities will receive more funding as they enrol more students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, First Nations students and students studying at regional campuses. At the end of the day, if you get the marks and you've got the skills, you've got what it takes. You deserve a place.
I think that's the Australian way. These reforms mean we'll guarantee you a Commonwealth supported place, and we'll make sure you get the support you need when you get there. This is similar to the reforms we're implementing to fix the funding of our schools, as well as tying those reforms to help more kids finish high school and then go to university or TAFE.
Needs based funding will provide universities with additional resources for tutoring, mentoring, academic assistance, scholarships and emergency financial support for those students. That's important because we know that kids from regional Australia, kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, are about twice as likely as other students to drop out of university in the first year at university.
What does this mean in practice for those kids from disadvantaged backgrounds? Whether they grow up in Ipswich or Esk in my electorate of Blair, for example, it will more than double the amount of funding to help them finish their degree—with things like extra academic support, tutoring and mentoring—from $600 a student to more than $1,500. The bill sets out the base equity amount of $1,535 and the base regional support at $1,398, with both amounts indexed each year.
Guidelines will set out how the base amount is to be applied to each student based on which cohort they're in. In addition, the bill sets out a framework for the ATEC to exercise its existing function to allocate international student places where the Minister for Education makes an international allocation pool determination, something that those opposite have steadfastly opposed.
It also makes small technical amendments to modernise information sharing between the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency and ATEC to inform their work as appropriate. Specifically, the bill amends the Higher Education Support Act 2003 and other acts. First, it will embed a new managed growth funding system to support growth in domestic students—in particular, those from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and regional and remote communities.
Second, the bill will establish demand driven, needs based funding to support students from those backgrounds. And, third, it will formalise the role of ATEC in allocating Commonwealth supported places to higher education providers. In addition, it sets out a framework for ATEC to exercise its existing functions.
It's worth noting these critical structural reforms have been the subject of extensive stakeholder consultation, and universities and peak bodies have indicated they're supportive of the new model. And why wouldn't they be? We know that under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating the number of Australians finishing high school jumped from around 40 per cent to almost 80 per cent, which was nation building in terms of our economy and in terms of equity.
These reforms are the next step in our efforts to build Australia's human capital. The universities accord set a target that, by 2050, 80 per cent of the workforce will have a TAFE qualification or a university degree. The only way to do this is to break down the barriers that stop many young people getting to university, certainly from regional and rural communities and from low-socioeconomic backgrounds.
The talent is there, but the opportunity is not. As a nation, we need to build capacity and spread opportunity across the country. We need to do more to guard against the 'tyranny of low expectations', as former prime minister and education minister Julia Gillard put it, and to ensure every school leaver in this country is given the tools for success in life.
These reforms build on the Bradley review reforms that Julia Gillard put in place during her time in government, and they will mean more young people from poorer families and from the regions and the bush get a crack at university. We want to significantly increase the number of university students from areas in the outer suburbs and the regions—for example, in my electorate, around Ipswich and the Somerset Region.
We're already well served by two university campuses in my electorate via the University of Southern Queensland, or UniSQ, as it's commonly called. There's one at Ipswich and one at Springfield. I congratulate UniSQ on their 20-year anniversary for their Springfield campus.
I attended a wonderful celebration for that on Saturday. Both campuses have done so much to improve access to education in the fast-growing Ipswich region and beyond, in Logan and in the regional areas such as the Scenic Rim, the Somerset Region and the Lockyer Valley. The University of Southern Queensland is contributing to our economic development and our local workforce needs.
Indeed it is contributing in your electorate too, Deputy Speaker Buchholz, in the Lockyer Valley. With University of Southern Queensland campuses in Toowoomba at one end and in Ipswich and Springfield, that whole corridor is well served. It means that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and from regional and rural communities can get the opportunity to go to university.
Why? Because they can see the campuses there. They can see the opportunity and they can seize that opportunity—not just see it but seize it.
That's really crucial for kids from the Somerset Region, from the Lockyer Valley, from the Scenic Rim and from Ipswich because they are disadvantaged. There is no doubt they're disadvantaged. Establishing that campus at Springfield was so critical.
It's an integral part of the greater Springfield area. Establishing it was the vision of Bob Sharpless and Maha Sinnathamby. I congratulate both of them for the work they've done in establishing Springfield City Group's education city vision.
It really has grown in line with the master planned community, bringing together education, industry, health and civic life. I dropped in to the Ipswich campus of UniSQ the other day to talk to some of their allied health students about the government's announcement that we're expanding paid prac to 10 additional courses like physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology and pharmacy.
That is on top of the cuts to student debt that we've done, which were so popular in the last campaign, I might add. The students were very happy with the government providing real cost-of-living relief and helping them train for some of the most important jobs in our country and especially our region. I think it's fantastic, by the way, that there's a health focus at the University of Southern Queensland Ipswich campus, and I commend them for their interest in establishing there a centre for palliative care with Ipswich Hospice so that allied health students, medical students and the like can train from that campus in palliative care.
What a great initiative. I commend it. It's something that I'll be fighting for in terms of funding, and I know this is very important from my local community as it's so fast growing.
Now, we don't want to be a country where your chances in life depend on how rich your parents are or we happen to live. Certainly, I grew up in a tough background and a tough environment, but education offered me the opportunity to get ahead in life. We don't want to be in a situation where your race, your religion, your location or your postcode dictate your chances in life.
That's not what we want to be as a country. We want to be a country that believes in the fair go. Legislation like this is what this is about.
It's about what we hope to achieve, what we as a country believe is important. It's no good criticising and nitpicking if you come from a rich area. People who come from the big capital cities at times don't understand how tough it is in regional areas.
For universities, the idea of going to university, if you're a kid growing up in Toogoolawah, is a massive change in life. If you're living in Laidley, Boonah or Esk, it is a huge change. You have to uproot yourself to go to university.
It is a major, major change. Legislation like this will majorly affect them and, importantly, assist them. It will mean that those universities will have greater opportunity to offer courses and more funding to assist those students.
It will mean more students and more funding. This is a big structural reform. It will build a bigger, better and fairer higher education system.
It will change lives and it will change the country. I thank the minister. He made the point that almost 50 per cent of young Australians in their 30s today have university degrees.
That is not the case in my community, and we need it to be. I want a time when a kid who lives in Ipswich or a kid who lives in Kilcoy aspires to university and gets that chance. Bills like this and funding like this will make a difference.