Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026

Mr SOON (Banks) (18:08): Prior to being a parliamentarian, I was a different type of public servant. I spent a great deal of my career working in education policy, looking at how education systems, both in Australia and overseas, can be more effective and provide better outcomes for students. My time in this field showed me that there is much government can do in order to improve our education system from an efficiency and effectiveness perspective.

However, if a situation persists where students are unable to meaningfully access the education system, government must legislate in order to ensure that the transformational power of education is an opportunity available to all. The government released the final report of the Australian Universities Accord in February 2024. The universities accord is a blueprint for higher education reform over the next 20 years, and the government has made significant progress in its implementation.

So far, this Labor government has implemented 30 of the accord's 47 recommendations in part or in full. As promised, the first piece of legislation passed by this parliament cut the HECS debts of hundreds of thousands of Australians by 20 per cent, along with changes to cap indexation, moving to a marginal repayment system and raising the minimum threshold to make the HECS system fairer on students and graduates.

We introduced the Commonwealth paid prac payment for teaching nursing, midwifery and social work students, ensuring that students studying some of the most in-demand professions do not have to choose between paying their bills and completing their mandatory practical training. We've seen the results of the paid prac payment and, as was announced a few weeks ago, we're expanding it to students studying to be paramedics, pharmacists, psychologists and seven more in-demand allied health professions.

This expansion represents a $143 million investment in our health workforce, ensuring that we can continue to train local talent for in-demand professions in our healthcare system. It was my pleasure to welcome the Minister for Health and Ageing to the suburb of Mortdale in my electorate two weeks ago to meet with local speech pathologists and occupational therapists.

While all of the professionals we met spoke about the value of their practical training, they also reflected that it was a significant challenge for them to give up existing work in order to support themselves. The recommendations also included making sure that there were proper stewards of our higher education system and a process to resolve student complaints when they call out the behaviour of higher education providers.

This government has established the Australian Tertiary Education Commission through legislation which passed the house earlier this year and came into effect in April. The commission will help deliver reforms needed to ensure the higher education system is working in the national interest, as well as monitor the performance of providers and provide advice to government on appropriate policy settings for our country.

What the Universities Accord made particularly clear is that our higher education system needs reform urgently to ensure it continues to deliver for students and our economy. The accord says clearly that, over the next decade, the number of people in the workforce with a certificate, a diploma or a degree will need to grow to 80 per cent. It means more students at universities and TAFE across our country if we are to meet Australia's growing skills need.

This legislation is the latest step in the government's response to make sure we can address those needs. The accord recommended a new funding model for higher education, planned and managed through the ATEC. It also recommended increasing the number of students, as my colleague the member for Barton outlined earlier, from underrepresented backgrounds and a focus on ensuring their success.

In short, this legislation does three things. It embeds the new, managed-growth funding system to support growth in domestic students, including those from low-socioeconomic, regional and remote backgrounds. It establishes demand driven, needs based funding to support students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, First Nations students and students studying at regional campuses.

It also formalises the role of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission in allocating Commonwealth supported places for higher education courses to providers and international students where the minister makes a determination. As a result, the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 enacts government's commitment of an additional $3.6 billion in the higher education system over the medium term and is projected to see 230,000 extra domestic students commence university over the next decade.

The House Standing Committee on Education is currently conducting an inquiry into the factors driving educational attainment, examining what drives differences in outcomes across different demographics. While the inquiry will seek to provide clarity on what creates these disparities in the education space, what can't be questioned is that they are there. As the minister pointed out when he moved the second reading, close to 50 per cent of Australians in their 30s have a university degree, but it is significantly lower for people who come from a lower socioeconomic background or from the regions and lower still for people from rural or remote areas.

It is a disparity that we need to change, not just because we need more people who have tertiary education but also as a matter of fairness, because there are talented young people everywhere, all over our country, who come from all different backgrounds. The new managed growth fund system will effectively uncap the number of places for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and regional areas.

These changes sit alongside the network of suburban and regional study hubs for university students that this government has doubled, bringing down the barriers to tertiary education for students in the outer suburbs, in regional and remote areas of our country. They provide a place for students to study and access IT equipment as well as advice on career pathways, employment, study options and their general wellbeing—all the things that students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and in the big cities often have easy access to.

These centres are a game changer, and the big winners are our regional communities. Of the 70 centres in the network, 55 are in regional or remote Australia. According to the Department for Education Statistics, they have supported nearly 21,000 students.

The demand-driven, needs based funding model will provide extra funding to support students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, First Nations students and students studying at regional campuses. Under this new arrangement, the amount of funding per student will more than double in some cases. Similarly to the Gonski model for schools, the more students a university has that meet these criteria, the more funding the university will receive to help these students participate and succeed.

The bill before the House sets the base equity amount at $1,535 and the base regional amount at $1,398, which is more than double the average amount provided last year. In some cases, under previous comparable funding programs it was as little as $600. Universities will be able to put this funding towards academic support programs such as tutoring and mentoring, direct financial assistance in the form of grants or scholarships, or offsetting of the higher cost of campuses in regional and remote areas.

We know that students from the cohorts this bill seeks to help are less likely to start a university degree. They are also less likely to finish it, with data indicating they are twice as likely to drop out after their first year. This is why needs based funding is so important.

It is a real reform to ensure that students who, coming out of school, have the grades to get into university have the supports to finish their degrees. Additionally, the bill sets out and formalises some procedural elements, including a framework for the ATEC to exercise its existing powers to allocate international student places where the Minister for Education makes an international allocation pool determination.

The bill also makes some technical amendments to modernise information sharing between the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency—the regulator—and ATEC to inform their work as needed and appropriate. I also feel compelled to challenge one of the points that the member for Berowra made in his contribution to the House. One of the central arguments he made was his idea that competition, deregulation and independence would be the best way forward for the university sector.

Core to that was the notion that we should let the university sector operate like other marketplaces and encourage competition. It has to be said, though, letting universities operate like businesses, rather than educational institutions, in a market that is inherently uneven or unequal has unfortunately been part of the problem. Even the father of classical economics, Adam Smith, argued that education should not be left to the market.

Some universities have access to a larger pool of potential students than others. Some universities have reputations built over decades of prestige that make them inherently more attractive to potential students. The need to meet commercial pressures in such an environment is what has driven an overreliance on certain revenue streams, such as international students, that the government has had to correct.

In some circumstances it has also predicated a drop in the quality of education delivered and the sort of conduct uncovered by inquiries into university governance, like the one my friend Dr Sarah Kaine is chairing in the New South Wales parliament. Indeed, higher education is not just any good or service. Given the level of tertiary qualified students our economy is going to need, it is becoming more and more essential.

Pursuing purer competition and deregulation in the university sector would only usher in a new era of problems that Australian students have had enough of, as well as the sort of consolidation that reduces access in the name of commercial performance. This legislation is important. Too many young people in this country face barriers to higher education on the basis of things that they cannot control.

We cannot go on telling young people that they should have aspirations for their future, before leaving them at the mercy of a system that gets in the way of them reaching that potential, not least of all because as a country we cannot afford the underlying cost of talented young people not getting a chance to succeed on the basis of where they live or how much their parents earn.

This legislation before the House will help make our higher education sector fairer. It will help build a sector where growth is planned, giving providers the certainty to plan for the future; where funding responds to the needs of students, lowering the barriers that prevent educational attainment and success; and where the opportunity to access the transformational power of education is not rationed for some while being plentiful for others but is available to all Australians, including in my electorate of Banks and in regional remote areas across our great country.