Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026

Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (10:21): Universities should be fee free and fully funded for teaching, learning and research. No student should live in poverty while studying or be burdened with a lifetime of debt. Higher education, like all education, should be a public good built on equity and democracy.

These are the basic propositions that shouldn't be hard to achieve in a country as wealthy as ours. But this Labor government keeps choosing to keep students poor and in debt. Labor's decision to continue the Liberals' uni fee hikes and funding cuts forces students to take on crushing debts in crowded classrooms at unis too often beset by governance crises.

Staff are battling wage theft, job insecurity, course cuts and, increasingly, the threat of executives seeking to replace them with AI. As the cost of living worsens and students cry out for help, the test for any higher education legislation that speaks the language of opportunity is whether it rises to these challenges. The Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026, as it stands today, does not meet that challenge.

It falls far short of delivering the change university students and staff deserve, both in policy design and in funding. The bill promises equity, yet, four years after being elected, the Albanese government still refuses to address higher education's most egregiously inequitable policy—the Liberals' fee hikes and funding cuts, which have sentenced students to forever debts and fifty-four thousand dollar arts degrees and priced out low-SES students, whose commencements have decreased by almost 10 per cent.

This policy alone has cost students at least $2.1 billion in the past four years. How can you all sit here and tell students that you are opening the doors of opportunity when support payments like youth allowance and Austudy are well below the poverty line? When you're forcing students to starve just to afford their degrees, all while with the cost-of-living crisis is increasing under your watch, how is that opportunity?

Tell me, what door is it that you are opening for students? It certainly isn't a door to an affordable home with food on the table. Labor can dress this bill up in words like 'equity' all it likes, but the bill itself does nothing to change the fact that too many young people are struggling through uni or have stopped going to uni altogether.

The committee inquiry into this bill made clear that there are many things in this bill that need to change, relating to student choice, growth, ministerial powers, postgraduate students, international students, equity students—and on the list goes. My team and I have been through these with the minister and his office, with good faith from both sides, I might say, and I will be moving amendments to address many of these issues.

It's not just a couple of amendments but pages and pages of amendments. You do have to wonder why a bill that needs so many changes was even brought into parliament in the first place. The higher education sector is in such crisis that it has been cornered into accepting the bare minimum, cornered into accepting crumbs when what is needed is a bigger pie of funding.

If the Albanese government is serious about improving equity, then it needs to get serious about fully funding fee-free higher education. I urge the education minister to keep pushing the Prime Minister to invest much more in the future of higher education and our young people and our country. Otherwise, we'll always be doing gymnastics without actually solving the real problem.

A primary concern I and many others have had from the start is the bill's potential to curtail student choice. Students may not get a Commonwealth supported place, CSP, at the university and course of their choosing because places are capped. Instead, the minister and ATEC are attempting to funnel students into institutions and courses they may not want to go to—and to do what?

To patch funding holes of the government's own making because they refuse to fund universities. The Greens will be protecting student choice by ensuring that ATEC must take student demand into account when setting allocations and by expanding the overenrolment provision from a hard cap to a buffer. This bill also allows the minister to set CSPs for a designated course to zero.

You can just imagine that under—God forbid!—a coalition or One Nation government they would seek to ban degrees and courses that they don't like in the name of being against 'wokeness'. No minister should ever be able to tell a student what they can and cannot study. The Greens will be bringing an amendment to remove this provision.

The problem is not where students are choosing to study but decades of Labor and the coalition deliberately underfunding and cutting funds to higher education. Universities, staff and students are bearing the brunt of this. Our regional universities are also suffering.

If regional universities are to thrive and be attractive to students, they must be fully funded, including through dedicating funding for infrastructure and research investment. That is actually what the accord recommended, not this half-assed response that we have today. Tying funding to student places and hoping that they will come is not really a solution.

The Greens support needs based funding, yet the funding could all be squashed by one single section that allows the minister to set the equity support amount provided to university to zero dollars. You cannot say that you are providing needs based funding and then leave it open for a future government to make that funding zero. The Greens will be moving an amendment to fix this.

In the inquiry, we also heard countless witnesses share the absurdity of the bill calculating the applicability of needs based funding at the time the person enrols in the unit. This means that a low-SES student living in a regional area who moves to the inner city for university is apparently no longer disadvantaged. So we are going to rectify this perverse application as well.

It appears that Labor has sought to limit the eligibility of needs based funding to as small a cohort as possible. The only reason for this is their refusal to fund universities properly and fully or even fund every equity student a Commonwealth supported place in the degree and university of their choosing. Instead, they would rather splurge and waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on fossil fuel subsidies and non-existent nuclear submarines.

Numerous submissions from universities, students, the NTEU and academics raised concerns that the current definition of a low-socioeconomic student is inadequate and unfit for purpose, utilising an outdated postcode determinant. The planned definition does not account for income, employment, family education history, occupation, housing, caring responsibilities, cultural barriers, disability or language proficiency.

The Albanese government's response is, 'We'll look into it.' Well, you've had four years in government to look into it and you have fallen short yet again. This bill was the perfect opportunity to fix this outdated and blunt measure. I do hope that Labor is sincere when it says that it will now start this work.

A highly criticised aspect of this bill is an overall lack of accountability and transparency combined with excessive ministerial powers. We will be moving a number of amendments that go some way to addressing these issues. ATEC will be required to publish its reasons when making allocations, and the minister's unfettered power to make conditions on funding grants will be removed.

This power could have been used to further crack down on students raising their voices for justice for Palestine, for example, or even forced universities to adopt the highly controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The interventionist precedent this power would create should alarm everyone, and it is unacceptable to the Greens.

We will be removing the section. The bill, as it stands, allows the minister to set a course and provide a level of allocations for international students. There are people in this chamber who, if they had this power, would actually set this allocation to zero.

I think you all know who I am talking about here. Unsurprisingly, this is the Albanese government having another swing at migration policy and trying to disguise it as education policy. As Mr Richard Lee from the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations shared, 'International students are not a tap to turn on and off.' The continual scapegoating of international students for the government's own policy failures is damaging.

It causes harm to students and migrants. Minister Clare has admitted that international-student visa fees, tripled since 2024, are being used to fund the accord reforms. International students are not cash cows or political playthings.

The Albanese government must stop wrecking international education to pander to One Nation's racist, antimigrant stance. It is disappointing that the government decided not to support expanding the evaluation of the act to include reviewing the allocation of international students. Their politicisation of international students trumps good policy once again, and it is students and universities who will suffer.

The Prime Minister is really in a shameful race to the bottom with One Nation on migration, and he's made it clear that he doesn't care about international students being collateral damage or about our higher education system suffering. I want to go to postgraduate students for a minute. With the exception of First Nations students, the bill excludes postgraduate students from needs based funding.

While the bill allows a university to determine how it uses its allocation of CSPs, tying needs based funding only to undergraduate students creates a perverse incentive for universities to use all, or a large portion, of their allocated CSPs for undergraduate students. Needs based funding must cover the full pipeline of university education and all equity students, without which the door will remain tightly shut to postgraduate degrees and to research as well.

Without the Greens in the Senate, this bill would have handed the minister of the day diabolical interventionist powers over higher education, placed unacceptable limits on student choice and failed to deliver equity. I want to thank my team, especially Sienna and Lauren, who have worked so hard for us to get to this outcome today, with 12 amendments being made in the Senate and a couple in the House.

The 12 amendments we have secured demonstrate the importance of the Greens in the Senate. I'll finish where I started. This bill has no additional funding beyond what is already budgeted for universities.

For a sector whose expenditure totalled $43.1 billion in 2024, a mere $3.66 billion over the next decade is crumbs. If the Albanese government wants to improve equity, they must repeal the fee hikes and funding cuts they've kept on the books for four years—not in two years time, but today. We will not see true equity in Australia's higher education system until universities are fee-free and fully funded for learning, teaching and research.

All I ask is that the Prime Minister give young people what he himself enjoyed: free education at a well-funded public university. Opening a door will not do much good until and unless the government addresses student poverty, abolishes student debt and increases student support payments, PhD stipends and housing affordability, all of which impact students' ability to walk through the door and out the other end having completed their degrees.

We know there is so much work to be done to ensure staff have the governance structures to be able to run their universities democratically and the resources, pay and conditions for world-class teaching and research and to ensure students have the best learning conditions and are not crushed by ever-increasing fees and debt. It is possible; the only thing standing in the way is the Albanese government.

The Greens will always put students first. We will continue to fight for universities and institutions to serve the public good, not to serve the government or the corporations of the day. With that, I move the Greens' second reading amendment: At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate: (a) notes that: (i) students and young people are facing the worst of the cost of living crisis, and 'opening doors' for students is not enough if they are not supported to complete their studies, (ii) students are being shackled by a lifetime of debt which is making the cost of living crisis worse, locking people out of the housing market and crushing dreams of going to university, (iii) the punitive Job-ready Graduates scheme fee hikes, which have led to $54,000 arts degrees, have now been in place for longer under Albanese's Labor Government than they were under the Morrison Government, (iv) while degree costs skyrocket, student payments like Austudy and Youth Allowance remain well below the poverty line, (v) higher education, like education at every level, is an essential public good that should be free, accessible and equitable, and (vi) all students undertaking mandatory placements should be paid for every hour of work they are required to do, at least at minimum wage, not a lesser supplementary amount; and (b) calls on the Government to: (i) invest in, and fully fund, higher education for leaning, teaching and research, (ii) increase Austudy and Youth Allowance, (iii) wipe all student debt and make university and TAFE fee-free for all, (iv) urgently reverse the fee hikes and funding cuts of the Job-ready Graduates scheme, and (v) pay all students doing mandatory placements at no less than minimum wage rates".