Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026
Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (11:38): I rise to speak on the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026. The government has presented this bill as an equity reform, and there are elements of this bill that are intended to improve access to university for students who've traditionally been locked out of higher education. The Greens support the principle that where you grow up, how much money your parents earn, whether you live in a city or in regional Australia or whether you're the first person in your family to go to university should not determine whether you get an opportunity to pursue higher education.
Of course we support that. But, if we're going to talk seriously about equity in higher education, then we have to look at the whole system, and the reality is that our universities have become increasingly inequitable because, over decades, governments have pushed them towards a semiprivatised, market driven model. Universities have been forced to behave more and more like businesses.
They've been expected to compete for students, compete for revenue and increasingly rely on student fees and private income to keep themselves going. When you structure higher education that way, students and staff pay the price. This bill doesn't deal with one of the most fundamental barriers confronting students right now: the actual cost of being a student.
It doesn't fix student poverty. It doesn't properly address the cost of university fees. It doesn't deal with the enormous debts young people are asked to carry simply because they want an education.
It leaves the deeply flawed Job-ready Graduates system in place. The universities accord itself recognised that Job-ready Graduates needed urgent remediation, and yet Labor has still refused to scrap it. The Greens estimate that students have paid an additional $2.1 billion under Job-ready Graduates since its introduction.
That is money coming out of the pockets of students, who are already being squeezed in every direction. They're paying more for rent. They're paying more for groceries.
They're paying more for electricity. They're paying more for fuel and transport. On top of all that, they're being asked to pay more for their education.
For many students, going to university now means trying to combine full-time study with enough full-time paid work to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. This is not an incidental problem because it goes directly to whether students can succeed. You can't seriously talk about opening the doors of opportunity if students get through the door and then discover that they can't afford to stay there.
If we want students to be able to focus on their education, we need to make sure that they can afford to live while they study. That means increasing youth allowance and Austudy. Income support payments used to support people.
They shouldn't leave students choosing between attending a class and picking up another shift at work because they need to pay the rent. Labor should scrap the parental income test for students over the age of 18. Once someone is an adult, they should have the financial independence that comes with adulthood.
Their ability to study should not depend on assumptions about the financial circumstances of their parents or whether their parents are prepared or able to support them. Access is only part of the equation; we also have to make sure that students can stay at university. We have to make sure that they can stay and finish their degrees.
We have to make sure that, when they arrive at university, there are actually staff there to teach them, to support them and to provide them with the high-quality education that they all deserve. That brings us to another problem that this bill doesn't address: the chronic underfunding of our public universities. The government talks about growing the number of university places and providing additional needs based funding, and that additional funding is welcome.
But the scale of the investment still falls well short of what is required to repair a system that has been pushed towards greater dependence on student fees and other private sources of revenue. This bill only provides a mere 1.7 per cent increase in university funding, pushing more universities to rely on student fees and ever-growing HECS debts. That financial pressure has consequences.
Across the sector we've seen universities become increasingly reliant on insecure and casualised employment. We've seen staff asked to do more with less. We've seen workloads increase.
We've seen academic and professional staff stretched beyond their reasonable limits. You cannot separate the learning conditions of students from the working conditions of the people who teach and support them. If we want good universities, we need properly funded universities.
If we want high-quality education, we need university staff who have secure jobs, decent pay and a manageable workload. This is particularly important in regional Australia. Regional universities do so much more than just provide degrees.
They are major employers. They train the teachers, nurses, doctors, vets and other professionals that regional communities depend upon. They undertake research specifically relevant to those communities.
They keep skills and expertise in regional areas. They give young people the opportunity to study without having to leave their communities and move hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. That is why what is happening at James Cook University in Townsville should concern us.
JCU is considering changes that would see its veterinary diagnostic pathology laboratory close. This is not some peripheral facility. It processes samples from throughout the Townsville region and is one of Queensland's major veterinary microbiology centres.
But perhaps the people we should listen most closely to are the students themselves. JCU students have launched a petition calling on the university to save the laboratory. What they say should give everyone in this place real pause for thought.
The students point out that veterinary science, biomedical science and medical laboratory science students all benefit directly from the diagnostic service, from the practical teaching it provides and from the expertise of the scientists, the technicians and the veterinary pathologists who work there. For these students, this is not an abstract argument about university administration.
It's about the education that they came to JCU to receive. They say their practical sessions are crucial to their learning and their professional development. The students are worried that losing the lab would mean future graduates leave university without the depth of practical experience that currently gives JCU students an advantage when they enter the workforce.
That matters enormously in a regional university. The students describe JCU's veterinary program as a backbone of rural veterinary service in Queensland, producing more than 50 graduates each year and attracting students from around Australia and overseas to Townsville. The students make a very obvious point:: if you diminish the quality of the practical education available at a regional university, you make it harder to persuade students to relocate there in the first place.
Regional universities already face challenges attracting and retaining students, staff and specialist expertise. The university shouldn't be making that task harder. The students at JCU are also deeply concerned about what happens to the people who work in the laboratory.
These are highly skilled scientists, technicians and veterinary pathologists. Many of them have worked there for over a decade. Students warn that losing these people would mean a loss of expertise, not just from the university but from the veterinary profession across North Queensland.
Expertise like that cannot simply be switched off and then recreated later when somebody decides they need it again. The students describe the potential loss as a 'brain drain' from the university and point out that replacing this kind of specialist expertise is difficult enough in our major cities, let alone in a regional centre like Townsville. There will be consequences for the broader community as well.
The lab supports diagnostic services for pets and livestock and contributes expertise to histological, microbiological, veterinary and biomedical research. If that local capacity disappears, diagnostic work and research services currently undertaken in Townsville may instead have to be outsourced, including to Brisbane. That means more distance, more expense and generally more delays.
When you are waiting on diagnostic results for a sick animal, time matters. The students also say that this proposal was developed without consultation with laboratory staff, academics or students, and that students were not given a meaningful opportunity to have their voices heard, despite the consequences it would have for their studies. That's not good enough.
Students are not customers passing through a business. They are members of the university community. The academics who teach them, the technicians who work alongside them, and the professional staff who make their education possible are members of that community too.
When decisions are contemplated that could fundamentally change the quality of a course, remove practical learning opportunities and cost experienced people their jobs, those people deserve a genuine voice in that process. What I find particularly striking is that students who chose to study at James Cook University are now having to campaign to protect the very educational opportunities that attracted them to go there in the first place.
That tells us something about the broader problem with the way we run and fund universities in this country. We can't talk about opening the doors of opportunity, particularly in regional Australia, while regional universities are simultaneously cutting staff, reducing services and weakening the educational experience available on the other side of those doors.
We can't say that we want to train the next generation of vets, scientists and regional professionals and then allow the infrastructure and specialist expertise used to train them to just disappear. And we can't talk seriously about equity while students are wondering whether the course they enrolled in will still provide the education and practical experience that they expected.
Opening the doors is not enough. What matters is what students find on the other side. Do they find lecturers and tutors who have enough time to teach them properly?
Do they find laboratories, libraries and student services that are properly resourced? Can they afford their rent while they study? Can they afford food?
Can they survive on youth allowance or Austudy? Can they finish their degree without accruing an extraordinary debt? And when they graduate, what kind of university system are we leaving behind for the students who come after them?
Those are the questions that an equity agenda has to answer. The Greens have long argued that education is a public good. It benefits the students who study—of course it does—but it also benefits all of us.
We need teachers. We need more nurses. We need doctors, engineers, scientists, social workers and vets.
And we all benefit from the research, knowledge and discovery that goes on in our universities. So governments should be prepared to properly fund the institutions that educate these people and provide that knowledge. Students should not be treated primarily as sources of income, and staff should not be treated simply as costs to be cut wherever a balance sheet needs improving.
If the government genuinely wants a more equitable university system, it needs to go much further than this bill. It needs to deal with student poverty. It needs to increase youth allowance and Austudy.
It needs to end the parental income test for adults, and it needs to undo the damage caused by Job-ready Graduates. It needs to tackle the cost of degrees and the debts that students continue to accumulate. And it needs to properly fund universities so that staff have secure employment and students receive the education that they deserve.
Our job is to build a properly funded public higher education system that gives every student who walks through its doors a genuine opportunity to thrive. That is what the Greens will keep working for in this place.