Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the two amendments to the Higher Education Support Act laid out in the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. They represent significant and positive changes to shift us closer to the goal of greater equity and access to higher education.

As noted in the interim report to the Australian Universities Accord review, the ongoing process of this review has served to reiterate how critical and transformative higher education is. Higher education is essential for the social and economic wellbeing of individuals but also to Australia as a whole, and particularly to our future growth and productivity. The review urges us to prioritise both the quality of higher education and access to it in Australia to meet the multiple challenges ahead and to deliver the skills we currently require and will require in the future. I'm particularly glad to see the 30-year time frame being considered in this review. We see far too little long-term thinking in policy development, and with education it can take decades to truly see the impact of policy changes.

The University of Western Australia is in my electorate of Curtin. It's rated as a world top 100 university. It's part of the Group of Eight group of universities and is No. 1 in WA for graduate employability. I studied at UWA from 1992 to 1997, and I'm pleased to report that many aspects of the vibrant student life I remember from my time there continue to this day. I note that both UWA and the UWA Student Guild made submissions to the O'Kane review, which I support.

The first amendment in this bill is a simple but important one. It will now extend and guarantee eligibility to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students for a funded place at university. The practical impact of this amendment is to extend the guaranteed funding for students in remote and regional areas to students in metropolitan areas too. This amendment is necessary if we're to reach our ambitious Closing the gap report target of 70 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young adults with a tertiary education by 2031. These amendments may also have a positive impact on broader First Nations families and communities, as well as individuals, embedding generational accessibility to tertiary education.

The second amendment proposes to remove the 50 per cent pass rule, which requires students to pass 50 per cent of their first eight units to maintain their Commonwealth supported place and other fee assistance. Like many submissions to the review, the student guild from Curtin University in Western Australia argued that the 50 per cent completion rate introduced in the Job-ready Graduates Package was flawed. It urged the review to consider the different reasons why students fail and, instead, provide universities with a discretion to look at individual circumstances instead of being forced to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Equity groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and students with disability, are likely to have more challenges transitioning to university and are disproportionately impacted by this rule. The Curtin Student Guild suggests money is better spent on providing support to students who may be at risk rather than the increased administration requiring universities to report on students who have not met the threshold of passed units.

The University of Western Australia also urged consideration of the context of a student where there is little or no family history of tertiary education, and the impact of a punitive approach with the requirement to pass more than 50 per cent of the first eight units or lose the CSP and HELP loan. They noted that the pass rule ignores the enormous cultural and physical barriers to successful participation among non-traditional students and that some success in university can be a springboard to the success of others in the family or indeed to later personal success. Minister Clare tells us that more than 13,000 students at 27 universities in Australia—students who are mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds—have already been impacted by the 50 per cent pass rule in the two years since the job-ready package was implemented.

In my experience, first-year students don't always make foolproof judgements about their choice of subjects. This would equally apply for students with added disadvantages, who may not have had family members with university experience to guide and support them in their subject choices. For those who have a low completion rate and who lose their CSP, it's likely that they'll pull out of university rather than continue to create more debt. Obviously, they are, and should be, liable to pay for the units they've failed, but the overall result is that they will withdraw altogether rather than remain at university without a Commonwealth supported place. So the 50 per cent rule does not, as the former minister for education, Mr Tehan, suggested it would, protect students from racking up debt. Rather, it presents an additional burden over the heads of disadvantaged and undersupported students. I support its removal.

I commend the amendments that require all higher education providers to have a support-for-students policy that complies with the Higher Education Provider Guidelines—namely, to require institutions to not only identify students at risk of not completing their units of study but provide support to those students and to account to the Minister for Education for the execution of that policy and support. I'm optimistic about these amendments and the focus on strategies aimed at supporting at-risk students to continue with and complete their education, but there needs to be some rigour related to this support. The Department of Education must continue to listen to student representative bodies and higher education institutions to enable them to deliver effective and tangible support to students who are facing challenges.

I commend the minister for acting quickly upon these two priority actions of the Universities Accord review interim report and I look forward to further detailed consideration by the Department of Education and the minister of the 82 policy areas identified by that report for improvement.

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