Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to say a few comments in relation to the interim report and the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023. It gives me an opportunity to speak about the importance of higher education, particularly to regional electorates like my electorate, the electorate of Bendigo. We are proud to be the home of the Bendigo La Trobe campus, but our higher education didn't start with Bendigo La Trobe. Our higher education history goes back 150 years—we're celebrating this year—with the School of Mines that was opened back in the day of the gold rush.

Since then we've seen the growth of higher education in our city. We've had the very successful teaching colleges, and I do, for the moment, forget the name. My partner will not forgive me! He, like many people in Bendigo, started their education to be a schoolteacher through that forum, only to graduate with a degree from La Trobe uni. There has also been the growth of the Bendigo TAFE campus, another proud higher education institution. Both of those institutions have had input into the accord process and are keen to encourage the government to look at how we can foster a greater pathway between vocational and higher education studies. The ability to start at Bendigo TAFE campus and go from certificate, to diploma and to bachelor should be easy and the norm, not the exception. But far too often it's been too hard to complete.

Quite often you hear from institutions that they spend hours, if not days, in multiple meetings trying to work their way through a complicated state-federal system to achieve that outcome. It's just one of the many areas that they are hoping this accord looks at, and I know that the accord and its committee members are keen to do so. This quote I think sums up where we're at in terms of Australia's higher education sector; it's the last line in the summary of the interim report:

In short, the Australian higher education sector lacks the institutional resilience and 'metabolic rate' needed to prepare our nation for the future. There is so much that needs to be done and higher education policy must respond.

They have laid down the challenge to us to do better, to do more and to work quickly at addressing the issues that we have.

Also, the summary of the interim report talks about how employment conditions for university staff are often precarious. There's high casualisation, which impairs future teaching and knowledge creation. We know this to be the case. Wage theft is quite often talked about when we think about people working in the higher education sector. With the high casualisation rates and the tenure rates, it's getting further and further away from what people imagine higher education work to be. The interim report also talks about students sometimes experiencing poor-quality learning and teaching, and encountering risks to their health, safety and wellbeing. It talks about the lack of support services and those services quite often being insufficient to enable people to achieve their best. Again, this is not new. It's what any member of parliament who has visited a university campus or spoken to university students would have heard on a regular basis.

University has changed a lot since many of us went to university. I went to university in the late nineties and early 2000s. I was the first in my family to enrol to go to university but wasn't the first to graduate; I did get involved in various campus activities along the way. My mum was actually the first in our family to graduate—last to enrol but first to graduate. She was a very dedicated student and stuck to her studies and her time. She's now working in the sector and is a very proud lecturer and associate professor at Melbourne university.

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