Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Back to the best place in Australia: Fowler. We want to make sure more Australians get a crack at going to university. That's what the Universities Accord is all about. One of the set of recommendations in that report, as I said in answer to the member for Ryan's question last week, was about how we make HECS, what we now call HELP, fairer and simpler. We're considering those recommendations at the moment and we'll respond in the next few months. What that report told us is that we need more people to be able to get a crack at going to TAFE or university in the years ahead. More jobs will require more skills. In the days when we were growing up, when Hawke and Keating were prime ministers, the percentage of people who finished school jumped from 40 per cent to almost 80 per cent. That was nation-changing stuff. That was big economic reform that created businesses and jobs that otherwise wouldn't have existed. The accord says that in the decades ahead, we won't just need 80 per cent of people to finish school, we'll need 80 per cent of people to be able to finish school and then go on to TAFE or university. A lot of those people grow up in Fowler and Blaxland and McMahon in the western suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and in regional Australia too. If we don't make sure we give them a crack at going to universities, we won't have the economic firepower to be everything this country can be in the years ahead. At its core, that's what the accord is all about.

See this speech in context