Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to begin by thanking the member for Holt for bringing this motion before us. Our government is absolutely committed to making higher education better and fairer for students. Ours is a government that believes in the transformative power of a tertiary qualification. We know the doors of opportunity that a university degree or a VET qualification can open, providing so much for people right across the country, and we know how important a tertiary qualification will become in the years ahead. That's why we're setting a new target—for 80 per cent of our workforce to have a tertiary qualification by 2050.

This target is critical to deliver on Australia's skills needs, but, in order to reach this target, we need more people to go to university and we need them to succeed when they get there. I deeply understand the importance of higher education. It has improved the lives of people in my own family and in my community. I hear so many personal stories about that all the time. In terms of my career, I was an academic for years and a passionate advocate for post-secondary education pathways. Now I have the great privilege to represent an electorate with two world-class universities as well as leading vocational education institutions in it.

I know that I share my deep passion for education with my community in Chisholm. There are many university students and academics who live in my community, and I know that families choose to make Chisholm their home in order to give their children a world-class education, with access to incredible higher education institutions and excellent schools in our suburbs.

I am proud to be part of a government that is conducting once-in-a-generation reforms to the higher education system through the Australian Universities Accord. I made a submission to the accord process on behalf of my electorate. My submission was based on many conversations with constituents at mobile offices, as well as a survey that received over 400 responses. Overwhelmingly, people in Chisholm wanted to see reforms made to the Higher Education Loan Program. I heard from students who were impacted by the huge spike in indexation on their HELP loans last year and from parents and grandparents who were concerned about how rising HELP loans would impact their children's futures. Our government has listened to the community and to the recommendations of the accord expert panel, and we are changing the way that HELP indexation is calculated. We are making the HELP system fairer. These changes will be retrospective. This will mean that $3 billion from HELP debts will be cut for more than three million Australians.

But our cost-of-living relief for students does not stop there. Our government is tackling placement poverty. We know we need to better support students who are required to undertake a placement as part of their university degree. Unfortunately, we've seen students having to choose between doing their placement for their studies or working to be able to afford their rent, food and medicines. So we are introducing a new prac payment to support teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students to do their mandatory pracs.

We are also doing more to support students on campus. Since I was an undergraduate student, which was some time ago now, I have been fighting for action to address gender based violence in higher education, which has been a persistent and awful problem for years. The rates of sexual violence at universities are alarming, and of course all students deserve to be safe at university and to feel that they can continue their studies, rather than what we have seen, where people who've been subjected to sexual and gendered violence have disengaged from study. All students deserve to learn on campuses free from gendered and sexual violence.

I'm really proud to be part of a government that takes the safety of students and staff seriously, through establishing a national student ombudsman to provide higher education students with an effective trauma-informed complaints mechanism to use when they're not satisfied by their higher education provider's response. This ombudsman will be completely independent, accessible for all higher education students and empowered by a new higher education code to prevent and respond to gender based violence. Our government is doing an awful lot for students in higher education, and I'm really proud to be able to speak on this motion today. (Time expired)

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