Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024, which is to implement the first tranche of recommendations from the Universities Accord. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: 'Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress in every society'. So I was very pleased when the government announced it had commissioned the Universities Accord, showing commitment to improving and modernising this sector. After all, not only was tertiary education ignored by the previous government but the case can be easily made that it made wilful efforts to undermine it. In their 2014 budget the coalition announced removing caps on student fees and imposing fees for higher degrees by research or PhDs. Thankfully, that did not succeed. The coalition cut operating grants again in 2017 and university research funding again in 2018.

In 2020 the coalition unveiled its signature tertiary education policy, the Job-ready Graduates program, which again cut funding. The program did lower fees for degrees deemed likely to lead directly to particular jobs, but it increased the fees significantly for humanities subjects: the arts, law, communications and economics. In this rapidly changing world, including dramatic technological advances, such as generative AI, and amid a rapid global energy transition, critical and agile thinking is more important than ever. It is not comprehensible to me that, at this watershed time of change in human history, the coalition would have set out to stymie critical thinkers and critical thinking. In fact, as the higher education policy expert Andrew Norton of the Australian National University explained, course fees have very little impact on course preferences. Demand for society and culture courses actually increased by nine per cent in the years following the introduction of this policy. If only the coalition had looked at the evidence before saddling a cohort of students with a much higher HECS debt.

Finally, who can forget that during the pandemic the coalition government repeatedly and inexplicably excluded public universities from government support? I've watched the progress of the Universities Accord Panel with interest. I was very pleased to attend briefing sessions with Professor Mary O'Kane, the chair of the Australian Universities Accord Panel, who was generous with her time and genuinely open to new ideas. It was a process that was overdue, there having been no broad review of the tertiary education system in 15 years. Unfortunately the government announced in May this year that in this term it would be responding to only 29 of the accord's 47 recommendations. Four of those recommendations are before the House today and are being implemented with this bill.

Given the substantial rises in the CPI that occurred over the last couple of years, the first step for this bill is to cap the HECS and HELP indexation rate to the consumer price index or to the wage consumer price—whichever is lower—backdated to 1 June 2023. This is a measure that I and many on the crossbench have been calling for in this term of parliament and one that is welcomed by students across the country. My crossbench colleague the member for Kooyong in particular played an important role in advocating for this measure, presenting one of the biggest petitions ever presented to the federal government, with 288,000 signatures calling for this specific reform.

It's clear that HECS indexation at the CPI levels seen over the last several years is an unfair additional burden on young people. Many people have been finding that over the last few years, despite a year of working and paying off their HECS debts, once it was indexed it was higher at the end of the year than it was at the beginning of the year. This is not how HECS was intended to operate. This change by the government provides for our young people a small breathing space that they need so badly right now as the cost-of-living pressures, housing prices and intergenerational inequality overall continue to grow.

Another important aspect of this bill concerns the introduction of payments for mandatory placements that many tertiary education students must undertake to complete their degrees. To date students in many courses have had to undertake prac placements without being paid. With this bill, from 1 July 2025 the Commonwealth government will provide grants to higher education providers to pay students in teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work courses for the duration of their mandatory practical placements. Students in these courses will receive a payment of over $319 a week, benchmarked to the single Austudy rate. This is a very welcome step. For students who are just scraping by financially while studying, having to leave their part-time job or having to move away to complete a placement may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It may be the end of their university studies.

Teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work are fields where there are dramatic workforce shortages. These prac payments will allow more students to undertake study in these fields. This is good news. However, there are many other courses where students will miss out and where they won't have their often lengthy practicums remunerated. These courses include veterinary science, psychology and medical and allied health. I recently met with a representative the Australian Medical Students Association, who outlined one of their concerns about this submission. They explained that the rising cost of living and the lengthy practical placement requirements limit the diversity of the people that take up medical studies, because medical students would often come from wealthy families that could support them while they undertook these lengthy prac placements.

I'm supportive of two other reforms in the bill: the requirement that 40 per cent of student service fees are to be directed to student led organisations and the creation of a new Commonwealth Grant Scheme for fee-free uni ready courses, to provide that important bridge between school and university for students who need it. These uni ready courses are so important for people who may be eager to undertake tertiary education but, for one reason or another, are not ready to go straight there. They may not have completed high school, they may not have achieved the necessary ATAR, or they may have completed school many years prior and need a study skills refresher. We should be enabling these very students to go to university. These are the students who have grit and the tenacity to pursue tertiary education despite not having a linear path.

To conclude, I want to stress that I'm a big believer in the importance of equitable access to education. Education can lift people out of poverty. It can take them to places they only ever dreamed of and can create new opportunities for all generations to follow. Education that is accessible to all allows our country to make the most of all our human potential. But access to education does need to be equitable; otherwise, we risk further entrenchment of inequality in our society. This bill takes some steps towards that and I urge the government to do more in this parliament while there is still time. I commend the bill to the House.

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