Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Geraldton Universities Centre model and the funding commitment in the budget to expand this model. Madam Deputy Speaker, you may not be aware, but this model has been funded with a $15 million commitment from the federal government to establish six new centres around the country. I have spoken a lot over the years about this model, and it is a real pleasure to be here today to talk about our recent commitment.

The Geraldton Universities Centre, or the GUC, model allows country students to study at university level face-to-face in their own communities. This is something that, quite frankly, those who live in the cities often take for granted. The extra cost and travel that country families have to absorb to send their children to one of the major metro areas to study are significant and in many cases that means that country students simply do not have the means to study their chosen field or study at all, and that is very sad.

This model allows for country students to instead go to a general-purpose learning area at home and study a variety of courses with a full cohort of students. The model rejects the idea that all learning should be remote and external for country children and instead reinforces the idea that many students need that face-to-face interaction. I know personally that I would never have got a tertiary education if I had had to have studied externally. This is in order to keep them engaged and active in their area of study.

There are several other towns in my massive electorate that would benefit from a model like this, including Karratha, a town in the Pilbara that I visited last week. I have spoken to several community leaders around the region and around town regarding the possibilities that this model could bring. The Pilbara, being the centre of the country's mining industry, could potentially become an engineering and skills hub—why not?—for universities looking to upskill their students and give them the best start at a job in the mining industry.

More than mining, a Pilbara universities centre could provide and train for the building blocks of a community. It could train local teachers and nurses and encourage them to work locally when they finish. We know that doctors, for example, are four times more likely to work regionally if they are country kids themselves, so the more country kids we can get into higher education by providing it in their communities, the more trained and skilled young people we can encourage to live and work regionally.

As a proud regional Liberal member I know that this potentially allows us to curb the brain drain from regional areas and breathe some life into those communities in regional areas that are desperately in need of some new skilled young people. This is the value of the GUC model.