David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Taree Universities Campus will now become a reality with the recent announcement that federal funding towards the new multimillion-dollar campus has been secured. This is a fantastic win for the New South Wales mid-coast region. Many people have been wondering whether this would actually come to fruition. I'm pleased to announce that we'll be getting one in Taree. It will deliver enormous social and economic benefits for our region for many years and many decades to come.

The Taree Universities Campus was one of nine submissions to be successful in the latest round of the Australian government's Regional University Centres program. Taree Universities Campus will form partnerships with a number of universities and TAFE to offer a range of courses that deliver a combination of local, face-to-face, and distanced learning. It's known as a mixed modality of teaching, with the assistance of distance learning which has been so successful in Geraldton.

In 2018 I established a local steering committee that formed last year again to gather broad community support and develop a funding application for the TUC proposal. This universities campus was one of the primary and most prominent suggestions in a 2030 survey I did across the whole electorate. People were looking for some tertiary education, university presence, greater than what we had, which was a single university that had a computer lab in town. They wanted more than that, and this will be a real game changer in that space.

A board was appointed of local people with huge experience and backgrounds in academia, business, industry and community. Together, with members of the steering committee, we were all able to put together a fairly comprehensive submission. The Taree Universities Campus is a community based, non-profit entity that will rely on a combination of Commonwealth funding, community and in-kind donations. Now that federal funding has been approved to assist with the establishment of the Taree Universities Campus, the board can now negotiate a formal funding agreement with the Commonwealth Department of Education, Skills and Employment. The agreement will provide assistance for the establishment of the campus and its facilities, along with dedicated Commonwealth supported places.

Since this announcement we've had a huge outpouring of interest and support, like we did when we formed the steering committee. To give you an idea, there were 17,000 likes without any boosting on social media. I'd like to acknowledge volunteer board members John Howard, Alison McIntosh, Lisa Proctor, Graham Brown, Maurie Stack and Steve Atkins for their commitment and work in getting us to where we are today, and also thanks—(Time expired)