Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. What will be the impact of the additional university places announced in the budget?

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

I thank the member for Newcastle for her question. We have skills shortages right across the country, and a lot of those skills are forged in our universities. It's why we committed in the campaign to fund an extra 20,000 university places. That funding is in the budget, and it's a half-billion dollar investment. A couple of weeks ago I announced the break-up of those 20,000 places. They include funding for more than 4,000 teachers, 2½ nurses, 1,700 extra engineers and more than 2,000 more IT professionals. Today, data came out that advised us that currently more than 44 per cent of young people in their 20s and 30s have a university degree. That's a good thing, but it's not the case if your parents are poor or if you come from regional Australia or the more remote parts of Australia. Only 20 per cent of people from poor backgrounds and only 20 per cent of people from regional Australia have a uni degree. It's even lower if you're an Indigenous Australian: only seven per cent of Indigenous Australians have a uni degree.

As I spoke to vice-chancellors about these 20,000 places, one vice-chancellor said to me, 'Minister, why don't you allocate 5,000 of the 20,000 to the groups that are underrepresented at university?' I thought, 'Why don't we allocate all of them?' And that's what we did. The universities that got the biggest share of these are Newcastle university, Charles Darwin University, Wollongong, Curtin, Edith Cowan, Adelaide, Victoria University, Queensland University of Technology, Charles Sturt and Southern Cross. We need more teachers, we need more nurses, we need more engineers, but we also need to make sure that our universities are ready for the next decade and beyond. That's what the Universities Accord will be all about. It'll be a big and broad review of our higher education system, the first since Denise Bradley did that work almost 15 years ago. Next week I'll announce the team that will lead that work and their terms of reference. One of the big issues that I want them to look at is this: how do we open the doors of opportunity that the Prime Minister talked about on election night to more Australians? The 20,000 places are a start, but there's a lot more work to do.