Cassandra Fernando (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises that the Government is putting in place significant reforms in response to the Australian Universities Accord to provide cost of living relief and to make higher education better and fairer for students, including those from low socio-economic status or disadvantaged backgrounds and those from the outer suburbs and from regional Australia;

(2) welcomes the Government's target of 80 per cent of the workforce having a tertiary qualification by 2050;

(3) further recognises that if the broader accord targets are achieved, $240 billion will be added to the economy over the period to 2050; and

(4) commends the Government for progress on all five priority actions from the Australian Universities Accord interim report and its response to 29 of the Australian Universities Accord recommendations in full or in part, including to:

(a) change the way indexation is calculated, wiping around $3 billion in student debt from more than 3 million Australians;

(b) introduce a Commonwealth Prac Payment for teaching, nursing and midwifery and social work students undertaking mandatory placements;

(c) fully fund Fee-Free Uni Ready courses to provide more students with an enabling pathway into higher education;

(d) guarantee funding for student led organisations; and

(e) establish an independent National Student Ombudsman.

In 2022, the Minister for Education, Jason Clare, embarked on a generational review of the higher education sector. The Australian Universities Accord consulted with students, industry, universities and staff in the sector to create a plan for the future. Currently only 14.7 per cent of higher education enrolments in Victoria are from low-SES postcodes, out of 24.9 per cent of the total population. This reveals that the low-SES students in Victoria have nearly half the enrolment rate of their wealthy peers. For an electorate like Holt, higher education is meant to be a pathway—a ladder to a better life—but the current system means that so many students miss out.

The accord has set an ambitious target to have 80 per cent of the workforce achieve a tertiary qualification by 2050. To achieve this, the accord made 47 recommendations to make higher education better and fairer for students and to expand access to those from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from the outer suburbs. If the goals of the accord can be achieved, $240 billion will be added to the economy over the next 25 years. In the 2024-25 federal budget, the government responded to 29 of the Australian Universities Accord's recommendations. Firstly, the government is changing the way indexation is calculated, wiping around $3 billion in student debt for more than three million Australians. We recognise that the recent debt rises threaten to discourage young Australians from studying. That is why Labor is changing the indexation of loans so that student loans will never increase faster than their wages.

We are introducing the Commonwealth Prac Payment for teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students who are undertaking mandatory placements. From July 2025 these students will be paid $319.50 per week while undertaking their placements so that students do not need to live in poverty while training to be our essential workers. To expand access and provide alternative pathways for disadvantaged students in communities like Holt, we are investing $350 million in fee-free uni ready courses. Initiatives like these are crucial for bridging the gap in education and ensuring equal opportunities for all.

One of the common themes from students and academics in the Universities Accord was the issue of accountability. To quote from the National Union of Students submission:

Students are the largest stakeholder in the higher education sector and their voice is essential for a well-run system. At the moment students do not feel like their voice is being heard and universities have a reputation of being billion-dollar unaccountable institutions.

The Universities Accord proposed new mechanisms for accountability, including the establishment of an independent National Student Ombudsman. The ombudsman will allow all students to escalate complaints about the actions of their higher education provider, including complaints about sexual harassment, assaults and violence. It will have the power to make recommendations to providers about actions that should be taken to resolve a complaint and work with regulators to respond to systemic issues. These issues are well-known because of the advocacy of the students, led by the work of the National Union of Students and campus based student unions. That is why the government is mandating that higher education providers allocate at least 40 per cent of the student services and amenities fees to student led organisations. This will strengthen student led organisations and their ability to act for the best interests of the students they are elected to serve.

We are not done with our work to improve access to higher education. Whether a kid is from Toorak or Croydon, Carlton or Cranbourne, all Australians deserve the same opportunities. The Albanese Labor government is committed to ensuring that all Australians can aspire to study at university. I comment this motion to the House.

Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder for the motion?

Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Holt for this motion on the Australian Universities Accord. Young people are under pressure in ways that most of us were not at that age. They're living with instability, insecurity and uncertainty that, if not unprecedented, has certainly not been seen in the years since HECS was introduced more than three decades ago. Employment is much less secure than it was then, and there's no certainty that a university degree will reward a graduate with higher income than someone without tertiary qualifications.

On top of all that, young people are living amid a once-in-a-generation cost-of-living crisis. Rents have reached a record high, with the median weekly rent in Australia now at $627, which is 8.5 per cent higher than at this time last year. The days when it was relatively easy to find an affordable share house are over, as are the days when students could be sure their pay in part-time jobs would keep pace with inflation. In real terms, although wages have recently finally grown slightly, the average wage is now the same as in 2011. Meanwhile, the escalation in tuition fees means that graduates have much higher HECS debts in real terms than even a decade ago and much more than when the system was introduced.

Taxation Office data compiled by the Australia Institute shows that Australians in their 20s with a HECS-HELP debt in 2005-06 had an average debt of around $12,500. From then until June 2023, total inflation was 57 per cent. Had the average size of debt increased in line with inflation, the average 2022-23 HECS-HELP debt held by people in their 20s should have been around $19,500. Instead, according to the Australia Institute, the average debt had risen by 145 per cent and was $30,763. That doesn't consider the Morrison government's ineffective and punitive Job-ready Graduates Package, which saw the cost of a communications degree, for example, rise from around $20,400 to $43,500.

It was early in 2023, before that year's federal budget, that I called on the Minister for Education to recognise the difficulties high inflation was creating for students and recent graduates by reforming the indexation formula for HECS-HELP debts. I suggested then that the formula should be determined based on whatever was lower: the consumer price index or the wage price index. Although it took a year, the minister added it to the work program for the Universities Accord review, which accepted and recommended the change in this year's budget, helped along by a massive petition launched by the member of Kooyong. The government announcement—by backdating the change to last year, when HECS indexation was pledged to an inflation figure of 7.1 per cent—is wiping out around $3 billion in student debt for more than three million Australians. Those with an average debt will see their liability cut by $1,200.

There is more that the government should be doing. It should be altering the timing of indexation until after compulsory repayments made over the year have been calculated, rather than before, a step that would save debtors hundreds of dollars annually. One option would be to move the indexation date from late in the tax year until after the tax return due date of 31 October. I do welcome the fact that the minister has approached banks to encourage them not to consider HECS-HELP debt when calculating eligibility for a home loan.

I have spent much of this speech talking about HECS because we need to resolve these issues to enable young people to reach their full potential. If 80 per cent of the workforce will need a tertiary qualification by 2050, we must remove the roadblocks to study. Sorting out HECS and HELP is a critical piece of this.

Last year, I also raised the issue of sexual assault on campus with the minister, pointing out the horrendous statistic that one in 20 students had been sexually assaulted since starting uni. I and other members of the crossbench introduced the minister to students from Fair Agenda who have been advocating for years for an ombudsman to tackle gender based violence at universities. This is also being delivered, and I'm very pleased that the minister has done so.

There is much more that I could say about the Universities Accord, but, given the available time, I will conclude by saying this: it is encouraging to see a report that provides an ambitious vision for tertiary education to underpin the future of our nation. Properly intersected university and vocational education is key to this, because education is power for individuals and for societies, including Australia.

Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Education policy is central to any federal government—education at all levels: high school, vocational education and training and TAFE, and higher education. Today we focus on higher education. It is only one part of education, but it is a central part of education policy.

Of course, while higher education policy is a story of individuals and their dreams and aspirations to fulfil their career opportunities, it's also a story about the macroeconomy and about society as a whole. In that sense, higher education policy is both a story of equity and access and a policy that relates to participation and our investment in human capital. These are interrelated because if we wish to achieve higher rates of participation and higher rates of investment in education then we, as a society, need to do better in giving those from more disadvantaged backgrounds a realistic chance of fulfilling their dreams. So we need to achieve both equity and access and, at the same time, higher rates of participation and higher rates of investment in human capital.

This budget and the government's ongoing work in relation to higher education starts with our broader goals—our long-term goals. I want to say that the goal of achieving 80 per cent attainment in higher education by 2050 is a very important long-term vision around which all of our policies are framed. I want to look at that in the broader sweep of what's gone on in the last 20, 30 and 40 years.

The Hawke-Keating government in the 1980s came to power when we saw year 12 attainment rates in the mid-30 per cent range and higher education participation rates in the high teens. By the time we got to the mid-1990s, we saw year 12 completion rates in the high 70s and tertiary completion rates in the high 30s. They had essentially doubled. That saw so many more people having the opportunity to finish year 12 and so many more people, in parallel, having the opportunity to finish their tertiary education. So many of the senior ministers from that time in a government which achieved so much policy reform—across the economy, across microeconomic reform and across health—point to these higher rates of year 12 and tertiary attainment as some of the greatest achievements, if not the greatest.

That's why it's so important that this government has set the goal of lifting tertiary attainment rates further from the rates that we saw back then. It's no coincidence that the productivity growth rates we saw in the two decades following the Hawke-Keating government were so high because tertiary achievement rates flow through to the skills level across the economy. They flow through to the research and development across the economy. They flow through to innovation. They're really important, of course, for individuals and what they have in terms of lifetime opportunities to fulfil their career dreams. They flow through to individuals in terms of their lifetime earnings, but there's also that macro story which is so critical.

Business as usual is not going to get us to 80 per cent or anywhere near it. It's absolutely critical that we see those key recommendations out of the University Accord acted upon. A key element of that is to reduce barriers to participation. There is HECS and HELP. HECS was a key reform of the 1980s which saw us increase funding to higher education but in a way that didn't create barriers for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and other groups that are disadvantaged. In the reforms coming through in the budget, we are removing disincentives to participate in higher education from the indexation of HELP. So we are seeing that HELP will be indexed in a way now which is the lower of the wage price index or the CPI in such a way that is fairer and more sustainable and doesn't create inordinate debt for those who are participating. We also see that prac payments of $319.50 a week are going to reduce barriers for those wanting to participate in areas such as teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work. It is a really significant payment for those who otherwise would have found this kind of training a significant barrier to their participation. We're also going to see fee-free uni-ready courses right across the country significantly increased. So this is about individuals and their opportunities. It's also about the investment in skills and human capital across the economy and the long-term productivity boost that's going to give.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This motion, I must say, is fairly typical of this government's approach over the last two years. There is a lot of talk and a lot of patting itself on the back. It's almost an orgy of self-congratulation, but there's very little delivery. It's a demonstration, once again, that this government is completely out of touch, particularly when it comes to policies impacting rural and regional Australians.

At the next election, Australians will be asking themselves some pretty simple questions. Australians will be asking themselves: Do I feel better or worse off? Is my family better or worse off? Do I feel safe in my family home? Do I feel safe in my community? Do I feel safe at my university campus? Is our country heading in the right direction? I must say that young Australians have never had it worse off than under the Albanese-Bandt government. Cost-of-living pressures are pushing many young people to breaking point. We've seen skyrocketing increases in housing, in power, in groceries and in fuel. We have a housing crisis that makes it almost impossible to find an affordable place to live, particularly in the large cities but also in our regional centres, and it's all been driven by Labor's high inflation and economic mismanagement. So this attempt today by the government—it is quite a premature attempt, I must say—to pat itself on the back for a job well done when Australians are suffering like never before shows just how out of touch this government is.

From a regional perspective, Deputy Speaker—I know you understand this well, coming from the Mornington Peninsula—students are experiencing massive cost increases in the housing affordability crisis and simply can't find properties when they're forced to move to Melbourne to continue their studies and when rental costs are out of control. The latest monthly Consumer Price Index data shows that Labor's cost-of-living crisis is hurting hardworking Australians. Core inflation, which is the Reserve Bank's preferred measure, rose to 4.1 per cent, well above the RBA's target. Australians continue to face one of the highest and most persistent rates of inflation of any advanced economy because this government—the Albanese-Bandt government!—has failed to tackle the source of the problem. With Labor's big-spending, big-government third budget, Australian households and businesses face higher prices, higher interest rates and higher taxes for longer. Labor has confused economic priorities, and they're hurting our households and small-business owners.

Under Labor's two years of homegrown inflation, the costs of everyday goods keep rising. We've seen food up by 11 per cent, housing up by 14 per cent, rents up by 13 per cent, electricity up by 20 per cent, gas up by 25 per cent, health up by 11 per cent and finance and insurance up by 15 per cent, and students are obviously not immune to this crisis. Students with low or fixed incomes are finding it very hard to excel at their studies and also undertake some part-time work to fund their own cost-of-living pressures.

So I do say to those opposite: Where is the legislation? Where is the legislation that the minister announced would be brought to this House? There are three million Australians with a student debt. HELP loans have escalated by almost 16 per cent since the Albanese government was elected. For someone with an average loan of $26,494, it will cost them an extra $4,000 under this term of government. Under the former coalition government, the average indexation rate was just 1.7 per cent. Labor said it would—and I quote—'cut the student debt of more than three million Australians in this month's budget', referring to May, obviously. However, why has the minister failed to bring forward the legislation in time to enact these changes to help indexation? When will we see the promised reductions in student debt, and when will they be delivered?

Labor's education budget also had some bad news for regional Australians more broadly, with the axing of the $224 million Destination Australia program, which was designed to support university students to study in our regional areas. We know that by just studying in a regional area younger people are more likely to pursue their careers in those regions and help alleviate some of the skilled workforce problems we face in our regional areas. Labor's budget cut $224 million from the Destination Australia program. The axing also of the coalition's Regional Research Collaboration program, which provided a range of supports for regional research was in the order of a $56 million loss to the regions. Again, Labor is big on talk but undermines the future of our regional communities.

This is in stark contrast to the way the coalition government backed students in rural and regional Australia. We increased the Tertiary Access Payment. We also provided regional university centres, and now Labor is placing those regional university centres in suburban areas.

Matt Burnell (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is a challenge that Australia faces with regard to its transforming workforce. That challenge is especially prevalent in Spence. It is noted in the Universities Accord that over the next five years 50 per cent of all new jobs created will require a bachelor-level degree or higher and another 40 per cent of those jobs will require at least some form of post-secondary qualification as well. In Spence, where over 50 per cent of our electorate do not have any post-school qualifications in 2021, this means that nearly 60,000 people will be unable to work in 90 per cent of all new jobs created in the next five years. This trend will only continue to accelerate as we move toward 2050, with 55 per cent of all jobs in Australia by that point requiring tertiary levels of education. It's also pressing that only one in 10 residents in Spence are currently enrolled in a higher education program, which sits well below the national average of 15 per cent. Fortunately, this government is tackling these challenges head-on through the considerable reforms already undertaken in response to the accord, helping to ease access for people in Spence and across the country to higher education.

The reforms in this budget are exactly what our community has been calling for, with a survey done by my office reflecting this. The north wants to see access to university significantly improved. My constituents are calling for an expansion of university institutions to the north. We were also told that visibility is an issue, with many in Spence forgoing the opportunities provided by tertiary institutions because of a lack of presence in our electorate. Our potential students are finding it difficult, when weighing up their future, coming out of high school or training, to consider the possibility of university when it can't be seen from where they have lived and grown up all their lives.

We also noted from our survey that there is a fundamental distance between universities and our community, not just in a geographical sense, as these institutions largely exist within the city of Adelaide, but also in a mental way: there seems to be a generational distance away from considering university education. That is why these reforms, in their capacity to bring quality higher education providers into outer metropolitan areas, are so important in ensuring that those in our community, often from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, can take full advantage of our world-class tertiary providers. This is coming in the form of suburban university study hubs, or SUSHs, offering 14 new hubs across the country, to be hosted in outer metro areas. It is bringing opportunity for the individual out to where it needs to be, for the future good of the nation as a whole.

There is also a focus on tertiary harmonisation, in that the government has outlined a pathway for universities, vocational training providers and TAFE to link more closely as a priority measure. It means that students already in training can upskill further and consider a wider variety of meaningful options as they move into the workforce. This will also make it easier for local industries across a range of sectors, such as manufacturing, defence and engineering, to access skilled staff already based closer to where they operate. Better still, it will enable those potential employees to link to employers with much greater ease and with a chance to work much closer to where they reside.

Building on all of this are our other budget commitments around affordability, including a $427.4 million investment over four years for a new Commonwealth prac payment. Those on placements—the future nurses, teachers and social workers of the north—can now gain meaningful experience without compromising their livelihoods.

We're also addressing the HECS system by limiting its indexation to the CPI or the WPI, whichever is the lower, to ensure that our students can enter the workforce and pay off debts in a sustainable manner. This will wipe around $3 billion of student debt from more than three million students. We are also investing $350 million to deliver fee-free uni-ready courses, adding to existing foundational study programs on offer at universities and providing a free, accessible means for students to enter tertiary education regardless of background or means.

These are holistic measures with holistic benefits, not just at the individual level through greater access to higher quality education but for the wider community for generations to come. The foundations are being built for skilled workers, trained and educated by institutions in our patch, to be crafted right on our doorstep.

Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting period.