Patrick Dodson (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition supports the Higher Education Support Legislation Amendment (2016 Measures No. 1) Bill 2016. The bill contains proposals for two changes to the Higher Education Act and related acts. The first schedule relates to grants available for universities to support their Indigenous students. Previously, there were three separate funding pools available for support services, grants and other programs and bursaries for Indigenous students. The proposal in schedule 1 is for the three existing funds to be pooled into one, which allows the universities to better respond to the needs of their individual Indigenous cohorts. It is a change that we believe will be welcomed by the sector because a more streamlined and flexible approach will better allow universities to meet their students' needs.

The second schedule amends various pieces of legislation to allow the Department of Education and Training to access tax file numbers for VET Fee-Help debtors in order to streamline data exchanges between the department and the Australian Taxation Office. This proposed change would make data exchange on individuals utilising VET Fee-Help consistent with other aspects of the HELP program.

The content of the bill that relates to Indigenous students deals with an issue that has long been a hallmark of Labor's work in this space. For many decades we have been the party that have sought to promote access to and participation in higher education, including for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. You only need to go back to the Second World War to see that it was Labor that was involved in ensuring there were scholarships for returning servicemen. In the 1970s Gough Whitlam made it possible for many to go to university who might not have otherwise had the opportunity. Today we still have many students who are the first in their family to go to university and who have been able to do so because of Labor's legacy in reforming higher education.

There are few main structural reasons that can prevent people from obtaining a higher education. One of them is the absence of aspirations, because universities do not seem to be an option for some people. For the creation of aspiration in the minds of students who are outside of cities and outside the types of families where it has been common over many generations to go to university, these types of students need to see role models and need to see opportunities to go to university. This is why equity programs are really important. They build the aspiration. They make universities seem normal and make it seem normal to go to university after high school.

This is why Labor is so concerned about the $152 million to the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program. It has already been booked into the budget, even though the review into that scheme is still underway. The Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program is not just a scheme that grows aspirations; it also supports students from more disadvantaged backgrounds once they get to university to help with participation and to help with graduation.

Labor has been working to build equity and participation for a long time. Gough Whitlam's reforms are a prime example. There was also Bob Hawke's 1990 landmark paper A fair chance for all, which explicitly talked about building involvement in higher education and graduation from higher education among students who have not had those opportunities in the past. That was a salient and landmark paper, and we saw an increase in those equity groups' representation in higher education.

The last Labor government in 2011 was in a situation where a lot had been done but still more needed to be done. This sparked the Bradley review, which found that Indigenous students continue to be vastly unrepresented in higher education. It is a challenge we still have to contend with today. Another review, the Behrendt review, which was specifically in relation to education access and outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 2011 and 2012, recommended pooling together, amongst many other things, some of the programs—as we are seeing here in this bill today.

There has been a lot of work done over many decades to seek to improve representation by Indigenous students in higher education. Due to the previous Labor government's reforms, we saw a 26 per cent increase in Indigenous student numbers. But there is still more that needs to be done. At the moment the access rate for Indigenous students is around 1.88 per cent compared with a population of about 2.9 per cent. The 2014 figures on retention are 0.9 per cent for Indigenous students. We must maintain our focus on equity programs, particularly those that are aimed at increasing Indigenous student representation. The opposition is pleased to support this bill.