Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In our nation, higher education is transformative for individuals and for our communities. It brings countless social and economic benefits—research, and social and community participation. It embeds progressive change in our communities as they learn to adapt and transform for our communities' and our national needs.

Higher education is one of our most crucial economic exports around the world. We have many thousands of students come to Australia to participate in our higher education sector because of its quality and because of the experience it brings. It underscores the need for our own domestic students, but also for international students, to have a well funded and robust university sector. There's no way of getting around the fact that high-quality and equitable higher education is essential for Australians and essential for our nation.

Quality research shows that, by the year 2050, some 55 per cent of all jobs will require some form of higher education. It is why almost universally in the sector and many around the country were absolutely dismayed at the actions of the last government who capped the number of places in Australia's universities. This made them harder to get into, including for courses where there was growing industry demand, made it harder to succeed in progressing through your course and made it more expensive.

What we are doing today in this bill, the Higher Education Support Amendment (Response to the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill, is implementing the outcomes from the review into higher education, in which stakeholders from right across the higher education sector and the broader tertiary sector participated. We saw governments, business, community, professional groups, universities, students and industry groups all participate in bringing together the reforms that are with us today.

The review process had some 300 submissions. It engaged with experts, including Emeritus Professor Bruce Chapman, who was indeed the Higher Education Contribution Scheme architect. I must confess I was someone who protested against HECS increases, way back in the 1990s, when I organised a rally outside then minister for higher education Kim Beazley's office. We rallied outside his office, and Minister Beasley disarmed us all, quite charmingly, by inviting all of the students that were there inside his office for a robust discussion about higher education policy. He pretty much said to us, 'Half of you students, who are protesting outside today, would not be here at all if it wasn't for our capacity to expand the number of university places because of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme.'

But I have to say that under the last government the HECS and its new iterations became completely unfair and out of control in the way it targeted different cohorts of students for student debt. The work of the review from Professor Bruce Chapman and others who are clear experts in income equity, education and tax has really helped drive the reforms in this bill to bring balance and equity back into the system.

One of the unfair policy changes that the last coalition government introduced was indeed the Higher Education Loan Program. For example, it saw a dramatic increase in fees for humanities students, communications students and a whole range of arts and culture, including things like anthropology. Students were being charged by the university and being charged fees that they had to pay back through HELP at a higher rate than it actually cost to deliver that particular course. This was despite the fact that these courses continued to have strong employment outcomes and led to graduate pathways into other streams of education. This is why I am particularly pleased that this bill has, as one of its aims, addressed some of those unfair policy changes introduced by the last government. I'm also pleased to see the expansion of access to Commonwealth supported places for First Nations students.

I outlined previously in relation to HELP that the Job-ready Graduates Package, which saw massive fee increases, had a particular impact on regional students and First Nations students in our country, as well as many people going to university for the first time. This is because they are, in fact, more likely to be doing some of those humanities-type subjects in their pathway to university. The coalition government was warned that their Job-ready Graduates program would rip billions out of public universities while burdening students with excessive and even lifelong debt. They were warned that the changes they made would be unsustainable and would create strain on the sector. Even prior to the damaging impact of the pandemic, the university sector was indeed at breaking point.

The expert panel's undertakings and review are in fact the first meaningful review of higher education in more than 15 years. That review was scathing of the impact of the last government's legacy on universities and of the impact of the Job-ready Graduates program on our nation, universities, students and the higher education sector as a whole, including on our reputation and standing with international students and the sustainability of the courses they participate in.

One of the harmful and unnecessary changes under the Job-ready Graduates program was the decision to implement a condition that required students to pass more than 50 per cent of their total attempted units to remain eligible for access to the HECS-HELP scheme or a Commonwealth supported place. Students who failed to meet this condition—despite having succeeded in all the other years of their study, or despite having had a particularly bad year, picked the wrong subjects or had other life challenges—were faced with the choice of paying for the course upfront so they could keep going, transferring to another cause, or withdrawing from their studies.

The justification the last government gave for the policy was that it would prevent students who were not academically suited to their studies from continuing to accrue large student debts. It appeared more as a stick to force higher completion rates and/or to weed out early students that the former government arbitrarily deemed to be unsuited to academic study, saving government expenditure. I have to say it wouldn't be unlikely that some universities would have worked with students to find a way to bypass this, giving them a conditional pass and those kinds of things. I see it as an unhelpful policy if universities have to find a bureaucratic way around it. Meanwhile, students withdrew from university entirely, perhaps unnecessarily, fearing they were going to be locked out because they'd had a hard semester. There was no requirement under the 50 per cent rule for institutions to take action to assist students at risk of failing more than half their course load or to address issues around the quality of the education, which might have been part of the reason students were failing.

As we have seen, the previous government's policy of maintaining pass rates disproportionally affected people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Students without support systems to lean on to get through university experience additional pressures, which affects their studies. Under the last government, we saw HECS-HELP targeting of humanities, arts and social sciences—disciplines with higher rates of enrolment of student equity groups, First Nations students and women—with tuition fees increased to over 110 per cent for most courses, making it more expensive to get a degree in social work or journalism than in medicine. This is despite the fact that medicine is a vastly more costly course to deliver. It is despite the fact that, in the long term, medical graduates are likely to earn significantly higher wages. And it is despite the fact that, because of the way the scheme capped government contributions for medicine degrees, these perverse disincentives also made it harder for universities to deliver courses like engineering and medicine.

Today I welcome the legislation before us in the Senate. This bill vastly enhances our ability to support First Nations students in our universities, including in regional and remote areas across Australia. It improves education pedagogy and it introduces a wide range of equity supports so that our students are set up for success and have accessible pathways to education.