Address to Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success Policy Symposium 2026

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which you are meeting today, and pay my respects to elders past and present.

I apologise that I can’t be there in person.

I am here in Canberra because Parliament is sitting.

Can I thank Shamit and the whole team at ACSES for what you do.

I think you know how much I appreciate it, and how aligned so much of what you do and what I am trying to do is.

It’s why I set up the Accord.

And it’s why I am implementing it.

Four years ago when I got this job 274,000 students started a university degree in Australia.

Next year that number will be 354,000.  

That’s a jump of about 30 per cent.

And it’s just the start.

The Accord paints a big picture of what the future looks like and what we need to get there.

That over the next quarter of a century the workforce is going to change dramatically.

That we will go from a workforce today where sixty percent of people have a tertiary qualification to 80 percent by the middle of the century.

Now if that’s right we have to open the doors of our universities wider.

This is a big project.

And I know you don’t want a 20 minute video message about every single part of the Accord.

But I do want to just mention some of the big things that have happened since we got together at UTS last year.

First, we have cut student debt by 20 percent. That all happened in December last year.

And it wiped $16 billion off the back of three million Australians.

But not only that.

We also introduced a new marginal repayment system.

In the past, once you earned above the minimum repayment threshold, you paid a percentage of your entire wage as a repayment.

Now you only pay a percentage of your wage above the minimum repayment threshold.

It means someone on about $70,000 a year will have to pay $1,300 less a year.

The architect of HECS, Professor Bruce Chapman, said this is: “the most important thing that's happened to the system in 35 years.”

Two months ago I announced a major expansion of another key equity reform.

And that’s Paid Prac.

It’s another big recommendation of the Accord.

What the Accord made clear is it’s not just the cost of degrees that’s important, it’s the cost of living while you’re getting it.

And when you are doing your prac that gets even harder. It can sometimes mean you have to give up your part time job.

Sometimes it can mean paying rent in two places at once. At the place you normally live in, and the place a couple of hundred kilometres away, where you are doing your prac.

It’s a reason why some students don’t finish. And it’s why we created Paid Prac.

We started last year with teaching and nursing and midwifery and social work.

And now we are extending it to ten more frontline health professions.

Clinical Psychology; Physiotherapy; Occupational Therapy; Speech Pathology; Radiography; Pharmacy; Rehabilitation Therapies; Audiology; Podiatry; and Paramedicine.

Over the last 12 months the ATEC has also come to life.

I remember Shamit once telling me the ATEC wasn’t just the most important recommendation in the Accord, it was the Accord.

Not because of what it will do in the next year or two, but what it has the potential to do over the next decade and the one after that.

I think that’s right.

It’s got the potential to turn a sector into a system.

A system that’s bigger than we have today, double the size.

A system that’s built around the know how of each university, and the needs of the nation.

A system where we have universities of different sizes and who do different things.

More like a constellation than the cut and paste approach we have today.

A system that’s more seamless. More connected. Where it’s easier to move between TAFE and university. And get the skills you need quicker and cheaper.

The ATEC can help us do all of this and more.

Reform isn’t easy.

It takes time. It costs money.

When I got this job I made it pretty clear where my focus would be.

As I am sure you remember, I said we need to help more people from poor families and from the regions and the bush get a crack at university.

I got a lot of nods back then.

The hard part isn’t saying it though.  The hard part is doing it.

Bending the system to make it fairer.

It means changing the whole education system. Not just universities.

And it sometimes means doing things that not everyone likes.

The legislation in the parliament right now is a good example of that.

The Liberal Party call it socialism.

That’s arrant nonsense that says more about them than it does about the Bill.

The truth is it’s a bill to help more young people from poor families and from the regions and the bush get a crack at university, and get through.

The sort of thing we did for Indigenous students three years ago.

Since then, the number of Indigenous students at university jumped by nearly 13 percent.

Preliminary data indicates it is up again this year.

Over the next decade my department thinks it could double.

The Bill does the same sort of thing for young people from poor families, from the regions and the bush.

It also puts in place for the first time a real demand driven needs-based funding system so students from disadvantaged backgrounds get more help to get through university.

It does that for a reason.

The evidence tells us that students from disadvantaged backgrounds and students from the regions and the bush aren’t just less likely to start a university degree.

They are also less likely to finish it.

The data indicates they are up to twice as likely to drop out after their first year at university than other students.

That's why Needs-based Funding is important.

It will provide funding for things like tutoring, mentoring and other academic support and direct financial assistance like scholarships and emergency grants.

There have been other programs, like HEPPP, that did this.

But funding for those programs was capped. This is different.

This is demand driven. The more students a university has that meet the criteria, the more funding they'll receive.

The more students there are at a regional campus, the more funding that university will receive as well.

In NSW at Charles Sturt University with campuses in Wagga, Orange, Bathurst, Dubbo, Albury-Wodonga and Port Macquarie, it means thousands more students going there and between $200 million and $500 million in extra funding over the next decade.

In Queensland at Central Queensland University with campuses in Townsville, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bundaberg, Cairns, Gladstone and Emerald, it could mean up to $260 million in extra funding over the next decade.

That’s an extra three quarters of a billion flowing into these towns and more will go to other regional universities across the country.

This is what I meant when I said I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on your postcode, your parents, or the colour of your skin.

Reforms like this.

It hasn’t come out of thin air.

It’s one of the centrepieces of the Accord.

Recommendation 40.

And hopefully in the next few days or weeks it will become the law.

Is it everything we have to do?

No, of course not.

There is a lot more we have to do to make our higher education better and fairer and everything it can be.

But this is the next step.

And I am sure in your work today and tomorrow you will touch on the next steps we need to take.

And I want to thank you in advance for it.

Have a great symposium and I look forward to seeing you soon.