Address to the opening of the UOW Liverpool campus

I start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting today and pay my respects to Elders past, present, emerging. 

Thank you, Aunty Dorothy, for that truly beautiful Welcome to Country. 

Well, this is bloody brilliant. 

Can I thank you, Ned, and the whole team of the Council for helping to bring this to life. 

And Max and Michael and Carneo and Adam and the whole team at the university as well. 

This is vision and this is leadership. 

Max, you mentioned the Universities Accord and thank you for it. 

You know what the Accord is, for friends who haven't heard of it before, it's a plan for our universities for the next 10 or 20 years. 

And what it says is that at the moment around about 60 per cent of Aussies in the workforce have a TAFE qualification or a uni degree, and that by 2050 that'll need to be 80 per cent. 

Just let that sink in for a second. 

About three in five Australians in the workforce have some sort of post-school qualification today and that, by the middle of the century, it needs to be four in five. 

That's a big jump. 

And what the Accord says is that's only going to happen if it happens here in places like Liverpool, because at the moment, places like Mosman or Toorak are already at that level, but we're not at that level here. 

And so, in order to realise that opportunity and build that workforce that we're going to need in the decades ahead, we've got to build it here. 

That's what I mean when I talk about vision and leadership and helping to bring the Accord to life. 

Ned, you talk about Liverpool becoming a university city. 

I want Liverpool to be a university city, and I want Bankstown to be a university city, and I want Parramatta to be a university city, and I want Blacktown to be a university city. I want Western Sydney to be a university city. 

Because if we're going to make the Accord a reality, that's what we have to do. 

At the moment, as the Minister for Education, we allocate a number of funded places to each university to educate Australian kids. Wollongong gets this much, Western Sydney gets this much, Sydney University gets this much. 

In a couple of months’ time, I'm going to introduce legislation that changes that, that uncaps that, for kids from poor families and kids from the bush. 

So, the kids, like the kids who live in our communities here and in Western Sydney, if they get the marks, if they've got the skills, if they've got what it takes, then they get a funded Australian Government place at university.

That's what we have to do. 

And I'm sure Ann and Dai get it as well. You live it and you breathe it here in our local community. 

A couple of people mentioned that I grew up down the road in Cabramatta. 

Two railway stations away. And I spent a lot of my misspent youth here at Liverpool Westfields. 

Hanging out at a shop like Sanity, which I don't think exist anymore, where you used to be able to buy a thing called CDs, right? And I spent, I reckon, 25 years playing cricket in the dodgy cricket fields of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Fairfield and Liverpool. 

I realised very quickly I was never going to be Adam Gilchrist. And so, I had to get on the train and head to university, and I went to the University of NSW. 

That wasn't two railway stations away, that was 20. 

And then you get on the bus at Eddy Avenue, and you take the, now there's light rail, but in those days, it was a bus. 

And so, it was an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back. 

And at the same time as I was doing that, a friend of mine who lived, truth be told, a girlfriend of mine who lived at Moorebank, which locals will know is just around the corner from here, was studying nutrition at the University of Wollongong. 

And so, she had to make the hike of about an hour to get down to the Gong. 

An hour there and an hour back, because when we were growing up, there was no University of Wollongong here. 

We did that. 

But a lot of our friends didn't.

University seemed too far away. It seemed like it was for somebody else.  

Whether we like it or not, we are creatures of our environment. 

If our mum and dad finish high school, we're more likely to finish high school. If our mum and dad went to uni, then we're more likely to go to uni. 

And if you live near a university, you're more likely to go too. 

You're certainly more likely to finish just because it's closer. 

That's why buildings like this are important. 

And that's why a big sign out the front that says this is a university is important too. 

So, that every mum and dad and every child who drives past here says, “we've got a university in town, maybe I could go there”. 

Talent is everywhere. It's opportunity that's not. 

And it’s education that can change that. 

I don't want us to be a country where your chances depend on how rich your mum or dad are, or where you live, or what school you went to or the colour of your skin. But we are. 

We don't have to be. 

We can change that. 

Education can change that. 

That's why this is more than a building. 

A good education can change one life. 

A good education system can change a country. 

This is part of that. 

That's why I didn't want to miss today. 

Thank you.