Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency’s (TEQSA) 2024 Conference
I start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
[Acknowledgements omitted]
Two and half years ago when I got this job, I said I didn’t want to be the type of Minister that just signed letters.
I wanted to reform the system.
To make it better and fairer.
I suspect now you can see I meant it.
And I hope you can see the reason why in the Universities Accord.
What it tells us is that by the middle of this century we are going to need a workforce where 80 per cent of people have a university degree or a TAFE qualification.
That’s up from about 60 per cent today.
That’s a big shift. A big change.
Some of this will happen organically.
Think about it. The fastest growing professions all require some sort of tertiary qualification.
But some of it will require us to change what we do and how we do it.
The key message in the Accord is that we are not going to hit that 80 per cent target unless we break that invisible barrier that stops a lot of young people from walking through your door.
Overwhelmingly, the young people they are talking about are from poor families, from the outer suburbs of our big cities and from our regions.
Breaking down that barrier means reforming our entire education system.
Here’s the nub of it.
At a time when we need more people to go to TAFE and university, the number of people finishing school at the moment is going backwards.
From 85 per cent 8 years ago to 79 per cent today.
That drop isn’t happening everywhere.
In non-government schools it’s either pretty flat or going up.
It’s happening in our public schools. It’s dropped from 83 per cent to 73 per cent in just eight years.
And in particular its kids from poor families.
If we are going to hit that 80 per cent target we have got to turn this around.
And that doesn’t start in high school either.
The same young people you don’t see walking through your doors, the same young people who don’t finish high school are the same people who fall behind when they are little.
They are also the same people who are more likely to start behind, to have never been to early education and care.
Can you see the common thread?
Fixing this isn’t easy or quick.
It is going to talk a lot of work and it is going to take time.
But the first parts of that are in the Parliament right now.
In the next two weeks six pieces of education legislation will be voted on by the Senate.
The first is a 15 per cent pay rise for early educators right across the country.
Some of the most important workers in the country and some of the most underpaid.
If we are going to build the sort of early education system that we need, that Danielle’s team have plotted out for us in their recent report, we need to build the workforce first.
And that’s what this is about.
The second bill is to increase funding for our public schools – to help complete the work that David Gonski started more than a decade ago.
Fully funding all public schools and tying that funding to reforms to turn around that drop in high school completion rates.
The third bill is another piece of unfinished business.
It extends the system of USIs, or unique student identifiers, that every university student and every TAFE student has to every school student.
We have been talking about this for 15 years – and now it is finally happening.
The fourth bill implements the change we are making to international education.
It makes important changes to fix integrity issues in the system and introduces limits, or caps, on the number of international students.
For universities it’s different. It will mean they will be able to enrol roughly the same number of students next year that they did last year.
The difference is it won’t just the big metro universities that benefit.
And when it passes, Ministerial Direction 107 will go.
I know how important international education is.
It doesn’t just make money. It makes us friends.
But we have got to get the balance right here.
And we have also got to remember what the primary and most important job our universities do is.
And that brings me to the fifth bill.
This is the bill that implements the first stage of the Universities Accord.
It includes almost half a billion dollar investment in paid prac.
The first time the Commonwealth has ever done this.
That’s financial support for teaching students, for nursing students, for midwifery students and for social work students, to help support them while they do the practical part of their degree.
A lot of students tell me that when they do their prac they have to give up their part-time job, or they've got to move away from home or work fewer hours.
Sometimes it can mean they have to delay doing their degree or not finish it at all.
This will give people who have signed up to do some of the most important jobs in this country a bit of extra help to get the qualifications they need. And we need.
Just to give you one example of what this will mean, earlier this year I met a midwifery student at UTS who told me this:
“I'm a first-year mature-age midwifery student. This payment is going to be absolutely life-changing for me. As a mother of two small children, I'm often balancing between practical work, placement and looking after my babies.
“There are literally some days where I'm doing 16 hour days between my study and my work and looking after my children.
“I cannot wait for this payment to be available for myself and other future mature-age students who might also want to enrol in this course who previously couldn't financially afford it.”
That’s what this reform is all about.
This is also the bill that will massively expand the number of free enabling courses.
You know what I’m talking about.
These are those free courses that are effectively a bridge between school and university.
A lot of unis already offer these courses.
Not many do it better than Newcastle University. They have been doing it now for 50 years.
One in five people who get a degree from Newcastle University today, start with one of these free courses.
People like Jennifer Baker.
Jennifer was a mum at 19. She worked in hospitality for 10 years. One day she saw an ad for one of these free courses in the local paper.
Now she’s got a science degree. An Honours degree. A PhD. And a Fulbright Scholarship.
She’s a computational medicinal chemist.
That’s what these courses do.
And what this bill does is effectively uncap funding for those courses, right across the country.
We've committed an additional $350 million over four years to significantly expand these courses.
It’s an ongoing funding commitment.
Universities currently receive as little as $1,286 per place to run these courses.
These changes ensure that universities will receive $18,278 per place next year, which will be tied to CPI increases each year.
It provides funding certainty for universities.
It deals with the disincentives baked into the current system.
And most importantly, it ensures that these courses remain free.
It will help more Australians to get a crack at university and succeed when they get there.
The Department of Education estimates that this will increase the number of people doing these free courses by about 40 per cent by the end of this decade and double that number in the decade after that.
This is also the bill that fixes how HECS debts are indexed.
It fixes what happened last year when inflation spiked and indexation went through the roof, and makes sure it never happens again.
To do this, it caps indexation at either inflation or wage growth, whatever is the lowest.
And it backdates this to June last year.
That on its own will wipe $3 billion in student debt for more than 3 million people.
But it is just the first step in making HECS fairer.
As you know, a bit over a week ago, the Prime Minister announced that if we win the next election, the first piece of legislation we introduce will cut all student debts by a further 20 per cent.
For someone with an average student debt of around $27,000 the legislation in the Parliament at the moment will wipe about $1,200 off their debt. This will wipe a further $5,500 off it.
That’s real help for a lot of young Australians, just out of uni or just out of TAFE, just moved out of home, just getting started.
And we will also make another change, to make it easier to pay off your student debt.
We will increase the salary you have to earn before you have to start paying it off from $54,000 to $67,000.
And will reduce your annual minimum repayments.
For someone on about $70,000, for example, this will mean you have to repay more than $1,000 less a year.
It’s another recommendation of the Universities Accord. In fact it’s a recommendation from the architect of HECS, Professor Bruce Chapman.
The fact is university is more expensive today than it was when most of us were uni students.
When HECS was first created students paid an average of about 24 per cent of the cost of degree.
This increased to about 36 per cent in the late 1990s.
And now, because of the changes the previous government made, it’s about 45 per cent.
Cutting student debt by 20 per cent fixes that for a generation of Australians.
But there is more to do.
That includes changing the way we fund universities.
Part of that is uncapping the number of places at university for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who get the marks for the course they want to do.
Part of that is a new needs-based funding system, so these same students get the extra academic and wraparound support that they need to succeed when they get there.
And part of that is a new Australian Tertiary Education Commission.
A steward. To drive reform over the long term.
And I hope to provide you with more detail on all of that before the end of the year.
Finally, the sixth bill that I want the Senate to pass in the next two weeks creates a National Student Ombudsman.
When I was at this conference last year, I talked about the scourge of sexual violence in our universities and I said that change is coming.
And change is coming.
What we are establishing is a dedicated, national body to handle student complaints within our higher education system.
Equipped with the power:
- To investigate complaints;
- To bring parties together to resolve issues, including offering restorative engagement processes and alternative dispute resolution where appropriate;
- To make findings and recommendations on what actions universities should take; and
- To monitor the implementation of those recommendations.
It will also have the sort of investigative powers a Royal Commission has. That includes the power to:
- To require a person or university to provide information, documents or other records relevant to an investigation;
- To enter premise of a university as part of an investigation; and
- To require a person to attend and answer questions before the Ombudsman.
Recent events at St Paul’s College in Sydney remind us of how important this work is.
This is another recommendation of the Universities Accord.
And it’s not just about sexual violence.
This will complement the work of TEQSA.
A couple of weeks ago I was with Dr Russell and the team at TEQSA for a meeting they organised with all Vice Chancellors as well as the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism and the Race Discrimination Commissioner.
It was focussed on lessons learned from the last few months, sharing best practice and the work we need to do together to ensure students and staff are safe and feel safe on campus.
As part of this, TEQSA is currently developing ‘Sector Guidance’ and a ‘Statement of Regulatory Expectations’ for Australian higher education providers.
To help manage contested issues, protests, and improve complaints and grievance services.
Can I thank Dr Russell and the whole team for all the work you are doing here.
Can I also thank you and the whole team for bringing us together yesterday and today.
To grapple with everything from good governance to generative AI.
And to talk about what’s next.
That’s what our universities are all about.
What’s next.
What this conference calls “Navigating Tomorrow”.
I have talked a bit about that today.
But it is really just the start.
There is a lot to navigate.
And a lot to do.
To make our education system better and fairer.
And if we get this right. Make the country we love better and fairer too.
It’s what makes this job so important and such a privilege.
One I will never take for granted.
Thank you so much for inviting me to talk to you today.