Good morning,
It’s a privilege to be able to address the ACSES policy symposium, and I’m sorry I’m not able to be there with you in person.
And I wanted to thank the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success, Curtin University and Griffith University for this opportunity to speak, and to give you all my warmest wishes for success.
I am recording this on Friday the 4th of September, and as we speak, it is highly likely that the Parliament is debating the future of the university sector through the Managed Growth Bill. My own party room will have finalised its position on Tuesday morning, around the time the Minister Jason Clare was scheduled to address you.
So I won’t get ahead of that deliberative process other than to say that I’m sure you’re discussing those issues too. And part of my message to you is that this critically important debate—about the future of the higher education sector—is taking place today not only at the ACSES symposium in Brisbane, but also in Canberra and across the country.
And there’s good reason for that. Because the question, when you take a step back, runs deeper than a single bill or funding model. It is about this: what sort of future do we want to build for this country through our higher education sector?
And that merits clear-eyed consideration from every serious mind.
Universities as a cause of student evolution in their own right
I approach this topic of course in light of my own experiences. Some of you would have heard me speak of my enthusiasm for this portfolio, and the university sector in particular. I have joked that being the Shadow Education Minister might just be the second-best job in the parliament!
Part of that enthusiasm comes from a recognition of what education can do. I have said many times that education is nation building. What is taught in the classrooms and lecture halls today will become the direction our leaders take in the world of tomorrow.
And part of it comes from my own background. Before joining the parliament, I was educated at the University of New South Wales, spent time as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, ran the public policy think tank the Menzies Research Centre, and worked at the Australian Catholic University under the brilliant Greg Craven and with Professor Anne Cummins, from whom I learned so much about equity and student success.
I loved my time working in the sector, and so I come into this role with a real affection for universities and higher education providers.
A university at its best is a community of scholars.
And I think those two words—community, and scholars—have important connotations.
They imply a commitment to truth over ideology or political convenience.
They imply academic rigour—an honest commitment to examining the totality of the evidence.
And they imply an openness to different views or opinions.
The core themes of this conference centre around the evolving nature of students.
This demands more than a discussion about the characteristics of the students themselves.
When it comes to changes in the student cohort, universities are not solely passive or reactive.
As higher education providers, you are not just responding to an evolving student cohort. In many respects you are responsible for them evolving in the first place.
Evolution implies a change to adapt to environmental pressures—and providers create, or at least have the capacity to control, some of the pressures that cause our student cohort to change into the future.
So it stands to reason that in any full discussion about students, their characteristics and their evolution, we also need to discuss the institutions.
The types of institutions we want.
The pressures they create.
The results they achieve.
And how those pressures will impact students.
That is a broader discussion. And as part of that broader discussion, I wanted my contribution today to focus on three issues:
- student opportunity and the Managed Growth Bill;
- curriculum reform as a pathway to higher education; and
- boys’ education.
Opportunity
Let me start with opportunity and the Managed Growth Bill that is currently before the Parliament.
Opportunity is in the formal title of the legislation, which is not called the Managed Growth Bill but the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026.
But real opportunity requires students to have meaningful choices.
The Managed Growth Bill is not a Bill that creates new places or gives money to students who need it.
Those are budgetary decisions that can be done without new legislation.
And that was one of the points that was made clear through the committee process. Despite the title of the legislation, it does not of itself guarantee increased opportunity.
Indeed, if there is a commitment to clear-eyed analysis and considering the totality of the evidence, the evidence makes for sobering reading.
According to Professor Mark Warburton’s analysis of so-called “fully-funded” places, for example, in 2021 there were 653,796 university places in the system, and the census showed a population of 25.4 million.
That number then decreased significantly – particularly in 2025 and 2026, when the funding for places fell to the tune of just over a billion dollars. On the current plan, we will not now see a return to 2021 levels until 2029, when there will be 658,855 places.
By that stage our population will be 29 million.
That means 5,000 places for an extra 3.6 million people, if you compare 2021 with 2029.
And don’t mistake – there are good things about the legislation. As my Senate colleagues have made clear in the days before recording this message, there are powerful reasons to support it and matters that really must be addressed, and as I said I won’t get ahead of that process.
The reason for mentioning it is because it is one of the pressures that is shaping your cohorts now, and will continue to shape them for at least the next three years. And it will also shape the providers.
One of the concerns which I have raised in my discussions is the fact that the over-enrolment penalties may penalise providers who improve their retention.
And more broadly there is no real question that the Bill as first drafted reduces student choice – as Professor Carolyn Evans herself acknowledged. More students will be turned away from their university of first preference.
And on the current trajectory, under this Bill your students would not only be moving into a market for university places that plays by new rules, they are also moving into a more competitive one.
An honest discussion requires us to acknowledge those restrictions on students’ choices.
From an equity and student success perspective, it’s an important factor for us to consider.
What impact will it have on the student cohort? How would students respond when they don’t receive a place at their university of choice? What will be the behavioural response? How will these pressures force the cohort to evolve?
Reading and the curriculum
My second issue concerns reading and, more broadly, the curriculum.
The doors to our universities do not open in year 12. They do not open simply as a result of funding, or because growth is managed.
They start to open when children learn to read. When they build the foundational knowledge that equips them for future life.
I am happy to say that in my view there has been some progress in this area. Since Christopher Pyne started the work towards mandating phonics education in his time as Education Minister more than a decade ago, the Coalition has been championing the cause of phonics.
Of course, Christopher had to contend with a lot of pushback from those who confused his passion for reading with his political philosophy.
And so I was pleased to see in Parliament earlier this year, Jason Clare declared the reading wars are over. I have publicly plauded him for his stance. It is a good thing.
He isn’t the first one to make that declaration. Sarah Mitchell, the Coalition Education Minister in NSW made the exact same declaration in November of 2020. You can find it online.
She rolled out the year one phonics screening check in NSW the very next year. And it is good to see that is now national.
The reason for raising this is to make the point that that success in higher education should not be framed as a funding issue. That is politically convenient, but it is a mistake.
Equity, student access and, more importantly, completion, is not achieved because of money.
Because as much as anything else, the students you take in are the product of the primary and secondary systems that come before you.
And the lesson of the last 16 years is that we are pouring more than ever before into our school system, and our schoolchildren are performing worse than ever.
Money isn’t the answer. Good education policy might be.
And if the reading wars are over, the learning wars aren’t.
To this day, we have debates over the explicit instruction and foundational knowledge.
The evidence is very clear.
Explicit instruction works.
Foundational knowledge is necessary.
Students need to have deep foundational knowledge to set them up for success and help them to understand the world around them.
And they need it in particular to engage effectively with AI.
The basics of a strong school education—reading, writing, maths, science and a proper understanding of our history—are non-negotiable.
Without that foundation, we are failing to equip our children with tools they need to build successful and productive careers.
We are not equipping them to succeed in your institutions.
We should expect our education system to set high standards and drive excellence in these fields. We do not want to fall into the trap of low expectations.
That starts with a school curriculum.
Indeed, I understand that is one of the core topics that Professor Jim Nyland has explored in his new book which is being formally launched at the symposium.
One of the themes in the book is the role curriculum innovation can play in supporting greater access, participation, and student success.
I think there’s something of a meeting of minds on this issue.
Because I think it’s clear curriculum can and does play a role, for better or worse, in higher education access, participation and success.
When I call for reform of the school curriculum, it is a call to improve outcomes. It is a call that aims to drive success in higher education.
So let me ask the question.
If the evidence is clear that our curriculum should be rich in content, with clear and precise knowledge that is logically sequenced—why would we do something different?
If the evidence is clear that students do well when their teachers have subject matter expertise on the topic—why would we design our curriculum otherwise?
Both of these apply to the thematic, cross-curricular priorities which are currently in the national curriculum.
How do you deliver a carefully designed, structured set of learning points that build sequentially upon each other when the subject is distributed across the curriculum as a whole?
And almost by definition, if it’s a cross-curricular priority, it isn’t being taught by someone with subject matter expertise.
It does these subjects a disservice and I think we need to do better.
And nor should we stop there.
I am deeply concerned with the idea that we as a nation should be asked to wait until 2032 to review the whole of the curriculum.
Because among other things, that will affect you and the work you do.
And it won’t just affect you now – it will affect you out to the 2040s.
Boys education
The final point I want to make is about boys’ education.
Any serious equity and student success agenda must confront the educational disengagement of boys and young men.
This is a point I have been articulating ever since I was appointed Shadow Minister for education.
This is not a zero-sum game.
In the last thirty years we have made extraordinary strides in the education of women and girls.
In 1996, similar proportions of men and women had degrees, with slightly more men than women – around 10%.
By 2024, 37% of women between the ages of 15 and 74 had a degree at bachelor’s level or higher. And if you drill down into the 25-34 age bracket, it is 54% of women who have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Those two figures compare with 30% of men between 15 and 74, and 41% of men in the 25-34 age bracket.
It is fair to say now that not only are Australians better educated in general than they were 30 years ago, but that women are better educated than men.
The successes we have had in women’s education are massive; it is a public policy achievement of which Australians should justly be proud.
I want boys and girls to succeed in their education – and can I say that I have a personal stake in this, as I have both a son and a daughter in the education system right now!
As I said, it is not a zero-sum game – and the data we are seeing on boys’ education is clear and it is compelling.
Boys continue to trail girls across the board on all the NAPLAN literacy assessments—reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation.
School retention rates now sit at 77.6% for boys, compared with 85.3% for girls.
And this flows through to our higher education sector. In NSW, where I’m from, there is now an 11-point gap between boys and girls going on to higher education in NSW.
And over the last 10 years, the number of higher education enrolments by young men has fallen by 10,000 – even though the population grew by 3.4 million over the same period.
There is a gap in university completions that is pronounced and growing.
According to ABS data about undergraduate domestic student, in 2020 there were 28,000 more young women than men who completed their degree.
By 2024—the most recent year for which we have data—that gap had expanded to 35,343.
In other words, in 4 years the gap in female to male undergraduate completions blew out by a massive 26.2%.
And if you want to talk proportions rather than raw numbers, the same trend emerges. Compared with their female counterparts, male completion ratios dropped significantly over those 4 years.
What this is showing us is not only that men are less likely to commence higher education than they were 10 years ago, they’re also more likely to drop out, and the rate at which they drop out relative to women is increasing.
This is why I wrote to Jason Clare last year and asked him to set up an inquiry into Boys’ education and to his credit he did – it is called the inquiry into “educational attainment”.
I am calling on you to confront this issue, treat it seriously.
Treat it seriously, like I know academics like George Williams do.
This is not a political issue. It is a systemic issue
This is part of the evolving student cohort you are discussing today.
And as I said, any serious equity and student success agenda must confront the educational disengagement of boys and young men.
Conclusion
With those points made, I’d like to end on a note of thanks. This is a group that has withstood the test of time in terms of supporting students.
You have been committed to supporting students achieve the best outcomes for years now, and have been building an evidence base so others can do so too. You continue to do so.
So as we in Canberra continue to debate the Bill currently before the Parliament, I ask you to please keep doing what you do. Keep advocating for students, and keep telling us how we can best help you do your jobs well.
I thank you again for your time and for the privilege of speaking today, and I wish you every success in your symposium.
Thank you.