Monday 24 August 2026
Attributable to Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations National President Jesse Gardner-Russell:
Thank you Chair for having the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations, the peak body for over 570,000 postgraduate students in Australia, here today.
My name is Jesse Gardner-Russell, and I am a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Just the other month my research was published in one of the top international journals, Nature Communications, which unveiled a new way to help prevent the vision loss that so often follows a stroke. That research exists a low-SES kid from regional Victoria got their opportunity. I am exactly one of the students this Bill is named for.
We support its intention. Opening that door to kids from regional towns or a low-income home. That goal is right. But the Bill misses the mark. Two years and three budgets on from the Accord this second-term government commissioned, its centrepiece funding legislation misunderstands what university students actually look like in 2026.
So let me say something you rarely hear from someone a student representative: the Coalition’s Job-ready Graduates package, which people like me regularly criticise, did one genuinely good thing. By letting universities shift CSPs between levels of study, it put more than six thousand extra Australians into subsidised health postgraduate degrees in 2024, compared with 2020 — with thousands more in teaching and IT. A legacy worth preserving.
Postgraduate coursework students are in their late twenties and early thirties. They are more likely than undergraduates to be working full time. And it is the degree of choice for anyone retraining or upskilling.
Think of a mum in regional Victoria who stepped back from work to raise her kids and now wants to retrain as a teacher to earn more for her family. A postgraduate place is the only degree a university can charge her full fee for — less than twenty thousand dollars with the CSP, or seventy-five thousand without. So the moment you cap the system, her CSP place is the first one cut: it is the only one the university can refill at full fee, and the one it gets no needs-based funding for.
It is robbing Peter to pay Paul. She can no more save her way to a seventy-five-thousand-dollar degree than I could for my bachelor’s — and I spent my gap year working full-time in IT, part-time at KFC, and tutoring on the side, just to afford to start my bachelor’s. A CSP is what let me do my master’s, and my master’s is what got me into research. Take it away, and the research that gives hope to someone who has just lost their sight doesn’t exist.
So we are not asking for a single dollar. We are asking you to make the Bill blind to the level of study. It takes two fixes that work synergistically together. The first is the funding: the Bill already rightly gives an Indigenous postgraduate needs-based funding, but it just stops one line short of providing that same support to a low-SES or regional postgraduate.
Secondly, Needs-based funding can only follow a student who already holds a CSP. The Minister promised that if you get the marks and you’ve got what it takes, you’ll get a place — a promise that, for those who scoured the Bill, is not found for anyone, and that the government’s own memorandum limits to non medical bachelor degrees. Legislate both, for postgraduates too.
This Bill is called Opening the Doors of Opportunity. Right now, it is a door stopper. Thank you, and I welcome your questions.
Attributable to Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations National Vice President Richard Lee:
Chair and Senators, Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is Richard Lee, and I am the National Vice President of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations, the peak body for postgraduate students in Australia.
My colleague Jesse has discussed the technical implications of this Bill for postgraduate students. I want to speak briefly about something more fundamental: dignity and choice.
The premise of this Bill is one that CAPA strongly supports. Where you grow up, what your parents earn, or the postcode you come from should not determine whether the doors of our universities are open to you. But opportunity in higher education cannot and should not be something we offer Australians once, at the age of seventeen or eighteen.
People’s lives change. The eighteen-year-old who chooses one career may discover at 25 that their aspirations have changed – I certainly don’t abide by the career pathway my school career counsellor and I planned when I was 17.
Think about a parent who leaves the workforce to care for their children may need a new qualification to return. A worker whose profession is transformed by automation may need to retrain altogether. Nobody drifts into a postgraduate degree the way a 17 or 18 year-old drifts into a bachelor’s because it’s the next step after school. You choose it; deliberately, usually in your mid-to-late twenties or thirties, usually whilst working full time.
Senators, more than 150,000 Australians work full-time whilst studying postgraduate qualifications, more than the number doing so at bachelor level.
It is the degree of the career-changer: the paramedic who wants to teach, the accountant who wants to move into policy. Nursing, teaching and allied health (the professions this country is short of workers in) are often postgraduate-entry programmes. And this is where I think we need to talk about self-determination.
Higher education policy should give Australians the capacity to make meaningful choices about the direction of their own lives. Our government undoubtedly has an interest in workforce planning and skills needs, but students are not simply units of human capital to be allocated to whichever occupation happens to appear on a skills shortage list.
Education gives people agency.
It gives someone the capacity to say: this is not where my story ends; I want to do something different. Yet, our funding system still carries an assumption that the bachelor’s degree is the principal opportunity the government should support, and that further education is somehow an optional extra.
The Bill illustrates that contradiction. A low-SES student undertaking an undergraduate degree can attract needs-based funding. A low-SES student undertaking a postgraduate degree cannot. Senators, the disadvantage has not disappeared; their postcode has not magically changed. Their financial circumstances have not necessarily improved. The only thing that has changed is the level of the qualification they are seeking.
Australia cannot simultaneously tell our citizens that they must adapt to technological change, tell industries that we need people to retrain to address critical workforce shortages, and then design a higher-education funding system that makes postgraduate retraining financially inaccessible to the people who need it most. That is not lifelong learning we strive to achieve as a nation; it is lifelong learning for those who can afford it. CAPA does not believe the answer is to take opportunities away from undergraduate students.
The ambition of this Bill to expand participation for Australians from low-SES, regional and underrepresented backgrounds is important, and it should be protected. Our argument is that disadvantage does not cease at graduation, and neither should opportunity. We are not asking you to invent a new benefit. We are asking you to recognise a choice this Bill already recognises for every other student it covers: with a place, and with the funding to make that place affordable rather than a $75,000 full-fee bet on a new career.
Make the system agnostic as to level of study. Give disadvantaged postgraduate students access to the same needs-based support. Preserve genuine access to Commonwealth Supported Places at postgraduate level. Because opening the doors of opportunity should not just mean helping more Australians enter university. We think it should mean giving Australians, throughout their lives, the dignity and freedom to decide which door they want to walk through. Thank you.
Attributable to Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations Policy and Research Advisor Maxim Jon-Buckley:
Thank you for having myself and my colleagues, Jesse Gardner-Russell, Richard Lee, and Sharlene Leroy-Dyer here today as representatives of CAPA and Australian postgraduate students.
Like Jesse, I too am a PhD candidate, and I too am a kid from the country. I will soon submit my PhD thesis, which investigates how acute lymphoblastic leukaemia cells, a blood cancer that predominantly affects children, communicate with non-leukaemic cells to initiate leukaemia.
I have conducted my PhD research at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, South Australia’s only independent medical research institute located in Adelaide.
It would be an understatement to say that research is facing chronic underfunding. Rejection rates for some government research schemes are currently as high as 92%. This means that universities that want to support regional researchers must do so out of their own pocket – for the benefit of the community.
Cutting-edge research is critical to a cutting-edge education.
They are not separate parts of the university. They are part of the same loop.
The Bill misunderstands higher education because it does not provide the additional funding required to improve the quality of education for the new students the government wants to attend university.
Where this comes into focus is at our regional campuses. The Bill is pitched as promoting regional Australians to attend a regional university. But where could a student like myself undertake my research with the specialised equipment and support required, at a regional university? The government is limiting the choices of regional Australians by not providing appropriate funding for what courses are still available to them.
But this also intersects with the Government’s other plan – to specialise university research. There is a consultation ongoing as to the breadth of research conducted by universities. When this Bill and that consultation are put together, what we have is a situation where the student’s choice is taken away, and the breadth of opportunities is limited for regional Australians.
This is the research environment myself, Jesse, and many Australians are about to inherit. If the government would like to open the doors of opportunity, funding research is what provides the quality of education that people like Jesse and I deserve.
