The government’s capping student places and needs-based funding bill – with considerable spin officially called the Universities Accord (Opening the Doors of Opportunity) Bill 2026 – won Senate approval on Monday. A total of 43 amendments were made, 32 from the Australian Greens, 6 from the government, and 5 from the Coalition. In some cases, a bundle of related amendments was needed to make a single substantive change.

The amended bill then returned to the House of Representatives for approval. The House made a purely technical change, replacing a Senate equity grant expenditure provision with its own identical amendment. This was due to section 53 of the Constitution, concerning the Senate’s power to amend financially-related provisions. So the amended-but-not-amended bill went back to the Senate and secured final approval today.

This post outlines the major changes to the original bill. It revises an earlier post on proposed amendments. The key changes are: a more secure sector-level floor number of Commonwealth supported places; a higher over-enrolment limit for larger universities; removal of a power to designate courses, which would have let ATEC allocate and cap places for specific courses; a better definition of equity student; and limits on the minister’s power to add conditions.

The Senate also inserted an amendment unrelated to the original bill, moved by the Coalition, to add two new institutions to Table B of the Higher Education Support Act 2003. This achieves more favourable public funding for them and their students. I suspect this amendment also has section 53 issues and will need to be revisited. In the interests of not further lengthening this post, I will discuss this issue in a separate post.

A sector-level floor number of places

On the bill’s introduction the explanatory memorandum indicated a floor number of Commonwealth supported places was intended, but this was not reflected in the bill itself.

In the House of Representatives a government amendment created a ‘core student load’ minimum number of places for public universities, although the amendment does not preclude year-on-year reductions in places.

But there was no corresponding requirement that the minister set a ‘total allocation pool’ of Commonwealth supported places sufficient to cover all the minimum ‘core student load’ allocations.

A government amendment in the Senate ensures that a year’s total allocation pool will be at least the previous year’s level: new section 30-5(1A).

That could still leave continuing student enrolment growth without sufficient places in the total allocation pool, which would force a reduction in commencing places. But overall this amendment improves the bill’s internal coherence.

Date for announcing the total allocation pool

A Greens amendment moved the statutory latest announcement of the total allocation pool back a month, from 30 June to 31 May.

Over-enrolment buffer

Under the original bill, universities with fewer than 15,000 students would be able to over-enrol 5% above their ‘domestic student profile’ of Commonwealth supported places, while larger universities would have a fixed cap of 750 places, in practice 2%-3% above their domestic student profile.

Under a Greens amendment all providers get the 5% over-enrolment buffer.

On my rough calculations, based on ATEC estimated CSPs for 2026, the Greens amendment increases the system’s theoretical capacity by about 7,000 places. The amendment ensures that growth in fully-funded places always triggers additional over-enrolment places; every extra 1,000 fully-funded places would also create 50 student contribution-only places.

A Green amendment changed the transitional provisions for currently over-enrolled universities. The original bill sets commencing student limits for over-enrolled universities, with cumulative penalties for consecutive year breaches – so if a university was 100 places over-enrolled above its commencing cap in each of Years 1 and 2, their penalty would be 100 × their average student contribution in Year 1 and 200 × their average student contribution in Year 2.

Under the Greens amendment only consecutive years immediately preceding the allocation year would count. So if a university exceeded its commencing cap in Year 1 and 2, was below it in Year 3, and then exceeded it again in Year 4, the university would only be penalised for Year 4 and not the cumulative total of Years 1, 2 and 4.

ATEC considerations when allocating places

ATEC has already provided, in briefings, a long list of its considerations when allocating places. However the bill only requires ATEC to take into account the minister’s strategic priorities and the provider’s performance under mission based compacts: section 30-45(1). A Greens amendment adds ‘student demand’. ATEC is, I believe, already taking demand into account in a negative sense – it does not want to allocate scarce CSPs to universities that cannot use them. But the philosophy of the bill, as shown in the over-enrolment policy, is that student demand should not be a decisive consideration.

Another Greens amendment requires ATEC to publish a summary of the matters it took into account when allocating places.

A related amendment requires ATEC to report on matters it is legally required to take into account, which includes the minister’s strategic priorities, ATEC’s assessment of compact performance, and whether the decision is likely to affect the provider’s compliance with an existing law, one that requires that students in Commonwealth supported places be able to complete their courses in CSPs.

In practice, this last provision is most likely to affect non-university higher education providers. They sometimes receive temporary allocations of CSPs, but enrol students who take longer than the period of funding to finish their courses. Note that ATEC does not have to ensure that these students get funded CSPs, it just has to take them into account. This could create a situation where a NUHEP is fined for over-enrolments because it is legally required to offer CSP places that ATEC will not fund.

Designated places removed

Under the original bill the minister could ‘designate’ a course or kind of course. This lifted another provision, which is still in place, that prevents ATEC from allocating places to a specific course or kind of course. Once a course was designated, ATEC could set a capped number of places in that course or kind of course.

Job-ready Graduates retained the designation power but stopped using it for postgraduate and sub-bachelor CSPs, leaving only medicine as designated under the current system.

A Greens amendment removes designated places altogether. From Senator Faruqi’s remarks in the Senate yesterday, this is so a future Coalition or One Nation government cannot designate ‘woke’ courses. ‘Woke’ courses can, however, still be defunded under section 36-15(2) of the existing Act, so removing designation does not entirely avoid this outcome.

This amendment also removes a possible use of designation that I thought more likely than cutting woke courses, such as re-designating postgraduate CSPs to preserve more capacity for undergraduates.

Under a separate provision of the legislation, medical places are still allocated by the minister, which is functionally the same as designation but no longer called that.

For non-Table A providers (private universities and non-university higher education providers) the minister will still determine a ‘priority class of courses’ and which providers are entitled to receive them. ATEC then works out the details.

I am surprised that the final legislation gives the government/ATEC so little power to micromanage Commonwealth supported places. It seems at odds with the general philosophy behind the ATEC reforms, especially around targeting skills shortages. The 2027 compacts will show whether ATEC uses them to get around these provisions. The government has form in bypassing the law, specifically in the allocation of places and in the rule-by-email scandal.

Ministerial conditions

A broad ministerial power to add conditions, in proposed section 36-65, to Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding was opposed by numerous stakeholders and supported by none. In the House of Representatives the government amended its own bill to restore existing constraints on industrial relations conditions and to limit the minister’s power to defund courses he or she does not like.

A Green amendment removes section 36-65 entirely but adds a ministerial power to impose conditions on allocations of medical places. The conditions must be ‘in relation to medical courses’.

Another Greens amendment removes a ministerial power to add conditions to specific providers in relation to needs based funding.

Definition of ‘low SES’ for needs based funding purposes

The bill as introduced was widely criticised for defining ‘low SES’ for needs based funding as the student’s address when they enrolled in a unit (a subject). That would mean a student who enrolled as a low SES student but then moved closer to campus would probably lose their low SES status. Because the number of university students is in the IEO formula, geographic areas around universities tend to be in the higher IEO deciles.

A Greens amendment deletes the reference to when the student enrolled in the unit.

Definition of regional

Regional needs based funding is based on funding students at regional campuses rather than regional students as such. The bill, however, refers to a ‘high priority area’ rather than a regional area directly. A ‘high priority’ area was defined in proposed section 39-50(4) to be regional areas as classified by the ABS or an area specified in the Needs Based Funding Grants Guidelines. A Liberal amendment removed this discretionary element, so regional funding only applies to campuses in official regional areas.

A downside for universities of losing this discretion is that regional classifications change with each Census. Some campuses could suddenly lose regional funding when the 2026 Census data is released.

The original bill included within its definition of regional campus a unit ‘administered or delivered’ at such a campus. A Liberal amendment removed ‘administered’. This stops universities putting a subject administrator at a regional campus to generate needs based funding.

Use of equity funding

The use of equity funding under the original section 39-70 amendment is quite prescriptive. Stakeholders were concerned that it only permitted support of equity students after they enrolled, and did not support activities to attract them to university (although there is a dedicated outreach fund for that).

A government amendment now allows spending on activities that support eligible equity students to access eligible equity courses. In practice, that means that universities can spend the money promoting undergraduate courses to low SES students but not postgraduate courses. For Indigenous students, universities can promote undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Equity and regional modifier amounts

The needs based funding system has statutory base loadings multiplied by a ‘modifier amount’ if a student has characteristics set out in the legislation. For example, a low SES student with a low ATAR gets more funding than one with a high ATAR.

Under the bill as introduced, the minister decided the modifier amount. It could be less than one, and indeed a modifier amount of 0.5 was proposed for online regional campus students.

A Greens amendment sets a minimum modifier of 1 for equity students and another amendment sets a minimum 0.5 for regional campus students.

International student commencements

The original bill gives the minister the power – which he has taken anyway via the national planning level – to make a determination specifying ‘the number of overseas students that may commence a course of education with ESOS registered higher education providers during a specified period’: original section 46B(1)(a), emphasis added.

A Greens amendment altered the wording of ‘number of overseas students that may commence courses of education’, replacing ‘a course’ with ‘courses’.

Based on Senator Faruqi’s statements in the Senate yesterday this was due to a view that the minister could use the original phrasing to specify places by course. A government senator said that the government had only intended to set overall numbers, but caps by course were proposed in the original attempt to set caps.

Evaluation of Act

The original section 37-1 required an evaluation of the system of allocating places to commence before 1 January 2031. A Greens amendment brings that forward to before 1 January 2030.

The amendment would also bring a review of needs based funding, as required under section 39-75, back a year to 1 January 2030.

ENDS