WeRise · Pillar 2
Learning & Becoming
From preschool to PhD: free, fair and future focused.
Before we can build the Australia we imagine, we need to educate the people who will build it. Not train them for jobs that may not exist. Educate them, fully and freely, from the very beginning.
What Learning & Becoming covers
Learning & Becoming is the part of public life that decides how far a person can grow: early learning, school, TAFE and university, learning again in the middle of a working life, and the science and research that push what any of us knows a little further.
It touches every family with a child, every worker whose job is changing, and every community that depends on a discovery it will never hear about: a vaccine, a crop that survives a drought, a safer bridge.
A society that invests in knowledge invests in everything.
How Australia has seen education and research
Australia's colonies were early to treat schooling as a public duty. In 1872 Victoria made primary education free, compulsory and secular, and the other colonies followed. In 1974 the Commonwealth abolished university tuition fees. Fees returned in 1989 as the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), a loan repaid through the tax system once a graduate earns enough.
Research grew alongside. The body that became CSIRO was founded in 1916, and Australian scientists went on to help give the world penicillin as a medicine, the black box flight recorder and the wireless technology inside modern Wi-Fi.
Each change reflected an argument about who education is for: the student, the employer or the country.
How it is seen now
Today the arguments are about cost and fairness: student debt that follows graduates for years, school funding that does not always reach the schools that need it most, a vocational system being rebuilt after years of decline, and early learning that many families still struggle to afford.
Underneath sits a newer question. If technology changes work faster than a career can adapt, learning cannot stop at twenty-one. It has to be something a person can return to all their life.
Why these policies belong together
Education and science are two halves of one idea: knowledge is a public good. Schools and universities pass on what we know. Research finds out what we do not know yet. Each feeds the other: researchers are trained in classrooms, and classrooms teach what research discovers.
Both also pay off over decades rather than election cycles, which is why they are so easy to cut and so costly to neglect.
Liberation is not a metaphor. It is a measurable outcome.
The policies in this pillar
Two ideas, one direction. Pick the one you care about.
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Last reviewed 9 October 2026 · Published by Atlas Media