Federal Parliament Speeches about the Job-Ready Graduates Bill
What did Parliament actually say when it decided an Arts degree should cost up to $50,000?
We’ve just released a structured dataset of the Federal Parliamentary debate on the Job-ready Graduates Package, at a moment when there is a call for submissions to reverse the policy.
But before we rehearse the familiar arguments, it’s worth returning to the source. Often what is said in media commentary does not clearly match the practicalities of government. Before making assumptions, return to the source. It will ensure the strongest submission possible.
Our project extracts Federal Hansard debates from the Parliament of Australia and converts them into clean, research-ready datasets.
This one includes:
- Every parliamentary reference to the Job-ready Graduates reforms
- Full speech text (not excerpts)
- Speaker metadata
- Links back to the official transcripts
No scrolling through webpages. No copy-paste assembly. Just structured debate ready for analysis, teaching, journalism, or submission writing.
If you’re preparing a submission, conducting research, teaching higher education policy, or simply want to check the rhetoric against the record, this dataset gives you the debate in a usable form.
We’re building an open project that makes parliamentary debate more accessible, searchable, and usable for researchers, educators, journalists and advocates.
If you use it, let us know, and cite the dataset! And if you’d like access to similar datasets on other debates, follow the project here.