Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Education Services for Overseas Students Legislation Amendment (2006 Measures No. 1) Bill 2006 and cognate bill help to assure the quality of Australian education and training institutions for overseas students. The legislation is designed to protect the reputation of Australia’s $7 billion education export industry. Certainly, as has been acknowledged by the member for Batman, we should reflect on the fact that this education industry was created initially by the Hawke and Keating governments. They saw wonderful opportunities for education exports from Australia, involving overseas students coming to Australia in large numbers and benefiting from our education system; and Australia benefiting not only from the revenue that was generated by their participation in education but also from the improvement in the diversity and quality of our culture and our links back to the countries from where those students came.

That was all part of the integration of Australia into our region—a reorientation of the Australian economy and, to some extent, of Australian society, such that it was more interested and more engaged in our local region and neighbourhood. That program has been a wonderful success. However, from time to time it will need some repair work, some tending, to ensure that quality is maintained. Unfortunately, there have been occasions when the quality of our offering has not been up to scratch. That is due in part to unscrupulous operators—a small minority of the total sector. That is why this legislation is before us—to ensure that unscrupulous operators are not abusing the system and so that quality is maintained.

The legislation is in part a consequence of an evaluation of the regulatory framework—an evaluation which made 41 recommendations. This legislation implements some of those recommendations while others do not need legislative change in order to be implemented. Labor is supporting the legislation but will move an amendment that provides for 28 days notice of the amount of annual registration charges to the education providers. This amendment will be moved by the member for Capricornia.

The education system in Australia for overseas students has become an integral part of our immigration program, as the member for Batman explained. Overseas students coming to Australia can earn points for immigration purposes through their study. I think that is a good thing because we will continue to need a strong immigration program in the coming decades as our own population ages and as the proportion of working age Australians in the total population consequently falls. An immigration program will play a significant role, along with other measures that can be taken, in ensuring that we are successful in combating the adverse economic consequences of the ageing of the population.

In a book of mine that was published earlier in the year I suggested the idea not only of the students themselves being given some extra consideration in remaining in Australia but that, while they were studying, their parents and other family members might be encouraged to come to Australia. It stands to reason if parents are so motivated to send their children to Australia to study that those parents might themselves make a good contribution to our society. This is all part of the challenge of the 21st century, a challenge that has been well explained by Richard Florida in two books, the first called The Rise of the Creative Class and the second The Flight of the Creative Class. By a ‘creative class’ Florida means those people who have had the opportunity to go to university, whether that be in the humanities, architecture, medicine or scientific research. He identifies, in a broad order of magnitude, about 150 million such people around the world. And he suggests that, more than any other factor, the availability of people who constitute the creative class will determine the wealth and prosperity of parts of the world in the 21st century. I think there is a lot of merit in that argument.

Richard Florida does not specifically deal with countries but with parts of countries. As is the case now, and it may be increasingly so in coming decades, there are parts of countries that are wealthy and other parts that are struggling. Florida observes that the prosperous and most tolerant parts of countries tend to be those that have high concentrations of the creative class. So the great contest of the 21st century will be to generate, attract and retain members of the creative class. Florida’s argument is that, rather than building businesses and trying to attract people to those businesses, communities should seek to attract the creative class, and businesses will follow.

Again in the book that I released, I argue not only that we should do much more to create, attract and retain our own creative class but that perhaps regional areas in Australia could be encouraged to do the same and that a visionary government could contribute to that great task, thereby creating a band of gold of our dynamic regional centres which obviously would include regional universities. That is the sort of challenge Australia confronts in the 21st century—the intense competition for people who have been educated in universities and vocational training institutions. To give absolute currency to this debate, I am able to refer to the OECD report Education at a glance that was released overnight. My colleague the shadow minister for education and Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who is in the chamber now, pointed to the revelations in this report and asked a question of the Prime Minister earlier today which he fobbed off.

A report from the OECD comparing Australia’s performance with that of other members of the OECD should ideally be a goldmine, but this one is a minefield—and I will explain that conclusion as I continue my remarks. On the question of overseas students, it is clear from the report that Australia is more heavily reliant on overseas students than any other OECD country. Indeed, the report says:

Australia, Austria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom display the highest ... proportion of international students in their total tertiary enrolment.

It goes on to say:

In Australia, 16.6% of tertiary students enrolled in the country have come to the country expressly to pursue their studies.

That is not a bad thing; it is a good thing. But it also begins to tell another story, and that is of the neglect of our higher education institutions by the Howard government for domestic students, Australian students.

We welcome overseas students coming to our country, for all of the reasons that I have mentioned, but it should not be a substitute for investment in the education of Australian students; it should be a complement to it. As this OECD report points out, that really has not been the case because the number of Australian undergraduate students has in fact declined, in the last two years for which statistics are available, for the first time in half a century. The report goes on to say, in relation to the contribution of international students to graduate output:

In Australia, Canada, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, more than a quarter of tertiary-type A second degrees or advanced research degrees are awarded to international students. This pattern implies that the true domestic graduate output is significantly over-estimated in overall graduation rates. This over-estimation is most important for tertiary-type A second degree programmes in Australia and advanced research programmes in Switzerland and the United Kingdom, where international graduates represent over 35% of the graduate output.

When the Deputy Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister a question today on our performance in producing Australian undergraduate students at our universities, he bundled together, I believe, all students—overseas and domestic students—to inflate the number. And this is what this OECD report is saying; it is making a very legitimate point that we deserve to know how many of those students are from overseas and how many are Australian. He sought to disguise the fact that this government has tragically and massively underfunded university education for Australian students, such that many universities have had to rely very heavily on overseas full fee paying students in order to sustain their viability.

Indeed, since the change of government in 1996 virtually all the enrolment growth in Australian public universities has been in the area of overseas full fee paying students. There has also been a small lift in the proportion of Australian full fee paying students, but it is from those who are subsidised through the HECS arrangements that we get the result that enrolment growth has been virtually non-existent.

In relation to immigration and overseas students, the OECD report says:

... the education systems where international students contribute most to the graduate output are those of countries with a long tradition of immigration favouring skilled individuals ...

It mentions specifically Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It goes on to say:

In this perspective, the contribution of international graduates to the total graduate output can also be seen as a measure of the size of the potential pool of highly skilled immigrants upon which host countries can capitalise to enhance human availability in the economy.

Hear, hear! And that is why Labor does welcome overseas students into this country. But as I said, the way it has been managed by this government has resulted in our universities relying very, very heavily on overseas students for their revenue. That is because the government has not properly indexed, and therefore increased in line with costs, the payments to our public universities.

From this OECD report the Deputy Leader of the Opposition has revealed, in a statement today, an absolutely stunning indictment of this government. That is that public investment in our TAFEs and universities has declined by seven per cent while in other OECD countries it has increased by an average of 48 per cent—a 48 per cent increase on average for other OECD countries, but in our tertiary education institutions a decline of seven per cent.

The OECD reveals what has been going on in this country since the change of government, because it says:

... many OECD countries with the highest growth in private spending have also shown the highest increase in public funding of education.

This is referring specifically to tertiary education. It says:

This indicates that increasing private spending on tertiary education tends to complement, rather than replace, public investment. The main exception to this is Australia, where the shift towards private expenditure at tertiary level has been accompanied both by a fall in the level of public expenditure in real terms ...

What an indictment that Australia stands out amongst OECD countries as a country where increases in private spending on tertiary education have substituted for, rather than complemented, increases in public expenditure on tertiary education. What this government has done is to shift the burden of investment in higher education and in TAFEs onto private individuals and onto the private sector, and it has shirked its responsibility to invest in the talent of our young people.

As a consequence of the failure to invest properly, the OECD report finds that in Australia the main reason for the increase in the private share of spending on tertiary institutions between 1995 and 2003 was changes to the Higher Education Contribution Scheme that took place in 1997. Who was in government in 1997? The Howard government was, and as soon as it got its hands on the reins of government it moved to very sharply increase HECS fees in this country. Depending on the course, those increases were anywhere from around 30 per cent to more than 100 per cent. This government has no philosophic commitment to public investment in our public education institutions, in our higher education institutions. It believes that a university education is 100 per cent a private good and that there is no public benefit from investing in education. And yet even the driest, most economically rational economist will tell you that there are very, very substantial spillover benefits for the rest of society from investing in higher education and in education more generally.

But this government, driven by blind ideology, does not agree with that, and believes that individuals who are going into our education institutions generate only benefits for themselves and not for the rest of the society. We know that because for most of the last few years this government, instead of investing in our higher education institutions, has been absolutely obsessed with voluntary student unionism and enforcing, coercing and bullying higher education institutions to adopt its own blind ideological position on Australian workplace agreements. When the now Minister for Defence was education minister we spent hours and hours in this parliament debating changes to enforce voluntary student unionism, instead of having a proper debate about investing in the nation’s future and about what we need to do to ensure that we are creative and productive, and have a decent, prosperous and harmonious society in the 21st century.

We desperately need university reform in this country. It will not come from the coalition because it just does not believe in it. But it will come from Labor. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition has produced a very well considered and creative package of higher education reforms that encourages diversity, that turns away from the one-size-fits-all approach of the last 20 years and that questions the government’s approach of ‘Moscow on the Molonglo’, of determining from Canberra the minute details of the operations, courses and practices of universities all around Australia.

Labor’s proposals reward and encourage excellence. They are subject to quality assurance. Just as this legislation provides some quality assurance, Labor believes in quality—not in a highly interventionist approach but one that ensures our public universities are absolutely up to scratch. That is where we are. The OECD report is not a goldmine as it should be; it is a minefield for the coalition government because of its neglect of higher education in this country. It will only be a Labor government that invests truly because it is only a Labor government that believes in higher education in Australia.

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