Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

She is not responsible, Member for Fisher. She would say that I was one of the ones who got away from her. RMIT have a campus in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, in Saigon. RMIT Vietnam offer Australian qualifications through their campus there. What is particularly important about that point is that RMIT, operating under Australian legislation as well as Vietnamese legislation, can get a four-year course through in 2½ years, because they teach 50 weeks of the year, not 36. Most universities and places of trade training operate about 36 weeks a year, Monday to Friday, 9 to 4, with 20 hours of student contact time a week. If the member for Capricornia wants to talk about efficiencies in the sector, she needs to know that in a lot of ways our universities and our trade training institutes are more like holiday camps to kids coming from other countries rather than places of efficient, effective and pressurised learning.

Kids from the countries that are coming to Australia expect to come here to work, and their parents expect them to come here to work. When they come on a student visa they are allowed to work 20 hours around our community as well as study. They are expected to work at study and to progress in order to stay here as a student. But we must realise that, unless our universities are prepared to offer on a more year-round basis the courses that kids are seeking, we are not looking as efficient as some of the universities in other countries. They still want to go to Harvard, Yale or Oxford universities, because those places are far more responsive to the marketplace demands than our Australian institutes of learning.

This act and these amendments are very important because they include an objects clause to clarify the main purpose of the ESOS Act and they deal with a number of other technical amendments. But it is really important to consider that the comfort zone has to be breached on this question of education services for overseas students. The country club approach to education has to go, and we have to see the huge public resources going into our university sector, in particular, and into our public training sector being used on a year-round basis and being made available to more students from more places as a result.

I want to make one last point on the specific provisions of this bill dealing with Christmas Island. Putting Christmas Island District Island High School within the system of CRICOS—the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students—is a welcome development. Those opposite are claiming credit for it, and if the member for Lingiari or Senator Crossin have been a party to it, well done to them.

I would also like to claim a little personal credit in that I have visited Christmas Island on a number of occasions and have been to Christmas Island District High School on one occasion. It is a great multicultural school that has kids from right across the region. There are regularly a lot of Indonesian and Indian faces. There are Islamic and Buddhist kids all working together with Christian kids. It is a very happy and very good school, and I think it is a fantastic environment to which kids from other parts of our region may care to come. It is a far more peaceful environment than people perhaps along the Indonesian Archipelago may find. But, as is often the case with any of this, it will generally be those from the wealthier parts of town who will be able to send their kids there. But I think there is an opportunity for Christmas Island to build on this and to create for themselves an enormous better-than-cottage industry.

Another point I will make about Christmas Island is that our Australian government environment people, the national parks people, who operate there and have so much responsibility for the biodiversity of Christmas Island, also introduced me, a year or so ago when I was last there, to kids who had come for their summer break from universities in Europe. I was speaking to people who had come from Paris, amongst other places, to see the biodiversity around Christmas Island and would love to have the opportunity to study there through our education system. They have not had that opportunity because of the way things have worked, and I hope that in time we will see that. Christmas Island, it is said, is like the Galapagos Islands in that it has an enormous amount of unique biodiversity that the world would be quite interested in. Frankly, as Christmas Island struggles to reconfigure its economy away from phosphate mining to other activities, I think education has a huge role to play in its long-term economic viability.

I congratulate the departmental officers who have been a party to constructing this legislation. I congratulate Minister Bishop on listening to me and, indeed, those from the Northern Territory who have parliamentary responsibility for Christmas Island in this matter. I will end where I began, and say that this act and these amendments are very important, but this act has so much more potential in the years to come. I do not think we work as hard as we can to get the dollars we should. There is great economic value as well as great societal value and, dare I say it, great security value that comes from more students studying in this country. (Time expired)

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