Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

And hear, hear—three big cheers for the member for Canberra for that contribution in defence of the nation's capital, but particularly of the public servants who serve not just the government of the day but the Australian people. It's a topic I wholeheartedly back you on and will have more to say on throughout the year.

I rise to talk about a number of matters. Firstly, international education: this is an incredibly important sector to Australia in many senses, with, economically, $28 billion of export value to the country in 2016-17—and that is just the value of international students studying in Australia. It is now our third-largest export industry after coal and iron ore. It is our largest services export industry, far outstripping tourism now and indeed contributing significantly to tourism numbers through the visiting friends and relatives category—families of students studying here come and spend time here. The statistics show they spend more time per average than other students and are far more likely to leave our major capital cities and support rural and regional Australia, often because their son or daughter studying here has language and cultural familiarity, and the confidence to take them around.

We have seen, in the last 12 months, 16.1 per cent growth from the 2015-16 figures and around 10 per cent growth in recent years. In terms of raw numbers, 792,422 international students were enrolled in Australian education institutions—that includes universities, higher education, vocational providers, private providers and English language courses in 2017. Higher education provides the largest economic share of that, with $19.1 billion of that $28 billion in value, though of course VET, English language and other sectors are important. That's the economic picture summarised.

It is also of long-term strategic importance to Australia. Hundreds of thousands of leaders across Asia—in particular, Asia; our part of the world—have been educated over the last few decades in Australian education institutions. This has proven to be of enormous value for economic development, trade relationships and strategic importance. Australia has also benefited from many highly skilled migrants who have chosen to stay for some years or to build a life in our country. Economically, international students make some of the highest economic contributions to our nation of any migrant. To be blunt, their home country has paid for their primary school years, their health care and their teenage years. They pay for their tertiary education in this country, and then our nation reaps the economic benefit through their working years by their paying taxes and so on. Of course life-long connections form between Australian students and international students that foster research partnerships, and the hundreds of thousands of alumni scattered throughout the world create goodwill and links to Australia.

The third benefit, of course, is the internationalisation of Australian education for our domestic students, the diversity in campus and classrooms, and the opportunities to make cross-cultural connections and friendships. I'll just have a Mythbusters moment—and I hear this; I think others would've heard it. There are some in the community who have this view—misplaced; it's wrong—that somehow international students are a problem because they're taking the places of Australian students. I've heard this. It's not said wilfully, in hatred. It's not said to be mean or to discourage. It's said in ignorance and misunderstanding. The fact is: the economic value of international students and the fees they pay are of enormous, critical and, indeed, growing importance to the ability of our higher education institutions, our universities, in this country to be able to provide facilities for domestic students. Many of the shining new facilities that we see, particularly at the top universities in Australia, are funded through the revenue that universities get from international education.

Shame on this government—and shame on this minister, Senator Birmingham—for using the revenue that international students are contributing to universities as an excuse to cut higher education funding. This is going to particularly impact our top universities, the Go8, over time. We're incredibly blessed in this country to have so many universities in the top 100. That's not just good for the research output and our international standing and reputation and the economic value we get from commercialising that research—and we need to do more. It's also a virtuous cycle, because the reality is that this is a competitive market, and the parents of many students, particularly those from China and other Asian nations, are influential in their choice of university, and they choose Australia because we have these universities in the top 100.

We're seeing competition, globally, increase exponentially. What we considered source countries over recent decades—Singapore, China and other places, from which students were coming here—are now becoming competitor countries and destination countries. So we cannot rest on our laurels. If we want to maintain our position, not just economically but to fuel this critical industry for our economy, we have to maintain our place in the world's top 100, and that means at least maintaining, if not boosting, our contribution of public funding to higher education and allowing universities to value-add and increase their research spend through other sources such as international students.

I'm concerned, though, despite this rosy picture, about some of the worrying signs and problems, and I'll just touch on a few; first, the sustainability of growth. There are some signs of a bubble. In any sector, you do have to worry when you see, year upon year, growth of 10 per cent, 10 per cent, 12 per cent and now 16 per cent in the last 12 months. We've seen this movie before, back in 2007, 2008, 2009, when we saw a completely unsustainable growth in the sector, and a bubble that burst, and we lost some billions of dollars of value. To their credit, the Rudd government recognised this and took hard decisions, through changing some of the migration settings and removing that link between migration and vocational education in particular, to reset the industry on a sustainable path. But transparency and interrogation of this data is critical, and we must not become dependent on international education revenue for our institutions, or, indeed, dependent on any particular source country—China being the obvious one, where China is now contributing in the order of 29 per cent of students overall and around 38 per cent of students to our universities.

The second area is the distribution of growth between states. The latest data, unfortunately, shows an accelerating trend where we're seeing a concentration of growth in New South Wales and Victoria, in particular Melbourne and Sydney. Melbourne's my home town, so in one sense we benefit enormously from this economically, but I do worry that the benefits of this sector are not being properly shared between other capital cities and rural and regional Australia. Indeed, from some of my former work, a few extra international students can make an enormous economic, cultural and social difference to smaller towns and regional towns—places like Mildura, Warrnambool and even larger regional centres like Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. I call on the government and the parliament to take this issue seriously. It is a bipartisan sector. It's got great support, I think, from both sides of politics, broadly. Refer it to a parliamentary committee to have a proper, thoughtful inquiry about what initiatives the federal government and, indeed, state governments could do to help share the benefits of this sector more equitably across the country.

The third area that is of concern to me and that I want to remark upon is that of the Chinese student experience. My view, at the outset, is that Chinese students are not just important contributors to our country economically; they are welcome. They are welcome in our country. They are welcome in our community. There's been a lot of media hyperbole about Chinese students—some nonsense run, fuelled by some opposite, that they're all spies for the Chinese government or the Communist Party. Those stereotypes are harmful, they're insulting and they're damaging.

We should be able to have a sensible debate in this country, in this parliament, about, for example, foreign interference laws. I think just about every member of this parliament agrees that there is a case and a need to strengthen our laws about foreign interference from all sorts of governments—not just China, as a lot of the media reporting has put forward—and we should be able to make that case and have that debate without making young people living in our country feel unwelcome. I'm also concerned about ongoing reports of the lack of integration of many international students but particularly Chinese students in our campuses and in communities. We need to focus on that as a critical issue. The government must take this seriously—not just because of the economic impact if we get it wrong but also morally. These are other people's children. These are young people, growing up and making their way in the world and they have chosen to come and live in our country and our communities in their formative years. We as a society and as communities have a moral responsibility, as well as the economic imperative, to make them feel welcome.

I will draw the parliament's attention to a few examples of the kinds of things that we could do, which I would back. Two particular policy prescriptions come from the excellent China Matters' publication, released late last year, which explored some of the issues with international students in China. Firstly, I back the call that federal and state governments should jointly declare a national/international students' weekend across the country to encourage Australian families to welcome international students into their home and communities. It's not an unreasonable thing. It's not a silly thing by any means to think about using the power of government to suggest that idea and have families across Australia welcoming international students for a barbecue and into their family and take them around and so on. When I was growing up, my family hosted an exchange student, with whom we have lifelong connection in Sri Lanka, a Muslim family from Kandy. My daughter went there when she was in grade 3 and my mum went there many times. It's been a wonderful relationship for our family. So I think that's a great practical idea from China Matters.

Another idea is that the government needs to work, and may need to provide financial incentives to universities, to lessen the isolation of international students—for example, to build student housing and to look at whether we need tax incentives or other initiatives to encourage the construction of more student housing where international students would be able to live in close proximity to Australian students. I'm appalled about many of the statistics, media reporting and research that say explicitly that the English-language proficiency of many international students actually declines when they have been studying in Australia for a few years. We're finding that students are living in houses with people who speak their native language at home—they are studying maths or engineering—and they speak less English living in this country than they learnt at home when they were studying. That's a shame on us as a community. We should be able to do better than that as a welcoming people, and we take our national image seriously. It is also of critical importance for the sustainability and the future of this critical sector. We cannot rest on our laurels.

Chinese universities are improving enormously. Many of them are leading globally and beat us in research in so many areas. So the incentive, the reason, increasingly in the coming decades, to be really frank, for many international students to come and study here will be the cultural experience, the sense of community, the importance of living in an English-speaking setting, getting internships or work experience, and being able to take that experience home for their future lives, be it in business or other settings.

Finally, I would raise some concerns around the government's handling of the Australian International Education: Enabling Growth and Innovation grants program and the allocation of what is, overall, in the scheme of support for an incredibly important sector, paltry sums of money. There was $3 million handed out last year. Magically, that was handed out on 29 June. Who knew? My understanding—but I'm very happy to have the minister correct this—is that there were no guidelines or open process with these grants and much of the money actually just went to the bodies or the people who happened to be represented on his handpicked international education council.

Given the enormous need for support and the wonderful things that we could do with some creative policy to share the benefits to rural and regional Australia, to make students feel more welcome and so on, there needs to be much greater transparency about how these funds—scarce as they are; minimal as they are—are used. How could stakeholders or providers propose projects for consideration? What kinds of potential projects were actually identified? What was the process for handing out this $3 million? I don't know. I haven't been able to find anything on the website. No-one in the sector that I've spoken to has a clue. The grants magically popped up before the end of the financial year. What were the probity arrangements? What were the evaluation criteria?

In summary, this is a sector which I think has enormous potential for Australia. We can and should seek to maintain and grow our position in a sustainable way. But, increasingly in the coming years, that will rest not just on our rankings and the quality of our reputation and so on but on the ability of Australia and our communities to provide a genuine, welcoming student experience for these young people from all over the world who have done us the great privilege of paying significant sums of money to get their education in Australia and call Australia home for these important years of their lives.

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