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

I want to draw attention to what I'd call the orphan child of the minister's portfolio, which is international education, and decry the complete lack of focus in the budget—the budget papers and the budget initiatives, with the exception of two—to Australia's third most valuable export sector.

International education, on the latest figures, is worth $38 billion to this country, third only to coal and iron ore, yet it's forgotten by the government. We've seen an increase in tourism because of it, and that's a category. We've seen an increase in students. There are 630,000 students, at present, studying in Australia and over 700,000 enrolments. This covers universities, higher education providers, TAFEs, private VET and English language courses. None of those figures include the offshore benefits from our providers delivering offshore curriculum training and so on.

It's of enormous long-term strategic importance to this nation. Literally, over a million alumni from some of the wealthiest leadership in South-East Asia, and every part of the world, have studied and spent their formative years here. It's critical to underpinning future trade and economic relationships, and the internationalisation benefits for our curriculum and the experiences for our students, domestically, at all levels. It is disappointing, therefore, that the budget papers are almost silent. There are two small initiatives: pages 9 and 64 in Budget Paper No. 2. That's it. That's all the Parliamentary Library could find, in all that stack of papers, for Australia's third-largest export industry. The government, as you can tell from their comments, sees this sector as a cash cow—nothing more, nothing less. The minister himself, when trying to defend the capping of higher education places and the $2.2 billion cut, said, 'Well, you can go and recruit more international students.' The Prime Minister then blames international students for congestion—not his failure to invest in infrastructure. It's the fault of international students that you can't sit on the train.

Our success is a wonderful thing for this country. We should treasure it. It should be a bipartisan endeavour, and I hope in the future it will remain so, in broad terms. But the government is becoming complacent. The question concerns the sustainability of growth, and there is little to nothing in this budget, except for the two admittedly worthy regional initiatives, that actually underpins the future of the sector. We have risks of a bubble. No sector should think that double-digit growth—10 per cent, 12 per cent, 12 per cent, 16 per cent—will continue. We saw this movie back in 2007. There was a whole range of reasons why we had the bubble pricked, and it was devastating to the economy and the sector. The risks are growing.

Market diversification—source countries—and also market diversification and distribution between the states. What I'd call the two most important factors that underpin future sustainable growth—we have to be ruthless on these—are positive student experience and ruthless enforcement of quality. We are high cost as an international provider and we will remain so, so we have to have the highest-quality product.

We are seeing examples of workplace exploitation, which are not addressed in the budget. The budget has nothing in it to address the crisis in workplace exploitation. Also, isolation of students and overconcentration of students in many courses are ruining the experience for domestic students. The minister has claimed publicly that quality is protected by our regulators, but that is rubbish. Everyone in the sector knows it is rubbish—especially, I'd call out not the high end but the lower end of the private vocational market. The periodic ASQA reviews are not working. At the low end, those courses have become a visa factory for people who are not attending classes. We have called out before that the minimum of 20 hours of attendance at VET courses is abolished. So, you can come to a low-cost provider in this country and not attend any classes. You can do that under the current regulations. This has been a known problem, and I will say that it was the Labor government that changed that rule. It was a mistake. But you've been in government for six years. There's nothing in the budget that addresses these problems. There should be mention of it. There's no new funding for ASQA whatsoever. It's clear and it's obvious if you talk to the sector that the high-quality providers would welcome your doing something about the bottom feeders in the market. They are the ones that hang outside their colleges and take their students. They would welcome your taking their concerns seriously, but the budget is silent on these issues.

It's also silent on the fact that 75 per cent of students coming to this country come through education agents. If you're a dodgy financial advisor, a dodgy real estate agent or a dodgy childcare provider, you get kicked out of the sector. There is nothing like that in international education. There is a bunch of sharks that we know keep phoenixing their businesses, ripping off students and risking the sustainability of the sector in the future.

I say to the minister: you really need to pay more attention. I never thought I'd say this, but it's almost like 'Bring back Richard Colbeck', because he was the world's first and only minister for international education. I think you may need some assistance to get some focus. You now have two minutes to inspire us as to how you're going to take this sector seriously and actually deal with the problems.

See this speech in context