Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's 12 June 2020, and this piece of legislation was tabled in the chamber on 4 December 2019. We've had at least eight sitting weeks since then, so it's good to see it finally find its way here for debate and to become law. It does demonstrate, however, this government's absolute lack of commitment to this sector overall.

I rise to join my colleagues in support of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019. Importantly, this bill seeks to criminalise and create an offence for providing, offering to provide or arranging for a third person to provide a cheating service to a student at one of our institutions of higher education. This isn't about stopping collaboration, importantly, or about penalising people for incidental or inconsequential assistance. It's about putting an end to systematic criminal cheating.

There is currently no Australian jurisdiction with offences specifically aimed at deterring or punishing cheating by students or organised cheating services, and that's something I'm glad we are here finally fixing. As the Higher Education Standards Panel noted in their advice to the minister in March 2017:

… inadequately constrained cheating activity has the potential to cause great damage to the domestic and international reputation of Australian higher education.

Australia's higher education system is one of the best in the world. That's why it is our third-largest export. The market for international education was valued at $18.8 billion by the Bureau of Statistics in 2014-15. It is crucial that our universities maintain their reputations as institutions with rigorous academic standards and a firm commitment to academic integrity. That's why I'm glad to see this bill introduce tough offences for cheating, with commercial cheating service operators facing penalties of up to two years in prison.

I do worry, however, that, with this bill, we'll look past what's causing this rise in the academic cheating market. In order for there to be commercial cheating rings, there has to be a significant amount of demand. We need to ask ourselves: why are students studying in Australia turning to cheating? Without a doubt, the business model of academic cheating services is becoming more insidious. We know that these cheating organisations have slick online ads and present themselves as legitimate services providing assistance to students undergoing academic stress, while doing something very different.

Universities and higher education providers have already done a great deal to provide and publicise support services for students, but clearly universities need more support so they can do more to ensure that students are able to get through their time at university successfully, without reaching out to a cheating service. This is particularly important for regional, rural or international students, who may be away from family and friends for the first time.

Over the last decade, the number of overseas students studying in Australia has increased sharply. There were more than 350,000 international students enrolled in the higher education sector in 2017. While I've heard the stereotypes of cashed-up foreign students coming here with fancy cars and designer labels, the reality on the ground in my electorate is that a lot of international students, burdened with the dreams of their families and an unimaginable fear of failure, do it incredibly tough. A recent survey by United Voice, of more than 200 international students, found that 25 per cent of those responding received $10 an hour or less in paid work; 60 per cent earned less than the national minimum wage; 79 per cent said they knew little or nothing about their rights at work; and 76 per cent said they did not receive penalties for weekend or night work.

Many international students are here desperate to make a better life for themselves. Unfortunately the economic reality of being a student in Australia, particularly an exploited working student in Australia, means that many students are unable to give their studies appropriate attention. As these important new protections are put in place, the government and universities need to make sure proper support services are in place and clearly publicised so when people are struggling they have somewhere to turn for help and assistance.

It is also important that we ask ourselves why universities are struggling to get across to their students. Has anything impacted the quality of teaching and learning in universities in Australia? The better part of a decade of conservative cuts to university has certainly taken a toll—capping places, cutting $2.2 billion from the system, locking more than 200,000 students out of the opportunity of a university qualification, and cutting $328.5 million from university research. And the universities had been abandoned by the government's COVID-19 response. This anti-intellectual government has done everything in its power to silence and diminish the influence of our experts.

I understand that this is a complicated and challenging world, but the fact that we need a bill like this to deter students from accessing cheating services saddens me as an educator. We've turned our places of higher learning into factories for jobs. Kids are there to get the piece of paper that will help them end up in any office that will give them a consistent pay cheque. That's not the kind of academic culture that will foster the innovation this country needs to deal with everyday life, let alone COVID-19, nor the challenges we were dealing with before this and certainly not the challenges we are yet to discover. But that's the culture that is fostered when you make having a HECS debt more onerous. It's the culture you foster when you slash funding to universities. It's the culture you foster when you disrespect research. The minister himself said at the National Press Club that productivity improvements in the higher education sector can deliver $2.7 billion to Australia's GDP a year. How will this be achieved when the government's policy is to cut everything? The Treasurer has a spare $60 billion that he can't give back to the bank. He should spend some of it in the sector that's going to see Australia through the foreseeable future.

For weeks now, Labor has been urging the federal government to act to help universities and save jobs. Their reluctance to do so speaks volumes about what they really think about this incredibly important sector. But the Prime Minister has done nothing to help, and now jobs are being lost, with thousands more to come. The federal government keeps moving the goalposts to stop staff at universities from getting fair access to JobKeeper, and that's putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk, including many in regional Australia. Already we've heard that hundreds of jobs will go at universities in Geelong—at Deakin, 400 jobs—in Rockhampton, with 180 staff gone last week and three campus closures, at Sunshine Coast, Yeppoon, Biloela, and in suburban Melbourne, at La Trobe. Without serious federal government help, universities have predicted, 21,000 jobs will be lost in the next six months alone.

The impact on regional communities will be devastating. Universities support 14,000 jobs in country Australia—that's tens of thousands of livelihoods destroyed. We're talking about academics, tutors, admin staff, library staff, catering staff, ground staff, cleaners, security staff and many others, many with families trying to make ends meet. The federal government cannot explain why a university student working a $100-shift per week is receiving the full $1,500 JobKeeper wage subsidy while a full-time university worker with kids to support is not eligible, and they have refused to date to do anything to change this.

We're relying on our brilliant universities and their researchers to find a vaccine for COVID-19, but they can't rely on this Prime Minister to protect their jobs. University jobs can be saved, if only this government would act and act now. If I were the government right now, I wouldn't want to look back after thousands of job losses, including in regional Australia, and know that more could have been done.

I also rise today to take the opportunity to point out the difference between the attitude of those opposite to this important sector and the attitude of my colleagues. In government, Labor continued to ensure that university education did not remain out of reach for everyday young people like the people I represent in Lalor. In order to achieve this goal, Labor invested in universities and supported them when they needed it. In fact, Labor's policy saw an extra 222,000 Australians get the opportunity of a university education. This included enrolments of financially disadvantaged students, which increased by 66 per cent. Enrolments of Indigenous undergraduate students increased by 105 per cent. Enrolments of undergraduate students with a disability grew by 123 per cent, and, under Labor, enrolments of students from regional and remote areas increased by 50 per cent.

In my time here, Labor has supported any and every positive measure the government has brought into this place in this sector, including today. This has included increased support for regional students so that they can better support themselves away from home while they study. Labor stood with the government to do that. And we've done this while, in Labor-held electorates like Lalor, opportunities for young people have shrunk, and despite growing youth unemployment and underemployment. Capping student numbers locks out young people from the electorate I represent. Increasing HECS debts and reducing the income threshold for repayments actively discourages students from pursuing tertiary education. And opportunities in VET have also shrunk under this government, driven by cuts to public TAFE. Under this government, we've seen the loss of 150,000 apprenticeships, and the projections in the recession are truly mortifying. We are losing 2,000 apprentices a week as we meet here today.

But what does this government do when we call out the impacts of their cuts across the sectors, both vocational education and training and higher education, and the shrinking opportunities for young people across the country? What do they do when we call out the deadening effect this has on aspiration for children in the regions, for children in the suburbs? What is their response? Well, their response is to indulge in culture war rhetoric. They deride higher education and shout that vocational education and training is as worthy—as if there is anybody else on the other side of the argument. In short, they reach for a distraction, a faux debate, to hide their deliberate failure to support the next generation. This leaves me absolutely despondent.

Those opposite don't intend to restore opportunity for the young people I represent and young people across this country. Their actions speak volumes about their disinterest in this. If those opposite want to have a serious debate about aspiration, if they seriously want to raise vocational education and training in the eyes and minds of the public, they should have a real conversation with business about the age-old responsibility for business to actively train the workforce of the future. They should engage immediately with the businesses who have lost and who are losing apprentices in this recession. They should thank them for meeting this unwritten obligation, this social compact, and they should be properly supporting them to hang on to every single one of those apprentices. But, no, none of that is happening. If they want to address the skills short that we are seeing, if they want business to thrive, if they want to plan a way out of this recession, they need to acknowledge the damage of their cuts to vocational and higher education and get serious about supporting young people and their aspirations.

As ever, I join my colleagues to support a sensible measure today but I am appalled that the real issues confronting vocational and higher education in this country, now heightened by the economic pain of a recession and the urgent need to plan for recovery, are left fallow for another term of this government.

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