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

The Education Services for Overseas Students (Registration Charges) Amendment Bill 2021 is part of a set of cognate bills and other so-called reforms to impose a cost recovery model on the sector. As has been said in previous debates and again in this debate, this is the very worst possible time you could pick to shift a sector to cost recovery. In the previous debate, on the related TEQSA bill, even government speakers acknowledged that providers are paying about 15 per cent of the costs. At the very time that students are not able to come to Australia and university revenues are being smashed, the government wants to move the sector to 100 per cent cost recovery.

This bill—no doubt the government will try to tell us this bill is a great thing—throws a tiny, tiny crumb to the international education sector by fiddling around with the charges, which should give them the princely saving of about $7 million a year. That sounds nice, doesn't it? But, firstly, the impact is largely irrelevant given the scale of damage to the sector; it's lost literally billions of dollars of revenue. Secondly, the impact is actually unknown. Peak irony: the government, in this bill, is giving $7 million of fee relief through the CRICOS registration charges and yet, in the other bill, is increasing charges for full cost recovery by a much larger and indeed unknown amount. So I don't know how any provider or university, private or public, could bank this saving without having a clue what's coming down the pipeline in the TEQSA changes. It's truly ridiculous. The sector has unprecedented financial challenges. The government is giving on one hand and taking more with the other.

International education was—I say 'was', sadly, in the past sense—Australia's fourth biggest export sector, worth over $40 billion to our economy. More than that, international education has enriched our cities and regions; it's made our campuses more vibrant and diverse. It's been an incredible national success story, something we as a country should be so proud of—that hundreds of thousands of young people, at that time in their life, have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases, to come and study and live in our community. It's increased our soft power, over decades, incalculably.

COVID has decimated this sector—our fourth-largest export sector, decimated by COVID. Some damage, of course, was unavoidable, with the borders shut. This is a sector—one of the service sectors—that relies on the movement of human beings and was always going to suffer damage. But the scale of the damage has been exacerbated and made far worse by deliberate actions and neglect by this government. As I said, the sector was worth $40.3 billion before COVID. The latest ABS stats saw that fall last year to $31.7 billion—a loss of 25 per cent of the value of this sector. The latest Mitchell Institute modelling projects another $10 billion loss in 2022; so we'll be down to half of where we were, and that will keep going. It will possibly actually start falling exponentially, for reasons I'll touch on. This is a devastating impact. This is billions of dollars of lost revenue for our universities and TAFEs and also an existential crisis for our independent providers.

Remember—and I say this to bust an urban myth—that international students do not take our domestic student places, as too many Australians think and indeed some government members seem to imply or think. They create places and opportunity for Australian students. They fund our classrooms, our capital works programs at campuses and indeed a significant share of our research effort. To be really clear, the impacts of this devastation that has been wrought on this sector include research. As a member for Cowan so eloquently spoke about, billions of dollars cut from international education means billions of dollars lost for our research effort. In an environment of the first recession in 30 years, when we should be thinking about economic recovery, that's the very time we need to be investing more in research and innovation, not less, and yet research funding is falling. The government's cutting research funding this year. This will also, over time, impact our ranking, because our global rankings for universities, which in turn help drive our attractiveness as a student destination, are significantly driven by research. So we're going to see a very nasty cycle emerge over the next two to three years.

We've also seen thousands of jobs lost at universities, with the government doing nothing. The latest estimate of jobs lost directly is between 18,000 and 21,000—and they're just the jobs that show up in the org charts in the universities. Untold thousands more casual teachers, sessional teachers, casual researchers, administrative staff, cleaning staff and so on have been lost. The ABS estimates this year say that 30,000 fewer people are working in higher education than were working the year before. These are avoidable losses. The government changed the JobKeeper rules three times to stop universities being eligible for JobKeeper. They didn't just stand by passively; they actively made sure that these jobs would be lost by refusing to extend the support to the sector. The economic impact has been felt on jobs in the cities and in the regions. I think the ABS stats said, before the crash, over 240,000 jobs were supported by international education in Australia. That's actually more jobs than are created in the entire mining sector. It's more jobs than are created and supported in the entire agricultural sector. The government has nothing to say on this. They're just happy to stand by while tens of thousands of jobs are lost.

It's also impacting our reputation. This is where the government is culpable. The Prime Minister actually stood up last year publicly and told students, 'If you don't like it, go home.' How do you think that resonated in a market where word of mouth is everything? Can anyone imagine the Prime Minister saying that about another one of our big export sectors? 'If you don't like our iron ore, don't buy it. If you don't like our agricultural produce, then nick off. Buy someone else's.' Why on earth would the Prime Minister say that about this sector? He's got a pattern of hostility. Remember, he blamed them the year before for congestion. It wasn't his failure to invest in infrastructure or rorting every infrastructure dollar he could find to push to marginal seats that was causing congestion; apparently, it was international students trying to get a bus to the university. Pathetic.

I do call on the government to extend the 485 visas. One positive thing which they could do right now would be for those thousands of students who are stuck offshore with a valid 485 postgraduate study visa. They were made a promise by this country, they invested thousands of dollars and years of their life to study here, they happened to be home when the borders were shut, and they're unable to come back and use that visa. That was a promise our country made them. We can't bring them back right now, because of the government's failures on quarantine, but we could at least do the decent thing—the smallest thing—and say, 'When the borders reopen, we will honour the promise as a country we made you and we will let you come back and have your one year or two years of post-study work rights.' That's in our national interest as well, because they form such a wonderful part of our pipeline of highly skilled migrants, in regional areas as well as in cities.

The final thing I'd note is the human impact on students is incalculable. As I said, they've invested a lot. For some students it's a case of, 'We enrolled, we're studying online and we'll be able to come at some point.' That's not a positive thing, a positive experience. But for some of these students, the government has to talk to them and at least say, 'We will prioritise you as soon as we can bring back any students.' Take a student who's invested hundreds of thousands of dollars doing a dental course. They've had five years in Australia, and they're stuck offshore unable to do their sixth year. They've gone into debt, and they see their life dreams evaporate. The government has had nothing to say to those students who've invested so much in our community. It's not a matter of trading them off against stranded Australians, which the government tries to do every time you raise this, but just being decent and human and understanding that these are people. They're human beings, they're young people who've invested in our country. We could at least have something to say to them: that we understand the sacrifice that they're making, that we understand the difficulties that it's causing. We understand that some have partners living in Australia. I've tried to help some students whose partners are living in my electorate. They are not able to come back and have never met their own child. Their own child has been born, they've only met their child on WhatsApp, and the government has nothing to say to these people. We can do better than this as a country and we can do better by our fourth-biggest export sector.

The other point I'd make about the impacts is that without action business failures are looming. The university situation is bad enough—the impact on research, capital works and so on—but the situation facing independent providers is existentially grim. This is a sector that works on pipelines, let's be clear. As current students leave, if there are no students coming through the borders to replace them, the student cohort shrinks. In the short term last year there was relatively little pain. Providers could adjust to some ups and downs and they still had a good stock of students who were in the country. But there's no JobKeeper eligibility for most of these providers because they couldn't show the drop in turnover at the critical time when JobKeeper was around, so they didn't get support at that point because they didn't need it. But for this sector, unlike most other sectors, the fiscal cliff is looming because their stock in the pipeline, if you like, the students coming in, has dried up. If you sit down and talk to them—the government doesn't talk to them—they'll tell you they can look down the pipeline and the next six months are going to be hard and they will hurt A lot of providers that could with their balance sheets have stuck away a bit of money to try to get through to Christmas. That's when the government suggests that students will start to come back. But by the time we get to January or July next year, we'll be at serious risk of significant business failure.

It's no exaggeration to say that for independent providers—not dodgy providers; most of them will go out of business because they don't have reserves, and good riddance to the small number that are dodgy—reputable businesses that have run a quality product and have been in the market for decades are facing a valley of death that is looming over their business. The government won't say it, but it seems unlikely that students are going to return before mid-next year at least. Oh, what could have been: if the government had invested in purpose-built quarantine facilities, hadn't turned its back on the sector last year and rejected every plea for help and every creative idea, we could have had thousands more students at least onshore and we could have had 38,000 stranded Australians back onshore. But the government decided it was fun to play politics and blame the states for everything, instead of taking responsibility and putting in place a safe national quarantine system. We are where we are, but they've wasted our island continent advantages and they've set up this impossible conflict between students and stranded Australians.

Of course people understand that citizens are going to get priority, but we should not be in this situation where we've seen the scale of devastation in our fourth-biggest export sector. So we're going to need—and I call on the government to do this—to provide more business assistance and to sit down to talk with the sector. If the government know that they're not going to be bringing students back for 12 months—if that's what the government are prepared to say and actually prepared to state as a view—then they have to give some comfort by working with the sector and businesses now. This is a sector that knows exactly what's going to happen. You tell them where the student pipeline's going to be, they will tell you at what point their businesses will fail and we'll see more closures and more loss of jobs. The government says it's put in $53 million. It's not nearly enough and it's not targeted. A lot of that went to universities; that's a different problem. Some of it went to ELICOS, English language teaching, and quite rightly so, but the VET and higher-ed providers need help and they need engagement now.

The other thing we need is a plan to rebuild the sector from the ground up. I hate to say this, but there's no choice but to hope that the minister for education will champion it. That was the minister who gave us robodebt, the minister for car park rorts, the minister who made a mess of immigration. And so, for that brilliance, they promoted him to education. But unfortunately it's this man, the minister for education, on whose competence and ability to get something through cabinet the future of our fourth biggest export sector rests. God help them.

You can't rely on the Prime Minister. He weirdly hates international education. As I said, he told the students to go home, blamed them for his own failures on infrastructure and congestion, gave no help or care—verging on sociopathic kind of lack of empathy, time after time. He wouldn't treat any other sector like that. The lobsters even got their own plane, but there is not a word of care or concern for international students.

The minister for education has a strategy. I understand he got it a couple of weeks ago. It's a bit constipated in the department. The department of education's not going that well. They've had three or four people in charge of this strategy. Apparently the international education person is in acting up in a job. But, anyway, the minister's finally got a strategy, with a road map to recovery. I urge him to get it out and give some hope to the sector. Hope is not a strategy, but it's a good start. At least he can say what his plan for recovery is and then try as best he possibly can not to do a robodebt, not to do a car park rort, not to make the mess like he did in immigration. He can try to get something through cabinet to actually repair some of the damage in our fourth biggest export sector.

I've outlined a few positive ideas. The government are going to need to help the independent education providers. They're going to need to send some messages to the students and start to repair the market and reputational damage and show that we do care as a country. They're going to have to start putting some money into marketing and get a bit more focus across the bureaucracy. Time doesn't permit me to go through all the solutions.

I look forward to seeing the strategy and I hope it's a good one. I used to look after international ed in the Victorian public service and worked under Labor governments and Liberal governments. I travelled with Liberal premiers and Liberal ministers to China. This should be a bipartisan portfolio. It should be a bipartisan sector. I've never before seen this lack of care for this sector from a Liberal government, ever. It's time it stopped. This sector has been a wonderful thing for our country and it deserves more attention from the government.

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