Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I'd like to congratulate the member for Moncrieff for getting through all of those acronyms! I want to thank the member for Moreton for introducing the second reading amendment to this bill. I rise to speak in favour of the second reading amendment moved by the member for Moreton.

Of course Labor supports these bills, which aim to streamline cost recovery arrangements for the regulation of education providers who provide services to international students. The Education Services for Overseas Students (Registration Charges) Amendment Bill 2021 repeals and replaces current charging provisions with a new framework, although most of the details, of course, will be set by regulation, which as you would know, Acting Deputy Speaker Vasta, is generally not the ideal way to arrange these matters. But the pattern from this government of trying to avoid transparency and accountability for its decisions continues.

Nevertheless, we will be supporting the bills. They make minor and consequential amendments arising from the original bill. The three related bills make minor and consequential amendments arising from the registration charges bill, and we will support them all. Labor, in principle, agrees with cost recovery in this area, although we did oppose the introduction of cost recovery in the TEQSA legislation that is in the Senate at the moment because it's a very bad time to be adding additional costs to higher education providers. Higher education providers have had an extraordinarily difficult couple of years, with Australia's international borders closed and a very important source of revenue for their operations consequently being unavailable to them. So while we support cost recovery in principle we don't believe now is a great time to be doing it.

In regard to the legislation being debated today, while we opposed the broad shift to expanded cost recovery in the TEQSA legislation, this particular set of bills is expected to reduce charges on international education providers and prevent providers from being double charged for the same regulatory activity. So we'll be supporting today's legislation. We support any reduction in charges at the moment, but this reduction in charges will only partially offset the hiked fees relating to the TEQSA bill that Labor has opposed.

We've moved a second reading amendment today because of the continued concerns we have about the way this government has undermined the university sector, particularly in the last couple of years. The government has systemically been trashing Australia's higher education system—the message has been sent to students and staff and to the parents who are hopeful that their kids will one day get a university education. If you look at the last 12 to 18 months, we've had a university system that is absolutely desperate and crying out for help from a government that not only continues to turn its back and turn a deaf ear but acts in a hostile way with universities. Thousands of university staff are losing their jobs around Australia. Thousands of students have seen their fees more than double. More students than ever are wanting to go to university and too many are being turned away. No other industry of this size has received overt hostility like we have seen from the government towards the university sector, with the government changing the rules of JobKeeper three times to make sure universities were excluded from receiving JobKeeper. Casinos got JobKeeper but our great public universities did not get JobKeeper.

While all of this was happening, the government introduced legislation that more than doubled the cost of a degree for thousands of students. Think about the year 12 kids who were doing their final exams last year. They had their heart set on a particular degree. In the middle of last year, we had the lockdowns, the disrupted learning, the uncertainty. Rites of passage were interrupted—the school formals that didn't happen, the 18th-birthday parties the kids didn't get to go to. Those kids, thousands of them, were told that the cost of the degree they had their heart set on would more than double. And look at year 12 this year. In New South Wales we've been in lockdown for weeks. Year 12 students have been told they will be doing their final exams, and now they are being told they probably won't be doing their final exams. In Victoria and Queensland there's a great deal of uncertainty as well. These kids have had two years from hell. This year's year 12s were in year 11 last year and experiencing all of those disruptions. They were hoping that they would get to do their final exams this year and experience all the rites of passage that teenagers look forward to. Why doesn't this government make it cheaper and easier for these kids to get an education? Whether it's at TAFE or university, now is the time to make it cheaper and easier for these kids to get an education after school. We know that they won't be having the same gap-year jobs that many of their friends would have had in previous years. They certainly won't be doing any gap-year travel. Let these kids go to uni or TAFE and let them do it in a way that's affordable and accessible to them.

The university system has been crying out for assistance from this government and, on top of the confusion, the uncertainty and cost recovery in this instance, they are also looking at decreased real funding for the university sector. Real funding for higher education will fall by about 10 per cent over the next three years. The budget papers confirm that, because of job-ready graduates, funding for the Commonwealth Grants Scheme, which subsidises student fees, will fall and student debt levels will increase. We know that fees have been going up; as I said, more than doubling in some cases. A Bachelor of Arts will see fees increase by more than 113 per cent. For a four-year degree, students are looking to pay close to $60,000. These are American sized university debts, and our kids shouldn't be lumbered with them at the same time as they're trying to save a deposit in an increasingly unaffordable housing market. At the same time as they're thinking of starting a family, these kids are lumbered with these $60,000 debts. Law and commerce students will have their fees increased by nearly 28 per cent. This isn't just bad for individual students—although, of course, it is terrible for individual students—and it's not just bad for the university sector, which reports losing about 18,000 jobs, although, if you look at the ABS statistics, it looks like more like 30,000 jobs were lost from higher education. This is also bad for our national prosperity.

When we look at countries that are doing well economically in the modern world, they are countries that invest in research and development and higher education. We know that a skilled workforce is the key to our economic prosperity in the future. Before COVID, we had real problems in our economy. Wages were going nowhere, business investment had stalled, growth was low, labour productivity was going backwards for the first time in 25 years and, according to research by Harvard University, we had one of the least complex economies in the world. Why is that a problem? We as a nation have always done so well from our commodity exports, and they will continue to be a huge and important part of our economic prosperity in the future. But we know that, if we are relying on raw commodities for our national wealth, we're very subject to changes in international markets. There are the different demands for our goods; of course, sometimes that might be because economies are changing internationally. Sometimes it is because other countries decide to introduce trade barriers when it comes to our commodity exports. Either way, the more complex and value added in our economy, the more irons we have in the fire and the more likely we as a nation are to continue our prosperity. Our university sector is key to this, both because of the research and development done by our universities—a large part of that obviously subsidised by international student fees—and because we know that an educated workforce, a workforce where you've got people going to high-quality vocational education or high-quality university education after they've finished their secondary school, is much more likely to underpin continued prosperity for Australia in the future.

The absence of international students will have cost the Australian economy $18 billion. That's a loss to universities, and it's a loss to the landlords, the restaurant owners, the cafe owners and the businesses that support those international students who are spending money in our local economy. It's a loss to the businesses that rely on the work that international students do in the Australian labour market. But it's also a loss to us as a nation, because we know that the return on investment that governments get from investment in higher education is a return of 200 to 300 per cent, according to the OECD. As we cut funding to universities, as we allow this sector to flounder, we have endangered our prosperity in the future—the prosperity of individual Australians and the prosperity of our nation.

I want to conclude with a few words about jobs in tertiary education. Tertiary education is our largest services export and our fourth largest export overall. If any other export industry was shedding jobs at the rate that the university sector is shedding jobs, there would be a national rescue package from this government. It is a mark of their hostility towards higher education that there has been no assistance for universities. Universities have identified 18,000 jobs that have been lost, but that doesn't cover the contracts that have expired, the research that hasn't been renewed. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that job losses so far are closer to 30,000 from the university sector. This is serious. Of course it's professors and academics, but it's also cafeteria workers, librarians, admin assistants, gardeners and construction workers, because added investment in universities has ground to an absolute halt. This is serious. These people have families. They've lost their jobs, they have families and they have a government that just doesn't care. The government doesn't care about the jobs that are being lost in universities today, and the government doesn't care that they are making it harder and more expensive for year 12 kids this year and the kids who graduated last year to get an education. If we look at the United States, they're actually trying to make a college education more affordable for their young people in this really difficult time. We're doing the exact opposite in Australia. We're taking a university sector that is democratic, that has tried to give more people a go at getting their dream job, that has invited people who are the first in their family ever to go to university—we've invited them into our universities; we've gone out and tried to get them to have a shot at university—and this government is shutting that down. Shame! What a shameful thing to do in a year like this.

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