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

I thank my friend the member for Indi for that contribution on the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024. There are some really good insights about regional unis. I would say, as somebody who ran this sector in Victoria under a Liberal government and then a Labor government, I think you have discounted the need for reform and some of the enrolment limits, and I would be happy to talk with you further should you wish.

This is our fourth-biggest export sector, and it's no trivial thing—it really isn't. It's critical to the economy and it's also critical to our universities, TAFES and many private businesses—most of them good, some of them bad. It's critical to young people's lives—people who choose to come in their formative years, generally, and study in Australia, many of whom stay on and build a life here. We should celebrate and welcome it when young people do choose Australia—it's a hypercompetitive global market, particularly at the upper end for talent. Students have many choices about where they go.

Most students are great. And I agree with the previous speaker that, too often, international students have been demonised. It should be a bipartisan thing. At the moment we seem to have descended with the Leader of the Opposition down the rabbit hole—no number is too low and no amount of damage to our fourth-biggest export sector is enough. We saw under the former government that the lobsters got their own plans to fly them around the world but the students were told to go home. It was a disgrace.

But for all the good, the soft power, the economic value, the internationalisation of our campuses, the student experience and curriculum, the skills and talent pipeline, and the broader contributions, there are also many negatives: the misuse of the student visa system and the completely unacceptable exploitation of students, as former police commissioner Christine Nixon found in her review. The social license is at risk. I take the point about regional universities, but the previous speaker drew a catastrophic picture from stuff that simply isn't in the bill and, clearly, would never be done because it's government policy. It has been the policy of the former government and this government to do what we can to attract more students to regional universities. The notion that regional universities would somehow have draconian course caps put on them is just nonsensical, and all members need to be careful to take with a grain of salt some of the more extreme advocacy points that have been put to us.

The bill seeks a framework for government to manage the sector, and it is a major shift in how this significant market is managed. Currently, to be frank, governments—the previous government, our government and governments that will come afterwards if we don't have reform—have only two blunt tools to manage the sector, and there is very little active policy that shapes the international education sector onshore. The first of the two blunt tools is CRICOS, which is the registration for providers that provide to overseas students. CRICOS sets notional limits by floorspace, teachers, paperwork and stuff, and is completely divorced from the international education policy framework. There's no transparency and no certainty. That's one lever you've got—the registration process for providers that teach. The other lever you've got is visa approvals, both offshore and onshore. The offshore instrument is incredibly blunt and, often, is actually working against government policy to diversify the students onshore, because, frankly, it prioritises students who apply from China because they're very unlikely to overstay their visas. So we've got these two blunt instruments that work against all the policies which we stand up here and preach.

The onshore application pathways are, frankly, misused and should be limited as soon as possible to cut numbers more quickly. I have no ill will towards the 'permanently temporary' visa holders—I've met many of them; they're decent people. But a person can come here to Australia to do a bachelor's degree, gain a post-study work rights visa and not find a skilled migration pathway as their English isn't good enough. They don't have the right skills and the labour market doesn't pick them you up. They might do a master's and another student graduate pathway and then hop around from VET degree to VET degree for 10 years. That's got to be cut off—that really needs to stop. We've said that. It's not straightforward, I understand, from an IT point of view in Home Affairs, but, with policy will, we have to find a way to stop that. It's not fair to those young people, and it creates horrible situations where people have spent most of their adult lives in our country and they'll never have a pathway to permanent residency. That does our society no good, and we need to do better with that. But we've got two blunt instruments.

Andrew Norton, one of the great higher education thinkers, as mentioned by the previous speaker, has painted a binary set of options. I would actually say that both of these are binaries to avoid. No. 1 would be a bureaucratically allocated market with some kind of Soviet-style inefficiency—you don't want public servants allocating institution by institution, every year, course by course. No-one wants that. That's not what's being proposed, despite some of the caricatures we're hearing. The other binary that I think you want to avoid is the cap-and-trade system. We don't want to set up a system that's effectively trading in people, and the minute you put it in you inflate the value of the places—like the taxi licence problem when Uber and other disruptors came in—and you privilege economic factors over all other factors. You basically drive the higher education system onshore to all teaching MBAs because they're the highest profit and lowest cost. Really? I think they're the two binaries you want to avoid.

The aim of policy should be to refine and evolve the current approach of CRICOS allocations linked to visa system planning levels and a policy framework so that our government and future governments can manage the number of students onshore. We hear all the screeching and hysterics from the Leader of the Opposition, who's always angry, always negative and always says no, and who loves to demonise migrants and play the little race card—nudge, nudge, wink, wink and all of that stuff. We've seen it for 20 years in this country, with his performance. People know what he is; they know what he's like. But, despite the current hysterics about international students, we actually need to get a policy framework and a way of governments managing the onshore system, because the truth is there is insatiable demand globally for people, young people usually, to study onshore in Australia that can never be met. And it's about time we stopped trying to manage this through the blunt instruments of visa rejections and the CRICOS system and agreed on an adult way that the minister and future ministers can manage the sector and shape it to maximise the value for our country in every sense. Governments need mechanisms to manage the market; that's my proposition.

I am concerned about some of the language—I'm not talking about the substance, but some of the language—and we need to be careful to get this right. The problem with the political fight and the screeching about students being to blame and how Australia doesn't want more students and the negative signals that are being sent—we hear them in markets now. This is a word-of-mouth market. It's driven by the student experiences of those who are here, those who studied in Australia and all the stuff that ricochets around on social media. The problem if we just screech, 'Hard caps; cap, cap, cap; hard limit; inflexible'—if that's what they're proposing; it's not what this bill means—is that you send a negative market signal globally, which risks deterring the best students, the ones we want to attract who can go anywhere in the world. Canada saw this when they implemented their caps in the wrong way. It's a hypercompetitive market for talent. It's bad for soft-power human capital and research.

It also sets up an immediate and endless political football with the opposition of the day. The number will always sound big and scary and be misrepresented and misunderstood. And it does create, as the previous speaker noted from Andrew Norton's work, a market problem of underutilisation, an allocation problem and a lack of flexibility. So, in doing this, we do need to be able to limit enrolments and manage the shape of the market onshore, but we need to do it in a way which includes sufficient flexibility. I've argued publicly for a range. You could call it a tolerance, but, whatever you want to call it, we actually want minimums as well as maximums. We don't just want to put a single number there, knowing that everyone will float below it. We want a signal that of course we want students, and that we want valuable students. We do want providers to use their allocations, or whatever language you want to use. Once ranges or whatever are established, there should be an annual periodic process to allocate spare capacity and growth, and it should have a use-it-or-lose-it philosophy. We want to provide stability and certainty for providers, and allocate capacity according to the policy frameworks to incentivise the behaviours we want: new housing, as the Treasurer and government are rightly pointing to; market diversification; and study in regional areas and so on.

The critical question which we've never confronted as a country is: what is the shape of the onshore market that we want? That's an elephant in the room that has never been tackled. I think we need a policy framework alongside this, and I think the minister is consulting on a draft framework—well done, Minister—to maximise the overall value for Australia. We would look at things like the economic value, which tilts strongly towards higher education rather than VET. But we'd also look at the skills and talent pipeline. We want young people studying, particularly in vocational areas where they can make a contribution to Australia—if we can't have everyone onshore—and that tilts towards VET. That's because most of the in-demand occupations on the National Skills Shortage List are actually vocational and not higher ed. We want market diversity for soft power—spread the love—to hedge the risk of overreliance on a particular market and to enrich the student experience on campus. We want regional and geographic diversity within Australia and we want to build our research links and capability. All of this may vary by location, but it does put the low-value private VET courses from the institutions that everybody knows are selling work visas, not student visas, that make no contribution to Australia in the gun. That's just a fact.

And we're figuring out what the basis is, what the best way is, to manage future student numbers onshore. I would argue strongly against just making a hard link to net overseas migration to suit the political purposes of the Leader of the Opposition of the day. This one is pretty bad, but it will be a political temptation, as people have said, in the future. It would be a very blunt instrument just to link it to the NOM. It would swing wildly and it would mean that domestic politics and other parts of the migration system would then drive the numbers in our fourth-biggest export sector. That would be economically chaotic and it wouldn't be linked to the management of overall student numbers. No government can control the NOM perfectly from year to year because we can't control how many people leave Australia from year to year. These are just commonsense things, if you put the politics aside. We could link a number range to pre-COVID numbers in around 2019, plus or minus a few per cent. That probably has merit. I'd argue that we really should look at a share of the Australian population back to pre-COVID levels. We're currently floating at about 2.9 per cent of the Australian population being international students. The pre-COVID average was about 2.5. That would be sensible, and it would have the advantage of inbuilt growth, because there was, on average, 1.6 per cent in population growth each year pre COVID. So we need to have that discussion, and we are having that discussion, with the sector.

We need to think how we establish initial ranges by the sector. I would say that has to flow from the policy framework—rebaselining things and, particularly, rebalancing things between higher education and VET. But we have to focus more on where major providers were pre COVID. There have been some blatant market share grabs—particularly, I'd point out, by a couple of the large New South Wales universities. Frankly, they've recruited large numbers of Chinese students and disadvantaged other universities which have been trying to do the right thing and diversify. So there does need to be some rebalancing. And, yes, we need governments to make sure that good private providers have an ongoing place in a managed market. That's so some of the bureaucracy, or the university snobbery that has been talked about by some of the regulators in years past, doesn't just wipe them out. That said, I have little to no sympathy for the bottom end of the private VET market, which has just profiteered post COVID and ballooned in market share.

In my remaining minute, I will just make a remark on the course-level intervention power. Rightly, it has been made clear by the minister upfront that this is seen as a reserve power to be used rarely, and only if needed. I would say it's a stick, if needed, to link to quality and integrity issues—a stick to curb or stop low-value activities in the VET sector. And it's also to be used, perhaps in a positive way at times, to allocate additional fixed places for high-value new courses.

For what it's worth, I think that amendments are needed to the bill. I think they will be dealt with sensibly. They're being thought about by the government, and will be looked at through the Senate inquiry. The submissions to that are robust and good; it's a proper process. I do think personally—this is not government policy—that I'm not seeing the case being made, frankly, for course-level caps in the higher-ed sector. I think the case remains overwhelming for course-level caps power in the VET sector. There's a lot more I could say, but time will expire on me in about 10 seconds. I think this is an important debate, but members need to remember there's a long way to go on this. The government is listening, we're consulting, and people should take those consultation processes seriously.

Debate interrupted.

See this speech in context