Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

As I've said publicly, the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024 is a sledgehammer to crack a walnut—and the wrong walnut. I do not quibble with the integrity measures contained in parts 1 to 6 of this bill. But I would argue that it's compromised by its approach to reducing the number of overseas students and short-term holidaymakers to make a show of doing something about a housing shortage that has little to do with either cohort.

We should welcome overseas students to Australia, as we've been doing since the heyday of the Colombo Plan in the fifties, sixties and seventies. What we should not be doing is encouraging young people to come to Australia on false pretences that the sham or questionable courses being offered to them are really a pathway to residency. It has meant that there are thousands of people now living in Australia in a kind of limbo, with reduced economic opportunities and no real road to citizenship. Visa factories ought to be run out of business, and, to the extent that this bill leads to that result, so much the better.

If rorting were the real concern, this legislation would focus specifically on providers of concern and simply introduce measures to ensure more effective regulation of their practices. Some privately owned VET providers are clearly not of high integrity and quality. They should be the focus, not universities and other quality government providers. Nor should this be an avenue to pit quality institutions against each other or to create a city-country divide.

Once again, we're presented with legislation about two very separate and distinct issues. It's becoming a habit with this government, and a bad one. As the government knows and as the minister has come close to saying publicly, the rest of this legislation, part 7 and 8, is not primarily about education but about fixing the net overseas migration number for the next year and using the tertiary sector to do most of the heavy lifting. There are also TAFEs and other respectable providers that would be adversely affected by these measures, not to mention the impact on Australia's reputation as a reliable provider of quality overseas education and on the ability of universities to support the research we need if we are indeed to be a clean, green superpower.

It was not that long ago that assaults on Indian students in Australia resulted in a sharp downturn in young people from the subcontinent signing up to come here to study. In fact, it took a specific visit by Julia Gillard to India to get under the hood and start the repairs. Reputation is hard won, easily lost and a real battle to regain. Overseas education may indeed be our third-largest overseas earner, but we are not unique. We do not have the field to ourselves. We do not have a monopoly. We are reliant on the cross-subsidisation that international students provide to support domestic students and research.

Already, the tertiary sector tells me, the uncertainty surrounding this legislation is leading to prospective students going to other countries, including the United States. That's not surprising given that Home Affairs is already deliberately slowing down the time it takes to process visas for prospective students. Create uncertainty and people will reconsider their options. By reducing the number of overseas students in this pre-emptory way we will be creating reputational and business risks for the tertiary sector as well as broader problems for an already troubled economy as unintended consequences. International students have played a large role in underpinning economic growth since COVID.

I accept that not every university thinks the same way on this bill. Some, like La Trobe—and I've met with the vice-chancellor—argue they will benefit. But I have also met with vice-chancellors from the University of Melbourne and Monash University, which many Goldstein students attend, and they entirely disagree. I do not want to be involved in creating a situation where students in Goldstein cannot get a place at a university anywhere near where they live because of arbitrary course caps that could be imposed under this legislation.

If there's a perceived temporary issue with the number of people entering the country—and I'm still not convinced this is a way to solve it—make sure the legislation operates for only a temporary period. I have been in discussions with the minister to add a sunset clause to the legislation so it will lapse once it's achieved the government's short-term goals. Unfortunately, it appears the government has ultimately decided not to support my amendment despite support from the tertiary sector and other respectable providers. Yes, the government sympathises with the concept, but it's decided it's just too difficult. That's an inadequate response, especially when the legislation as it stands grants extraordinary powers to the minister to, for example, impose total enrolment limits by legislative instrument and to impose total enrolment limits by notice to the provider. The real sledgehammer comes with additional provisions to allow the minister to impose enrolment limits on individual courses by legislative instrument or by notice to the provider. This is an overreach, and I wholeheartedly support the amendment from my colleague the member for North Sydney to remove that provision.

Meanwhile, I continue to offer a sunset clause of two years to enable the government to get over what it sees as an immediate but one-off problem. It would also give the sector certainty that the extraordinary powers granted to the minister would not be used for even less acceptable reasons by a future incumbent. The government acknowledged to me that it might have been a different story if the Australian tertiary education authority had been up and running. I offered suggestions to address this that were considered but ultimately rejected. I do suspect that, if the minister had been the ultimate decisionmaker, a sunset would have seen the light of day, to mix a metaphor, but he is not and there are other priorities at play at in other offices in this building.

It appears that the proposal to cap the number of international students was thrown into the budget at the last minute to make it appear that the government was doing something about the housing shortage. In his budget address, the Treasurer went so far as to blame international students for putting pressure on the prices of rent and making finding housing harder for everyone. The government has repeatedly shown itself to be willing to bow to the politics of fear propagated by others in this chamber on immigration. Now a housing crisis which has been decades in the making is being tied to international students. I would argue that the housing crisis has multiple causes which are bipartisan and will take decades to repair. This needs to be done in a considered way, and creating another problem in a knee-jerk attempt to solve it is not the way to go. There is a real danger that, in trying to resolve one perceived issue, this legislation, if it remains unamended, would damage the broader economy, especially by reducing the supply of part-time workers at the time of a labour shortage and with inflation remaining uncomfortably strong.

As the Treasurer has pointed out, it is services rather than goods that are driving inflation now. Reducing the supply of labour can only make matters worse, and blaming overseas students for the housing crisis is at best simplistic. As the Property Council has pointed out, between 2019 and 2023 median weekly rent increased by 30 per cent. Over the same period, student visa arrivals decreased by 13 per cent. Reports suggest that overseas students occupy a mere four per cent of rentals. As the Student Accommodation Council puts it:

There are more domestic students in rental homes than international- yet no one is suggesting we ban share-houses for local university students.

The fact is we have simply not been building enough purpose-built student accommodation. The Property Council estimates 7,770 new beds are due to come online by 2026—still not enough to alleviate demand in the private rental market. It's still not quite clear to me how increasing requirements on universities to add to student accommodation works when this legislation will reduce their income and, one would have thought, therefore their ability to borrow to build. On top of that, last financial year, when growth was an anaemic 1.5 per cent, the National Australia Bank estimated that spending by international students was responsible for the 0.8 of the increase—more than half of the total for the year. Growth remains around the same level right now, so any cut in international student numbers is likely to have a further direct impact on growth.

The Group of Eight universities suggests that, if the number of international students were capped at the pre-COVID level of 2019, the immediate impact would cost the economy more than $5 billion and more than 22,000 jobs. In my own city, the estimate is that international students at Monash and Melbourne contribute nearly $6 billion in economic output and the impact would reduce economic output by more than $1 billion and 4½ thousand jobs. I know the universities are talking their own book, but clearly the impact would at least be substantial and damaging.

This bill is a sledgehammer—and not in a good way. I do not support it in its current form.

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