Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Presenting the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024 as an education bill is a misrepresentation. This bill reflects the fact that the sector has become an unwilling and unfortunate victim of the major parties' race to the bottom on immigration numbers. It is indeed a very sad day when we see our major political parties competing to damage an important Australian growth sector and export industry.

The education sector drove half of Australia's economic growth in 2023. It contributed $48 billion to our economy. The sector supports 250,000 jobs nationally. But its benefits are not just economic. They include students' cultural and social contributions, their role in our workforce and the soft power imbued in the sector's contribution to our global engagement and to our foreign policy. Let's face it, for years there have been issues with the integrity of the education sector. It has been subverted by low-calibre colleges and by visa shopping and hopping by students who have sought to remain in this country indefinitely. We do need better oversight of agents and providers, and we need better protection of students entering tertiary and secondary overseas student pathways in Australia.

In amending the Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000, this bill does go some way to improving the integrity of our international education system. However, the bill also proposes a number of other measures that could damage that system: arbitrary enrolment caps for individual courses and providers and extraordinary new powers for the minister to suspend or cancel courses for international students without consultation. It gives the minister the power to cap student numbers down to a course level, with no requirement to consult or provide reasons for limiting international student numbers in any one particular institution or course. There are limited accountability provisions and limited avenues for appeal of these decisions. Institutions will have no right to a merits review. If providers exceed their caps, their registration will be automatically suspended for that course or for the whole institution for the rest of the year.

These consequences of automatic suspension are draconian, and they are profound. Equally, the deadline of 1 September of the preceding year for the allocation of places, which aligns with neither institutions' nor students' timetables, is a confounding aspect of this legislation. The uncertainties around the timing and number of visas for students compound the institutions' difficulties. It's going to be very difficult for providers to know how close they are to their cap for each course in accepting applications. They may well exceed their cap for a single semester, with attrition and completions then bringing numbers down during the year. But the proposed penalties are so severe that providers will likely underenrol so that they can be sure not to exceed their limits. This will lead to stranded places and to total enrolments falling well under caps.

We're told that the minister will exercise these extraordinary powers only in extraordinary circumstances. That might well be true of this minister, but we have no guarantees regarding his successors. The government proposes to give itself powers which would also put education providers at both legal and financial risk, with limited means of recourse. These powers could harm the institutions' investment in quality programs and delivery of assets. The potential impact on capital investment in the industry is clear. The measures fly in the face of the Higher Education Support Act, which defines Australian universities as being autonomous in relation to their academic courses and offerings, how they teach and what research they conduct. The legislation negates four decades of effort by Australian governments to actively develop our international education sector.

Reflecting the excellence of many of our institutions, Australia has become a leading destination for international students. Those numbers increased by less than six per cent a year between 2005 and 2019. Of late, they have overshot targets as students have returned after the pandemic, but let's remember that that rebound was accentuated by the Morrison government's active encouragement of their return, with such policies as unrestricted work rights, fee-free visa applications and expedited visas. Then, in 2022 and 2023, the Albanese government also contributed to the significant increase in international student numbers by clearing the backlog of student visa applications and by giving many international students an additional two years in Australia after they graduate.

Now we find ourselves in a housing crisis with 1.1 per cent rental vacancies in Australia and a shortfall in purpose built student accommodation. This crisis has been decades in the making, and it's directly attributable to the policy failures of successive Liberal and Labor governments to build enough housing in the country. Cue the Albanese government's U-turn on education. It first responded by abruptly decreasing student visa approvals in late 2023. Forty per cent are now being refused—that is unprecedented. The government has twice raised the savings needed by international students to gain visas, and it raised the bar on language requirements. It then increased the non-refundable fees for international student visas from $710 to $1,600—by far the highest in the world. It has halted temporary graduate visas to international students aged over 35 and it has reversed its earlier two-year extension of their visas. What has happened in response? Well, we have already seen a 34 per cent drop in visa applications in the last 12 month in the VET sector, to the lowest level since 2005, and a return to the massive visa backlogs of the last government. Consistent with that race to the bottom, the opposition leader proposes cuts to migration which would see new student enrolments fall to 10,000-15,000 a year. This would do untold damage to our education sector.

The evidence level set up for universities and the unpredictability around processing of visas and visa approvals have already disadvantaged the smaller institutions. Rural and regional universities are now limiting or refusing applications from students from those countries which are deemed at high risk of visa refusal. It's important to remember that capping metropolitan places will not encourage those international students to go to the regions. They have cultural, social and labour-market reasons to stay in the cities. Currently, fewer than 10 per cent of international students opt for regional institutions, despite the lower course costs and migration incentives. Those who do go regional are often attracted by the lower course costs, but that cohort is going to be the cohort that is the hardest hit by the recent increase in visa application fees.

We've already seen, with the Morrison government's extraordinary Job-ready Graduates program, that heavy-handed incentives or punishments have very little impact on student choices. International students are not going to choose to go to the regions; they are simply going choose to study in a different country. The same principle applies to caps on metropolitan universities in favour of regional institutions. The relationship between the housing crisis and international students is weak. International students account for only four per cent of our rental market. They make up less than one per cent of the house population in most local government areas in Australia. Only three per cent of international students live in a detached houses, with 74 per cent living in purpose built student accommodation. Many live in shared accommodation in the unregulated rental sector. Many live far from the institutions at which they study. International students often struggle to find housing because they lack a rental history. They have little protection in homestays and in shared accommodation and they're vulnerable to exploitation. They remain an important workforce in key sectors such as aged care and disability support in Australia. There's a real risk that placement caps will cause labour shortages for local businesses and the care sector.

It makes no sense to propose to limit course numbers based on domestic labour-market demands. Eighty-four per cent of overseas students who come to this country return home after their studies and only 16 per cent decide to stay in Australia, so why limit students' course selection to the skill sets that we require here? We would in fact be better off reserving positions in courses with domestic skill set shortages for Australians, not for international students, particularly for those courses in which there is a constraint on prac placements. The minister shouldn't need to micromanage institutions. Any cap should be set at a provider not a course level, and it should be set at least 18 months in advance of the year in which the students are applying.

We have to remember that students are not migrants. The two should not be conflated. Any government with effective immigration policy can winnow out those graduates who want to stay and who actually do have qualifications which are consistent with our skills deficits. We should remember that international graduates account for one-third of our permanent skilled migrant intake and that those migrants produce a massive economic dividend over their working lifetimes.

Australian universities have experienced a long-term decline in government investment, particularly in infrastructure and in research and development. They rely on tuition fees from full-fee-paying international students to deliver their core function of research, which is the basis of their international ranking and, in turn, the basis on which they attract quality overseas students. It's true that in our universities this has fuelled a culture of revenue, profit and competition in what might well be viewed as an unstable business model. This government says it wants to make things in Australia, but it has provided no additional funding for research in its recent budget. Government grants for the ARC, the NHMRC and the MRFF typically support less than half of the economic cost of supporting funded research. Commonwealth support payments for medicine and veterinary science students leave a shortfall of as much as $10,000 per student. If this government really does want to expand tertiary education and research while reducing our reliance on international students, it is going to have to fund universities better.

Swinburne university in my electorate of Kooyong has already been impacted by the recent changes in the processing of visas. In May and June 2024, the drop in percentage of student visas granted compared to 2023 was as follows: for India there was a decrease of 88 per cent; for Sri Lanka there was a reduction of 93 per cent; for Vietnam there was a reduction of 78 per cent; and for Pakistan there was a reduction of 86 per cent. This is egregious. It's an egregious insult to a venerable institution. Some of Swinburne's courses are going to become non-viable if international student numbers remain impacted in this way. That loss of revenue is going to directly impact research capability and capacity. We're going to see the same pattern repeated at every major institution in this country. The institutions' reputations are already being harmed by this government and its delays in visa assessments. Students are already threatening to move to universities in other countries, and that's already beginning to have an impact on local businesses in the surrounding suburbs, who are being impacted by the reduced numbers of students on campus.

The first goal of our universities should be to educate Australians, not to generate revenue as global businesses. It does make sense for the government to review their business models, but the review should be based on objective data and modelling, and it should be taken in concert with, not in opposition to, educational institutions. It makes sense to defer these changes and for any such radical policy change to be undertaken not by a single minister but by the proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission as part of each institution's mission based compact process. I will be moving an amendment to this legislation mandating an independent review of the impact of enrolment limits on providers, on net overseas migration and on the quality of education offered to our local and international students.

Rather than a kneejerk contraction of an important industry in response to a temporary overshoot on immigration, which is of successive governments' making, this country needs mature and nuanced policymaking on housing, on immigration and on education. The Albanese government should not overcompensate as a kneejerk reaction to the populist small-mindedness of the opposition. For the good of all Australians, it needs to have the courage to stay the course on the education sector. If it does not, and if it continues to fail to research adequately, we will see institutions fail, we will see skills and labour shortages worsen, we will see our universities' international rankings tumble, we will see our academic reputation tank, and our economy will suffer. I cannot commend this piece of legislation to the House.

Debate interrupted.

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