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

I rise to speak on the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019 and to move an amendment. I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes that the Government has damaged the quality of Australia's world-class education system by:

(1) cutting billions from universities by effectively capping undergraduate places;

(2) slashing research funding; and

(3) failing to develop a long-term education policy for the nation".

Labor will support this bill and the extension of unique student identifiers from vocational education and training to higher education students. There are currently two student identifiers in tertiary education: the student identifier for the vocational education and training sector and the Commonwealth Higher Education Student Support Number in the higher education sector. This bill consolidates these two schemes into a single identifier by decommissioning the Commonwealth Higher Education Student Support Number. This will create a single record of a student's tertiary education journey, following individuals as they move between different institutions in different sectors.

This makes a lot of sense at a time when a lot of students are studying at university when they finish school and then later upgrading qualifications through a TAFE course or the other way around. It makes a lot of sense to have one student identifier in the tertiary sector. It's a useful change as far as it goes, reflecting the policy's original purpose, which the Gillard government developed almost a decade ago and introduced into parliament in 2013. All the way back in 2009 we had a COAG communique which stated:

Improving data collections for all education sectors is of critical importance to Australia. A national student identifier could track students as they progress through education and training and would further support a seamless schooling, VET and higher education experience for students.

So of course we support the principle. We started down this track when we were last in government.

What's very disappointing is that it has taken until the government's third term to introduce this legislation connecting the higher education and vocational education schemes. We still don't really have a system that would also include student records across their schooling. We're no closer, really, to harmonising student records that would cover both schooling and postschool education. We've seen seven years of procrastination in this area; seven years of indifference and neglect.

The government has been urged on a number of occasions to make this change. The government's own reviews have urged it to accelerate the consolidation of student identification across schooling, higher education and vocational education and training. This was recommended in March 2018 in the Gonski review, which found:

The absence of a national, persistent USI is a barrier to creating national education data sets that would assist in developing a comprehensive understanding of the impact of policy or partnership efforts. Without the USI, the numerous existing data sets are disconnected and analysis of these can only provide limited insight.

It's disappointing that this bill is only a partial remedy for this issue.

Labor are very supportive of fulfilling the potential, the capacity, that extending the USI from vocational education to higher education would provide us with. We'll better understand how people progress through their post-secondary school education, including the different pathways—if you follow a vocational education pathway or a higher education pathway—and the intersection and interoperation of these two sectors. We need to make sure that, as a national unique student identifier is extended to school students, the system really is fully integrated so that we can make the most of all of those different datasets. Of course, we do that in a way that protects student privacy, but it is an incredibly valuable resource to see what kinds of interventions genuinely make a difference for students.

In recent years we have been suffering from very poor outcomes. All of our international testing results are going backwards. We're very concerned about the fact that, in literacy, numeracy and science—a range of different areas—our school students' results are plummeting in the international rankings. Having a unique student identifier that follows a student throughout their schooling into post-schooling education and tells us what interventions that student has had and what difference it's made in their educational outcomes is a very rich data source indeed. To make the most of this very rich data source, of course, we have to make sure that we have funding set aside for research in education. At the time of the last election, Labor was proposing a well-funded institute that would engage in exactly this sort of educational research so that we could take what is best practice in classrooms and make it common practice across our education system. The government have said they are up for more research in schooling, but they haven't actually provided any extra funding for this type of research. When you look at the benefit of medical research to the health of our community, you can picture the potential benefit we can have for our students with a methodical, widespread approach to taking the best research and implementing it in our classrooms.

We know the importance of evidence based policy. Our $280 million commitment at the 2019 election to establish a national evidence institute, with a mission of evaluating what works and what doesn't work in our schools, would have meant the commissioning of new research. It would have given educators an opportunity to stay up to date with the most recent research and know how to apply it in their classrooms. It would have saved money, because, of course, we spend a lot of money on things that don't work in our classrooms. It would have lifted standards and it would have helped schools that are already doing excellent work to share that success with others.

We believe that to give students the best education we need to put an end to the decades of ideological debate about what's best in the classroom and in fact base our interventions purely on the science, purely on the evidence of what's working in our schools. This bill does enable a better look at vocational education and university results. It does help with the aim that Labor has of education policy based on credible research with proper data collection through a national unique student identifier scheme that would improve outcomes for all students. It does help with that, but in a very small way. It does fall short, dramatically short, of that goal. But we're never going to stand in the way of small improvements when we see them, so we'll support the bill.

The other criticism it's important to make while we're talking about this legislation is that it's good as far as it goes, but it doesn't even begin to stem the tide of damage done by the very substantial cuts to both vocational education and higher education in this country. It doesn't solve the deeper problems that are facing TAFE and our universities. And it really doesn't in any way even begin to acknowledge the most fundamental connection between investing in education and economic growth.

The backdrop to the discussion that we're having about education policy at the moment is the dismal state of the Australian economy. If you look at all of our key economic indicators, they are all going the wrong way. Wages are stagnant. Productivity is static. Business investment's down. Household debt keeps going up. Labour market productivity is going backwards for the first time ever since we've been collecting these statistics. Economic growth is at its slowest level since the global financial crisis. This is not a picture of a thriving economy. It is not a picture of a country that's putting its best resources, its people, to their best use. If we're being blunt about the situation, we're in a period of stagnation and decline, we're in a period of malaise, driven by the lack of a plan from those opposite for jobs and growth.

We've got an era of low growth, low productivity and low investment which has been absolutely disastrous for our nation. It's squeezing people financially. You don't have to go far to find people who will tell you how anxious they are about the fact that their wages aren't going up and that their households budgets are under pressure. We've got almost two million Australians now who are out of work or looking for more hours of work—millions of Australians living with the reality of unemployment or underemployment who haven't had a decent pay rise in years, and thousands who've actually suffered flat-out wage theft in recent times.

In the face of this, we know that investment in education can change our national economy and it can make a huge difference to people's own lives, to their own family budgets. We know that a university degree or a vocational education qualification can expand the opportunities that an individual has, expand their employability and help erase the barriers of class and inequality that have trapped people in poverty in some communities around Australia. We know very clearly that investment in education is a driver of economic growth in countries around the world. World Bank analysis shows that the social return—not the private return but the return for our whole community—of an extra year of schooling sits at around 10 per cent, and it is even higher for women.

In Australia, research by Deloitte Access Economics placed the value of our universities to our productive capacity at $140 billion—that is, Australia's GDP is $140 billion a year higher because of the improved productivity of the 28 per cent of our workforce that have a university qualification. Of course, it's not just about the dollars-and-cents return that we make as a nation and we receive as a nation when we invest in education. All of the evidence shows us that that return is real, it's reliable, it's predictable and it's waiting for us to grasp. The Deloitte Access Economics report estimated that Australia would require an extra 3.8 million university graduates by 2025. We need those graduates in science, engineering, medicine, nursing, the humanities and law, just as we need people trained in the vocational educational sector. We've got shortages in both and we shouldn't for a moment believe that this is about one sector versus another sector. Australia needs a strong and excellent university sector and a strong and excellent vocational training sector.

The minister himself has acknowledged that productivity improvements in the post-secondary school sector can increase economic growth by $2.7 billion a year. So that's even before we take note of the huge difference that university campuses make in our regional communities, how they provide jobs, attract investment and train regional workers. And, in many cases, of course, that regional workforce, trained in a regional university, goes on to live and work in a regional community. When we've had shortages of medical workforce in the past in regional areas, the evidence is always that we are most likely to improve that situation by training young people from regional areas in regional universities. If they stay in the regions to do their higher education, they're much more likely to stay there and go on to work in a regional community.

We've also seen in recent times these vast benefits ignored, and universities in particular are seen as great places to make cuts in order to try and balance the budget. It's a government that's cut $2.2 billion from the higher education system, $328 million from university research and re-capped university places, which means that probably 200,000 Australians will miss out on a university place—200,000 people who would otherwise have qualified for a university place will miss out.

It's also this government that has cut more than $3 billion from TAFE and training. That's never been our approach. We want to make sure, as a Labor Party, that a university education or a TAFE education is available and accessible to every Australian who's prepared to work hard, study hard and go to university or TAFE. We opened up the university system by uncapping places, giving an extra 190,000 students an opportunity to go to university. That decision was driven by our commitment to those individuals to give them the best opportunities in life, but also by our sure knowledge that a modern developed economy requires these graduates. And it's worked.

Under Labor universities' policy, financially disadvantaged student enrolments increased by 66 per cent; Indigenous undergraduate student enrolments increased by 105 per cent; enrolments of undergraduate students with a disability grew by 123 per cent; and enrolment of students from regional and remote areas increased by 53 per cent. These are the kinds of aspirations that should be driving decision-making in higher education.

We've seen similarly in TAFE the obverse, I suppose—massive cuts to TAFE and vocational education have seen growing skills shortages right across Australia. We've got, as I said earlier, almost two million Australians unemployed or underemployed yet three-quarters of Australian businesses will tell you that they can't find the skilled staff they need.

Education is our greatest force for equity and it can also be our most effective tool for economic progress as a nation. Education helps create jobs, boosts wages and gives a better quality of life for all Australians. Education underpins economic growth and improved productivity that is desperately needed in our economy today. Education is not just social policy. It doesn't just help individuals. Education is economic policy—a bedrock for economic development in this country. We need to make sure the government stops viewing our education system as simply a target for cuts and recognises it as the engine for growth that it is.

Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Celia Hammond (Curtin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019. In my electorate of Curtin education is very important. Significant numbers of people are employed and work in the education sphere, from early childhood through to higher education. There are over 50 schools, with almost 30,000 children enrolled in them. There is one world-class university, the University of Western Australia, and a number of other higher education providers. Of the population in Curtin aged over 15 years, over 52 per cent has post-secondary qualifications above the level of diploma. This is compared with the national average of 30 per cent.

Education is extremely important in Curtin, and education matters to our government. We know that Australia's capacity to grow, compete and thrive in an increasingly global economy is dependent on all employers and all individuals, regardless of their background or circumstances, being able to access and use the right training, knowledge and skills at the right time. A strong and seamless post-education sector encompassing both higher education and VET is critical to our economy and to helping prepare Australians for the workforce opportunities of today and of the future. Equally importantly, having the opportunity to obtain knowledge and skills—and to be able to pursue employment and work opportunities using that knowledge and those skills—is vitally important for both individual and societal wellbeing.

I've said it in this place previously, but I think it's worth repeating: Australia and Australians cannot afford to be left behind in this time of rapid change, a time of escalating digital transformation and disruption. We need to be adaptable. We need an accessible, high-quality postsecondary education sector, one that is innovative, robust and responsive to our country's needs and ever-emerging gaps.

There are differences between vocational education and higher education, and these are differences we should encourage and celebrate as they provide choice and opportunity for people to follow a path which best suits their talents, ambitions and passions. At the same time—and more so now, I think, than ever before—we need to be cognisant of the fact that the offerings in these two sectors are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary. For example, there are many areas in which somebody learns something in higher education which can be enhanced with further VET studies, and the same in reverse. Also, with the rapidity of technological advances, people are frequently having to upskill or reskill and to do so at a relatively rapid rate. Both higher and vocational education have vital roles to play in this, and it's vital that the two systems speak to each other so that people can access, as easily as possible, the best path for themselves.

This particular bill amends the Student Identifiers Act to enable the extension of the unique student identifier, also known as the USI, from vocational education and training to higher education students, and to enable the Student Identifiers Registrar to assign a student identifier to higher education students. The USI initiative commenced on 1 January 2015 in the VET sector. It is a reference number, made up of 10 numbers and letters, that is free and easy to create and stays with a student for life. The USI gives access to an online record of nationally recognised training in the form of a USI transcript. This can be used by people when applying for jobs, seeking a credit transfer or demonstrating prerequisites when undertaking further study. The USI initiative is also extremely valuable for government, as it enables the collection of information about students' training activities and their movements within the VET sector. This information provides an important foundation for understanding and improving VET performance and better meets the needs of students, training organisations and employers.

Currently, in the higher ed sector, the equivalent to the USI is the Commonwealth higher education student support number, known as the CHESSN. The CHESSN is not currently compatible with the USI, and this creates difficulty for those VET students transitioning to higher ed, or those higher ed students transitioning to VET. The higher ed sector has long supported the establishment of USIs and the importance of establishing a national USI to support a seamless transition between schooling, VET and higher education. The call for the national USI across all education sectors was repeated in 2018, on at least two occasions, through the STEM Partnerships Forum, led by Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel. The forum summarised that the lack of a consistent national identifier was the largest barrier to understanding the impact of policy efforts to improve engagement in STEM education. In the same year, in the final report of the Higher Education Standards Panel into improving retention, completion and success in higher education, it was recommended as a way to better understand student pathways across tertiary education.

This bill is responding to those calls by amending the current act so as to include the higher education sector, thus enabling the assignment, collection, use, disclosure and verification of student identifiers for higher education students. The registrar has powers and functions that will expand to include the operation of the student identifier in the higher education sector. From 1 January 2021, new domestic and onshore overseas students studying at a registered higher education provider will be required to apply for a USI. As noted, the benefits of the USI are numerous. Key among those benefits is that it will help students engage with their studies across sectors. It will facilitate people's ability to upskill and reskill, build their careers and fulfil their goals and aspirations. It will also strengthen the integrity and richness of data available and help the government to gain a better understanding of student pathways across tertiary education. A more robust evidence base will help inform future policy development and program delivery. This will further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the government's investment in tertiary education. This project is going to trigger the decommissioning of the existing CHESSN and replace it with the USI. This will reduce from two to one the number of tertiary identifiers issued by the government.

Our government knows that an excellent education system really, really matters to the future of our society and our country. This why our government is investing record levels of funding in our education system. This is why we are committed to taking considered and appropriate steps, such as those contained in this bill, to ensure that the system, from early childhood through to primary, secondary and tertiary education, is fit for the demands and challenges of the world we live in. We want a system that is responsive to the needs of students. We want a system that provides the best platform and opportunities for people to individually thrive. We want to make sure the system continues to strengthen and underpin the vitality and success of our wonderful country. I commend the education minister on all he has done in this space, and continues to do, and I offer my support for this bill.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019, a bill that seeks to amend the Student Identifiers Act 2014 to enable the extension of the Unique Student Identifier, the USI, from vocational education and training students to higher educational students. Since 2015, students enrolling in a nationally recognised VET course have been assigned a randomly generated alphanumeric code, the Unique Student Identifier. That code is used by the student each time they enrol in a VET course. Since 2017, persons who have a USI have been able to access, view and download their authenticated VET transcripts via the USI transcript service. The bill before the chamber extends the USI framework to higher education students. It will enable the USI to record a student's entire tertiary education. The bill proposes that, from 2021, new domestic and onshore overseas higher education students can apply for a student identifier and, from 2023, registered higher education providers will not be permitted to confer a regulated higher education award on an individual unless the individual has been assigned a student identifier or has an exemption for some reason.

Labor developed a proposal for a national USI scheme almost a decade ago. In 2009 a COAG communique stated:

Improving data collections for all education sectors is of critical importance to Australia. A national student identifier could track students as they progress through education and training and would further support a seamless schooling, VET and higher education experience for students.

A USI for the VET sector was introduced by Labor in the 43rd Parliament but was not voted on before lapsing when parliament was prorogued. It was reintroduced by the coalition government in 2014 and then passed into law. The coalition government has neglected the education sector by wasting time when they could have been extending this important scheme to include higher ed and by failing to extend the scheme to all education sectors.

The coalition government's failure has disadvantaged students and the education sector as a whole. The March 2018 Gonski review—the Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schoolsrecommended:

Accelerate the introduction of a national Unique Student Identifier for all students to be used throughout schooling.

The report contends:

The absence of a national, persistent USI is a barrier to creating national education data sets that would assist in developing a comprehensive understanding of the impact of policy or partnership efforts. Without the USI, the numerous existing data sets are disconnected and analysis of these can only provide limited insight. This has particular implications for areas such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy, where there are calls to increase the relative priority of specific skills and subjects but the impact of previous and future policy changes are uncertain.

Labor understands the importance of evidence based policy. Labor took a $280 million commitment to the 2019 election to establish a national evidence institute to evaluate what works and what doesn't work in Australian schools. The institute would commission new research, help educators stay up to date, save money, lift standards and help schools that are already doing excellent work to share those successes with other schools. Labor believe that to give students the best education, we need to put an end to decades of ideological battles about school education. Education policy based on credible research along with data collection through a national USI scheme would improve outcomes for all students.

The bill seeks to enable a single student identifier to record a student's entire tertiary education journey by decommissioning the Commonwealth higher education student support number and expanding the USI to higher education. However, for school students and for their parents and carers this bill does nothing to alleviate the problem of a school student's educational history and being left behind when the student moves from school to school, or from state to state. The 2018 Gonski review said this was an important problem that needs addressing. A USI that included all school students would facilitate a smooth transition to a new school for students and would result in less impact on their learning development. It is important that the national rollout of the USI to school students is accelerated, as recommended by the 2018 Gonski review. The benefits for students, employers and the education sector would be enormous. It will be important to ensure the new system is protected by adequate security safeguards and that the information is used only for the purposes for which it was collected.

Sadly, Australia's economic growth is slowing. It's the slowest it's been since the global financial crisis, and one of the reasons for this can be traced back to the fact we have a coalition government in its seventh year. Let's look at the economic landscape: we've got stagnant wages; household debt has sky rocketed; almost two million Australians are looking for work or more work, and unemployment is higher than it should be; business investment is at the lowest levels since the 1990s recession; productivity, a great measure of whether the engine of society is working, is going backwards; living standards are going backwards for many people. A decline in educational outcomes and a skills crisis are contributing to these dire circumstances, and we see the results in our electorates every day. We see it translate to people coping with record low wages growth and crashing productivity, business investment at its lowest level since the 1990s recession, as I said. It's dampening consumer and business confidence. You just need to go to retail shops and talk to retailers to find out what's happening. Business is down 10, 20 or 30 per cent, and some are even down 50 per cent; no-one is pulling money out of their wallets. Obviously those opposite will say, 'You're talking down the economy,' but I'm telling the facts as reported to me by businesses in my electorate.

The Australian Industry Group says that 75 per cent of businesses surveyed are struggling to find the qualified workers they need. A great education can be the ticket to a lifetime of opportunity for the individuals who obtain that education. And it's the ticket to a wealthier and more productive nation. A university education transforms the lives of individuals and is one of the best investments any government can make in its citizens.

The coalition government has the power to close the gap in just one generation and provide all the spill-on effects to the whole community. Put simply, investing in and maintaining our world-class universities is good for all Australians. The value that university education has added to Australia's productive capacity is estimated at $140 billion in GDP. We know that Australia will require an additional 3.8 million university qualifications by 2025—additional, that is—yet, when it comes to our higher education system, let's look at what the coalition government's priorities have been. You can sum it up in three words: cut, cut, cut. That history is important, especially in the current context, where university vice-chancellors are telling us about the impacts of the coronavirus right now—damage that could be rolling out for months, perhaps even years, if people don't turn up to universities and, instead, go to those countries where the borders aren't closed.

Before the coronavirus came along, let's look at what the coalition had done. They'd capped university places, cutting $2.2 billion from the system and locking more than 200,000 students out of the opportunity of a university qualification; and they'd cut $328.5 million from university research. The minister himself said to the National Press Club that productivity improvements in the higher education sector can deliver $2.7 billion to Australia's GDP per annum. How are these cuts going to improve productivity?

Universities are also economic powerhouses within the community, particularly the universities in our regions. They provide jobs, train regional workers and prepare our young people for the future challenges our country will face. Research has found that seven in 10 regional university graduates take up work outside of metropolitan areas and that those universities and students reinvest more than $2 billion a year back into those regional communities with university campuses. I'm talking about the great contribution the universities of Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Cairns, Townsville and the like make. I would have thought that National Party MPs would understand this and would be in there championing these universities. Instead, we hear from vice-chancellors that they are flat out getting a meeting with regional representatives in the Morrison government.

During the last campaign Labor took a different approach. We committed $12.3 million to establish the national institute for flood resilience at Southern Cross University in northern New South Wales. I give these examples because these are policies that could be taken off the Labor shelf by the National Party or the Liberal Party and used to stimulate a sector that is reeling at the moment. The Northern Rivers is one of the most active flood plains in Australia, so locals know firsthand the devastating impact these natural disasters can have. That's why we took the idea of a national institute for flood resilience to the election. It is estimated that floods cost the Australian economy $18.2 billion per year. The knowledge that would have been developed in a regional centre like Lismore could have been shared across our nation and the world. Labor also committed to build an emergency response and innovation centre in Townsville at James Cook. The centre would have used state-of-the-art augmented reality technology to create realistic simulations to support vital research and training. In the summer we've just experienced, the black summer, we've seen our country at its most hostile. We've seen communities at their most vulnerable. These are just some of the examples of the nation-leading and nation-building research that can occur right here in Australia, particularly in regional universities, and lead to real emergency mitigation.

In government what do Labor do? We continue that great tradition of ensuring that university education never remains out of reach for our brightest people. In order to achieve this goal we invested in universities. After years of neglect under the 12 long years of the previous Howard government, Labor boosted investment in universities from $8 billion when we came to government in 2007 up to $14 billion in 2013. We also opened up the system with demand-driven funding in 2012, which has seen an additional 190,000 Australians able to obtain a place in university. We also wanted to ensure that the opportunity to go to university was made available to all Australians, particularly those who have had to overcome structural disadvantages. And what happened? Well, it worked. Labor's policies saw an extra 220,000 Australians get the opportunity. Financially disadvantaged student enrolments increased by 66 per cent; Indigenous undergraduate student enrolments increased by 105 per cent; undergraduate students with a disability grew by 123 per cent; and students from regional and remote areas, those areas represented by the National Party particularly, increased by 50 per cent.

Labor supports this bill and the member for Sydney's sensible amendment. We support the extension of the USI to higher education students, but we need this framework to be completed by extending it through to school students so that everyone can gain the maximum benefits of a unique student identifier, as envisaged by the Labor scheme developed over a decade ago.

Katie Allen (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019. The unique student identifier is a number given to a student upon enrolment in any tertiary institution. This bill amends the Student Identifiers Act 2014 to enable extension of the USI from VET to higher education. For the first time, a student identifier will follow a student throughout their education and be extended from vocational education to universities.

Imagine a student finishing school after completing the VCE. She enrols in a VET course in aged care and gains work as a care assistant. She realises she really enjoys looking after and supporting people and their families when someone is unwell. As a result, she enrols in a Bachelor of Nursing. During her degree she is able to support herself by working in an aged-care facility. She completes her degree and starts work at a hospital. After a few years, she decides that she enjoys the energy and fast paced environment of the emergency room, so she enrols in a master's degree specialising in emergency care. She sees how practice could be improved and wants to enact change in her workplace to ensure the hospital is giving the best level of care to patients, so she enrols in a doctorate and completes a thesis on clinical practices. Despite moving from TAFE to university to another university, her student identifier will be able to follow her right through her professional and educational career. This will alleviate the administrative load of the institutions, and the student will be supported and encouraged throughout their lifelong learning.

We all know that lifelong learning is now a fact of life. We know, with the future of work, that we have to prepare our students for ongoing learning now and into the future. With the 21st century knowledge economy coming online and the ability for people to access education becoming faster and easier, this unique student identifier is going to make sure that we can map the progress of people as they move through our educational system and that we are able to track them on an ongoing basis. By having one unique student identifier throughout a person's educational journey, it will help inform government policy and help both federal and state governments understand the pathways tertiary students take after leaving high school, a journey which is often complex and varied but doesn't just stop at the age of 25. It continues on for many people throughout their life.

In the last decade there's been a focus on encouraging students to undertake higher education in Australia. However, ensuring students stay enrolled and complete their studies has proved more challenging, particularly amongst rural, regional and remote students. Research from the Australian Council for Educational Research indicates that after nine years of commencing a degree only 59.5 per cent of remote students and 69.8 per cent of regional students graduate. This is in stark contrast to the 75 per cent of their metropolitan counterparts. We need to do better to understand the gaps, to ensure that once students gain access into an educational system they can be supported to be retained and maintained in that system. These students face certain financial pressures and emotional, social and cultural pressures from relocation to new environments, which their metropolitan counterparts are less likely to experience. Having one unique student identifier will allow policymakers to track the educational journey of rural, regional and remote students, and that can be used to inform policies to help ensure that students are maintained within the system and supported throughout their journey.

Furthermore, at the STEM Partnerships Forum, led by the Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, there was a recommendation for a lifelong unique student identifier to be established and implemented by this year. It was found that a key barrier to understanding the impact of policy efforts to improve engagement in STEM education was a lack of a consistent national identifier. I'm pleased that we are now debating this bill and I expect the support across the division on this.

As a professor at not one but two universities, I understand the unique situation that students face when they're making life decisions about where they would like to develop their education and where they would like to be in the future. We know that tracking student progress is very important when we are looking at strengthening the integrity and richness of the data that is provided so that we can see where we can better use our resources and where we can better support our students.

This bill will amend current requirements under the act to include the higher education sector. Specifically, the bill will enable the assignment, collection, use, disclosure and verification of student identifiers for higher education students. The register, appointed under subdivision B of the act, has powers that will expand to include the operation of the student identifier in the higher education sector. From 1 January 2021, once this bill is passed, new domestic and onshore overseas students studying at registered higher education providers will be required to apply for a USI. From 1 January 2023, registered higher education providers must not confer a regulated higher education award on an individual unless that individual has been assigned a USI or an exemption applies.

This is a simple, practical, sensible measure which points to the fact that our government understands that higher education needs to be flexible, it needs to be open and it needs to allow students to traverse the different sorts of educational outcomes they wish to achieve. It puts the student in the driver's seat with regard to their career development. I'd like to congratulate the minister on bringing this bill forward and I support it fully.

Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased today to rise in this place to speak on the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019. Labor will support this bill, but I also support the amendments moved by the member for Sydney. They're very sensible and factually correct amendments that note the ongoing failure of the Liberal-National government to support higher education. They also note the slashing of funding to universities by this government and also the retrograde funding cuts for science and research made by the Liberal-National government.

Many of us here are passionate about the value of our higher education system and the benefits it brings to Australia economically, socially and of course personally for every individual, but only the Labor Party supports the higher education sector with policy and practice when in government. After seven long years of this Liberal-National government, all the sector has seen, very sadly, is cuts, cuts and only ever more cuts. Labor understands the prosperity that comes from keeping our higher education system strong. It lifts the nation up, it opens doors for individuals and gives opportunities to those who may not have had them before. A university education transforms the lives of individuals and is one of the best investments any government can make. In one generation it can close the disadvantage gap and has flow-on effects for entire communities. As the member for Sydney said earlier in this place today, education is the greatest opportunity to achieve equity and equality.

In government, we continued that great Labor tradition by ensuring that a university education never remains out of reach for anyone. In order to achieve this goal, Labor invested in Australia's universities. After many years of neglect under the Howard government, Labor boosted investment in universities from $8 billion in 2007 to $14 billion in 2013. We also opened up the system with demand-driven funding in 2012 which has seen an additional 190,000 Australians able to get a place in universities. Now this Liberal-National government has cut $2.2 billion out of the sector, which is an effective cap on places. That means that 200,000 people who could have gone on to further education in this country no longer can. That's an opportunity that has been denied to many people in my electorate: once they could have gone to university, but, thanks to this Liberal government, they are no longer able to.

This bill speaks to the importance of the sector as a whole by modernising and making sure that universities, governments and appropriate agencies have the tools required to continually provide the best support possible to students in this country. The bill amends the Student Identifiers Act to enable the extension of the unique student identifier from vocational education and training to higher education students. The unique student identifier is a secure online record of a student's nationally recognised training. The national system was developed to track student outcomes and pathways through the education system, and to facilitate assessment of overseas students and communications between relevant state and federal departments.

Critically, the Gillard Labor government developed a business case for a unique student identifier within the vocational education and training system, but sadly that legislation elapsed at the 2013 election. It must be noted that the Abbott government, in 2014, did pass the Student Identifiers Act, but that did not extend to the higher education sector, which is what we are seeking to do today. Since 2014 there has been a radio silence on this very sensible reform that will help students and policymakers alike.

As has been noted before, the higher education system still uses the Commonwealth higher education student support numbers, and this bill will enable a single student identifier that will record a student's entire tertiary education by decommissioning the old CHESSNs and expanding the student identifiers to higher education. It proposes that from 2021 new domestic and onshore overseas higher education students can apply for a student identifier. If we extend this identifier from vocational education and training to higher education then universities and governments will better understand how Australians use post-secondary training as well as pathways between vocational education and other higher education institutions. This is useful as it will more clearly inform future policy development and program delivery through new up-to-date evidence based data.

It will be important to ensure that, as a national universal student identifier is extended to school students, we continue to maximise the new data that is gained while at the same time protecting the privacy of students at home and abroad. That is why Labor is happy to support this bill; however, as usual, it is clear that something like this should have happened a lot sooner. Seven years in power and this government has failed, until now, to adopt what is quite a simple reform. It is abundantly clear to the Australian public and everyone involved in the higher education and VET sectors that this Liberal-National government have no plan, have no agenda other than chasing weird ideological pursuits and are distracted always by their own internal bickering. The coalition government have failed once again to see the real importance of the higher education sector. They should have extended this scheme to the sector years ago. This government can't even do the simple things quickly—it's taken seven years!

Two years ago the government's own Gonski review, in 2018, the Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools, said:

The absence of a national, persistent USI is a barrier to creating national education data sets that would assist in developing a comprehensive understanding of the impact of policy or partnership efforts. Without the USI, the numerous existing data sets are disconnected and analysis of these can only provide limited insight. This has particular implications for areas such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy, where there are calls to increase the relative priority of specific skills and subjects but the impact of previous and future policy changes are uncertain.

This is from their own report, and here we are, two years later, and finally this unmotivated government are getting around to this simple, uncontroversial change that could help the nation understand how the education system is working. Perhaps they could even think about developing policy to improve it. The truth is that the Liberal-National party simply don't care enough for good policy in this country and they never pass up a chance to cut university funding and funding to the vocational education and training system in this nation.

Labor is committed to developing policy based on evidence. At the last election, Labor committed to establishing a national evidence institute to evaluate what works and what doesn't work in Australian schools. This institute would commission new research, help educators stay up to date, save money, lift standards and help schools that already doing excellent work to share their successes and their knowledge with other schools. Practical, helpful education policy: it's an idea that this current government might want to look at themselves and perhaps seek to implement for the good of the nation.

It's a policy we developed because, on this side of the House, Labor understand the needs of the education sector and we understand the importance of building a policy around solid evidence and facts. It's time we gave students in this country the best education possible and put an end to the ideological battles that have been waged in the sector. Strange and paranoid red-herring arguments about freedom of speech on uni campuses have distracted this government from doing the important things—simple things like this student identifier bill. Instead, they chase their tails on ridiculous arguments that just seek to denigrate people who work at universities and people who study at it. Labor supports education policy based on credible research, not strange conspiracy theories. Data collection through a national universal student indicator scheme would improve outcomes for all students—and not just students, of course.

A strong higher education sector has fantastic benefits for the economic health of a nation. Australia's economic growth has been the slowest it has been since the global financial crisis. Wages are stagnant; household debt has skyrocketed; almost two million Australians are looking for work or more work; and the unemployment rate is higher than it should be. Business investment is at its lowest level since the 1990s recession. Productivity and living standards are going backwards. A decline in educational outcomes and a skills crisis are contributing to these dire circumstances. We see it every day. Put simply, investing in and maintaining our world-class universities is good for all of us. The value that university education has added to Australia's productive capacity is estimated at $140 billion in gross domestic product.

It is a sector under extreme pressure, with the outbreak of COVID-19 affecting international students. As we all know in this place, the internationalisation of Australian education is a great success story and one that has enriched our society as well as our campuses. International education is a $33 billion export industry, one of Australia's largest. The international education industry also supports over 130,000 jobs in this country. We mustn't forget that the international education industry also supports science and research in our public universities. As science and research has been cut by this government year upon year upon year, universities have but one choice: to turn to their international student market to ensure they can get the funding from those students to support science and research. If this government would care to think about the benefits of science and research and perhaps start funding it instead of cutting it all the time, they would find our universities under less pressure to continually seek to grow on a massive scale the international education sector.

It is a sector we want to grow but, in times like this, when we see the outbreak of COVID-19, we can see how easily it can be damaged by something that is beyond everybody's control. I must say, when this crisis with COVID-19 is over, all Australians—certainly us in this parliament—will warmly welcome back to these shores Chinese students and other students from across Asia, because we know the participation they bring to the university education system in this country is gravely important not only for other students on campus but also for the entire education system itself.

As I said at the start, Labor supports this bill. I also support the amendment moved by the member for Sydney. I urge the government to do more to support this important sector that is facing so many challenges on so many different fronts.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My dad started his working life at the age of 14 at my grandfather's garage 'pumping gas', as the Americans put it. Some 71 years later, he still goes to work as a motor mechanic. By anyone's measure, that is a long time in just one career. I didn't follow my dad's footsteps into his motor mechanics business. In fact, like so many of my generation, I've had a number of careers, and only time will tell how many more I have here and beyond. This bill, Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019, will be very important not just for my generation but increasingly for those who are younger than I.

It is a little known fact that I began my adult life pursuing a different kind of vocation. I studied to become a Catholic priest for a short while with the Pallottine order in Victoria. I know that for some that may be unpalatable with the issues that have arisen in recent times regarding sexual abuse, but I, for one, am proud of the work that I did and the many good men and women that I interacted with at the time. In my second career, I took up tools and worked with my hands as a carpenter. I studied for my vocational qualifications at Holmesglen TAFE as an apprentice carpenter and joiner. After establishing my own building business, with an incredibly supportive wife, two children and one on the way, I had a brain explosion and went back to uni and studied law at QUT. I went on and practiced as a barrister for 16 years after that. So I've received a formal higher education, I've received a formal vocational education and, on Victorian building sites at the peak of that recalcitrant union the BLF in the 1980s, you can safely say I've received plenty of informal education along the way.

For a person of my age that mixture is not unique, but it is unusual. For students growing up in Australia today it will be the norm. Students today don't think for a second that they will have only one job, one career or one skill set during their lives. With the pace of technological change, they have never known anything other than continuous learning. They expect that their working life will be the same, and it will.

The Department of Education, Skills and Employment's Australian jobs publication describes studies which estimate that soon Australians will make an average of 17 changes in employers across five different careers. Each career change will need fresh training and in many cases new formal qualifications requiring multiple types of learning. Our students today are going to need to mix vocational education with university courses flexibly, as they move from one industry to another. But it won't just be in moving between careers that vocational education and higher education will need to interact.

Recently, I visited the site of EndED Butterfly House in Mooloolah Valley with co-founder Mark Forbes. The coalition government has contributed more than $6 million towards the construction and operation of this Australian-first facility, and it's terrific to see it racing towards completion. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Mark, EndED, the Butterfly foundation and BA Murphy Constructions on what will become Australia's first residential eating disorder facility. While I was touring the site with Mark, we spoke to one of the carpenters installing cladding. He very kindly gave me the chance to borrow his nail bag and make some good use of my building licence I've been keeping for all of these years. We reflected on how much faster we were able to clad the building than I—or even when he—could have when I began my career. With strong, battery powered tools and nail guns everywhere saving labour, and the tangled wires of hoses a thing of the past, custom manufactured structures created by machines elsewhere are slotted seamlessly, with a little bit of gentle persuasion, into place.

It doesn't take a university education to work with building tools today, but on more complex builds it won't be long before it does. In some trades, the change is already happening. On my recent listening post tour in Fisher, I was helped out by one of my most dedicated volunteers John Pozzey. John was telling me about his first career decades ago in one of the most advanced machining tool shops in Australia. John, and the company he worked for, were tireless innovators in their day, building some of the most advanced components available. But I doubt that they would recognise them in the workshops of companies like the coast's own HeliMods today.

To work in today's aeronautical and mechanical engineering shop, you need hands-on skills. But you also need cutting-edge design, engineering and IT skills. At HeliMods, a pure vocational education is not enough but nor is a pure university education. You need both sets of skills and, as the industry's technology continues to change, you need constant refreshment of both. We must make gathering those dual skills easy, seamless and efficient. What I found was that each of the many stages of my education was anything but. Every time I took up a new course, I found that I was starting again. I was laboriously establishing my existing learning—trying to get it recognised, and studying how to make the system work—before opening my first book.

It can't be like that in the future. If we cannot encourage more Australians to study more, and to study in more varied ways, then we will all fall behind our international competitors. Certainly, we need to ensure that we are getting the right number of students into the right courses at university. The coalition government is helping to achieve that with record funding of some $18 billion this year. Those opposite like to talk about cuts, but you can't have cuts when you have record funding. The coalition government is helping to achieve that. In my own electorate of Fisher, the government has provided the University of the Sunshine Coast with additional funding for teaching and learning—from $165 million in 2018 to $172 million last year. That's on top of an additional $69.4 million that we are delivering for new students over the next four years at the USC Moreton Bay campus.

But, instead of degrees, we need to encourage more of our young people to get a trade. In Queensland in 2018, in the construction trades, 37 per cent of employers attracted no suitable applicants for trade jobs they had available. Only 49 per cent of vacancies were filled. Glaziers, tilers and cabinetmakers are some of the hardest types of employees to find in my state. These are facts. I know firsthand. When I tried to get a glazier to replace a window that had been smashed in a storm, it took six months to get a glazier out. We have skill shortages among sheet-metal workers, fitters, welders, bricklayers, plumbers, chefs, bakers and childcare workers. We need many more people to be learning a trade, yet our society tells young people that a university education is the only route to success. We must change that culture. In the meantime, we can also work with it to achieve the doubly skilled workers we'll need in the decades to come.

This bill, by extending the operation of the Unique Student Identifier to the university sector, will actually support recruitment for the trades. It will help show the direct paths which exist between vocational education and university education. It will help to demonstrate that they are part of the same continuum, reinforce for potential students that beginning in a trade doesn't have to mean ending in one, and show that movement between the two is seamless and commonplace. It will, with the passage of this bill, be literally built into the system. I believe this is an important message to be sending to our young school leavers today.

I would like to take this opportunity to mention a group who are particularly badly affected by the obstacles that currently exist in our education system, and that is ADF veterans. We are well aware of the challenges that face some former service men and women when they leave the ADF. It can be difficult for our veterans to find new meaning in their lives and to build a fulfilling career once they leave the ADF. I believe that, for many, education could provide them a new path forward. Former service men and women should be fantastically well-placed to begin a degree or a new vocational education course. The ADF demands continuous training and learning from its personnel, and in many cases it provides qualifications to recognise that work. However, achieving recognition for that prior learning in the civilian world can be very difficult. I hope and trust that over time we will be able to incorporate all of the ADF's training programs into the national unique student identifier system and make it that little bit easier for our service men and women to demonstrate the skills they already possess.

As the minister has described, this bill will set up a universal national system which will lay the groundwork for a much more seamless movement of student information across institutional and state boundaries, across the gulf between the university sector and vocational education, and across long breaks from study. This will particularly help women who take time out of the workforce to raise children. But it will have one further important outcome. Governments, just as much as a modern worker, need continuous learning to develop good policy. Up until now, we have had no means of tracking the contemporary student journey. The trail for government ran cold at the boundary between vocational and university education. This bill will ensure that in future we'll be able to understand these complex new educational paths and design policies that will deliver the learning that we need in the 21st century.

I enjoyed learning to be a carpenter and joiner and then a builder. I enjoyed learning to be a lawyer. I'm enjoying learning how to be a federal member of parliament. I'm excited for the next generations of Australians and the varied careers that they too will enjoy. This bill will make those paths a little bit easier. For them and to all young people who are studying or who are looking to study, I commend this bill to the House.

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Vocational Education, Training and Apprenticeships) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank those members who spoke on the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019. The bill gives effect to a key national education reform announced in the 2019-20 budget to extend the unique student identifier known as the USI from vocational education and training to higher education. The Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019 outlines amendments to reflect consistency between VET and higher education, providing continuity for all tertiary students. This will ensure that both the VET and higher education sectors are able to provide students with the best support and services possible to enrich their entire education journey.

For the first time, all students studying at a tertiary level will have access to the same national identity system. With almost all students in tertiary education using the USI we will be able to monitor and collect unprecedented data to better inform education programs and policies. As with all information that is maintained by the government, privacy is our No. 1 priority. USIs are kept in a secure environment, with all necessary steps taken to protect identifiers from misuse, interference, unauthorised access and modification. Through the USI, students will be able to move between VET and higher education more easily, encouraging ongoing engagement in education and lifelong learning, personal development and career aspiration.

The amendments in this bill were designed with innovation, fairness and longevity at their core. They were informed by a collaborative approach between stakeholders and government agencies, with a focus on ensuring that the students of today and tomorrow have access to the best quality tertiary education. Again, I thank the members for their contributions to this key debate on measures that will facilitate the expansion of the USI to higher education. I commend the bill to the House.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Sydney has moved as an amendment that all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The immediate question before the House is that the amendment moved by the member for Sydney be agreed to.