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

I speak today on the Education Services for Overseas Students (Registration Charges) Amendment Bill 2021 and three related bills: the Education Services for Overseas Students (TPS Levies) Amendment Bill 2021, the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Cost Recovery and Other Measures) Bill 2021 and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Charges) Amendment Bill 2021. 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:

(1) that the Government has damaged Australia's world-class higher education system, placing thousands of university workers' jobs at risk, and jeopardising Australian research; and

(2) the Government's actions will make it harder for Australia to recover from the COVID-19 recession".

This motion is being seconded by the member for Macquarie. These four related bills form part of a broad shift by the Morrison government to cost recovery for the regulation of higher education providers. These bills intend to give effect to the Morrison government's 2021 budget announcement that charging for regulatory activities associated with overseas education would be simplified. The intent of these bills is to reduce charges levied on international education providers by an estimated $7 million a year, and Labor supports this legislation.

The principal bill being debated today amends the Education Services for Overseas Students (Registration Charges) Act 1997, or the ESOS Act. The ESOS Act regulates international education and provides that all education providers that deliver education to students in Australia on a student visa must be registered on the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students, or CRICOS, the acronym that people would know. This applies to all sectors, including higher education; English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students, or ELICOS; vocational education and training, or VET; and schools. So, various ESOS agencies handle the CRICOS registration for each sector. For example, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, or TEQSA, is the regulator for higher education; the Australian Schools Quality Authority, or ASQA, is the regulator for VET and stand-alone ELICOS providers; and schools are handled by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, or the DESE. The department is also responsible for other functions relating to the ESOS framework and managing CRICOS. Charges for those functions are a condition of registration under the ESOS Act and are recovered from non-exempt CRICOS providers.

The bills that are being debated today will repeal and replace current charging provisions with a framework to allow charges to be set in regulations. The bills will prevent providers from being double charged under the new arrangements and ensure the relevant agencies are all properly resourced to fulfil their ongoing compliance, analysis and monitoring obligations—crucial when you have a world-class education system. It wasn't too long ago that we had 20 per cent of the overseas students in the world coming to Australia. The bills aim to ensure the quality and integrity of Australia's international education and training system is maintained.

Labor is not opposed to cost recovery, in principle, if it is well thought through and justified. Labor has previously opposed parts of the Morrison government's broader shift to expanded cost recovery for higher education providers. Labor opposed the TEQSA cost-recovery legislation for good reason. Moving to full cost recovery for higher education providers when they've just been forced to bear the brunt of the COVID pandemic, mostly without any government assistance, is not good policy—not right now.

Labor supports the bills being debated today, because they are expected to actually reduce charges on international education providers and prevent providers from being double charged for basically the same regulatory activity. I say 'expected', because most of the details of the new framework will actually be set through regulation, not through this parliament. So the minister will be doing it away from the parliament. I philosophically think that parliamentary scrutiny should be the No. 1 thing, rather than leaving it to ministers to do things in their own portfolio.

The bill provides the minister with broad discretionary powers. The Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills particularly singled out this aspect of the bill as being significant for comment, saying:

… that this Bill:

Provide[s] the minister with broad discretionary powers to exempt providers from the requirement to pay a charge by legislative instrument in circumstances where there is no guidance on the face of the bill as to when these powers may be exercised.

This is a pattern that is becoming the hallmark of the Morrison government. It is a play to avoid transparency and accountability for their decisions. All legislation, if it's good legislation, should go through the prism of parliament, and then let the ministerial decisions be scrutinised by the parliament.

Earlier this year, the same committee, the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills, commented on the cost-recovery bill, where they said:

… the committee notes that a legislative instrument, made by the executive, is not subject to the full range of parliamentary scrutiny inherent in bringing proposed changes in the form of an amending bill.

This has been the bedrock of the Westminster system for years. It's not subject to parliamentary scrutiny. That's becoming a design feature of Morrison government legislation, I would suggest. Labor is so concerned with this lack of accountability and the lack of transparency of this Morrison government, that Senator Gallagher is introducing a bill this week in an attempt to make this government comply with process and be accountable. It's not enough to say, 'We got elected; we get to decide everything.' That is not how the Westminster system works. Sadly, the Morrison government are happy to make higher education providers more accountable to compliance but won't apply those same rules to themselves.

I have hosted meetings with vice-chancellors from universities right across the country over the past week or so. The shadow education minister, the member for Sydney, has joined some of the meetings, and together we have heard time and time again about the burden of compliance faced by universities, particularly during this most difficult of COVID times. The government's foreign veto laws introduced last year—and I'm not making comment on what motivated them—have placed a heavy burden on universities attempting to comply with a complex process for assessing whether a foreign university is autonomous or has some influence by the state. We know that it is a significant cost. We are talking two, three or four bodies that have to go through that compliance process even when universities are under the pump in terms of their budgets.

University of New South Wales Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor George Williams was quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald last month saying:

There are a number of countries where it's really quite challenging as a matter of law to determine whether it does have institutional autonomy or not. Often it will depend upon the interpretation of foreign language legal documents.

Compliance with complex and unclear regulatory schemes cost money—money that would otherwise be spent meeting the educational needs of students. And this is all at a time when universities are grappling with revenue losses of around $3 billion. How can universities make plans when they've had that sort of hit to their budgets? We need universities to get Australia through COVID and, research-wise, prepare Australia for a better future.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.