Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment Participation, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

A final and very short contribution: if I had to describe the statements of the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research in this debate today, Mr Chairman, you would pull me up as being unparliamentary, so I will not go there. There is a serious question mark around the truthfulness and the accuracy of many of the statements that the minister has made today. I understand that we have to get this moving, because we have to have divisions completed by 4.30, but let me remind the chamber again that this legislation has been in the parliament since 19 August. Not once did the government bring it up in the Senate. The government controls the legislative agenda of the Senate and the government did not bring it up once.

We are dealing with this now. We would have facilitated easy passage, but we are faced with a government that is not serious about putting appropriate safeguards in place to ensure that the people who are caught up in the collapse of colleges are properly protected and that there is an appropriate level of scrutiny of those shonky providers, who none of us want to see continuing in this industry. Senator Xenophon is quite right. This is a very important export industry for us—with $15.5 billion of export income, it is Australia’s third-largest export industry—and it is important that people overseas can have confidence in the quality and integrity of our education system. Furthermore, any of the statements the minister has made about this being an open-ended, unfunded commitment are absolute garbage. The minister is completely out of his depth. The minister has been misled by the people advising him, or he genuinely does not know what he is talking about, or he is intent on misleading the Senate. This is not an open-ended, uncapped commitment; this is something that is important, and I commend it to the Senate.

Question put:

That the amendment (Senator Xenophon’s) be agreed to.