Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to speak on the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment Bill 2013. This bill seeks to make amendments that will empower the Tuition Protection Services—the TPS—to better protect students. By protecting students we protect Australia's reputation as a country which can offer the highest quality vocational and tertiary education.

The bill makes two amendments. The first is to ensure that the Tuition Protection Service has the power to force the refund of prepaid fees where a provider fails or a course is cancelled. The second is to ensure that the Tuition Protection Service has the power to force a refund of prepaid fees where a visa is refused for a prospective student. Both of these amendments are important, given the economic value that the overseas student market has to Australia, and also because we want to protect our reputation as a quality provider of education.

The Tuition Protection Service—the TPS—is a signature reform of the former Labor government. It emerged from the crisis of international education brought about by the lax immigration rules of the former Howard government in relation to student visas. Certainly, profits were put before quality education. These lax rules lead to unsustainable volumes of international students. This failure of conservative policy-making saw the entrance into the market of operators, some of which can only be described as immigration scams dressed up as educational providers.

Indeed, at the time, we saw, night after night on our nightly news, the plight of overseas students who were not able to fulfil the course requirements and leave Australia with an educational qualification and who had lost all of the funds they had paid to these scam operators—funds which had, no doubt, been scraped together by family and through the students' work. Clearly, something needed to be done. Further, I think at the time Australia's reputation as a provider of quality education was well and truly tarnished as, night after night, scam after scam was uncovered. Students were just not getting the proper educational outcomes, and they were losing money. It was certainly an embarrassing time for us.

That forced us to ask ourselves some genuine questions about the quality of an Australian education and the soundness of training providers, some of whom were damaging the entire Australian education sector. International students looking at coming to Australia from overseas were seeing scam providers on the news. They had no way by which to judge the quality of Australian education. They could only see what was being broadcast and printed in international media. As I said, at the time it was very embarrassing. Writing in the Monthly, the journalist Margaret Simons, described the situation:

Most of our big export industries do their business out of sight of city dwellers. Mines are dug and ore extracted without stirring the dust on suburban streets. There is one such industry, though, whose major commodity is visible in our capitals. That commodity is human beings. They are the confused young people trying to serve us in low-rent fast food outlets. They are the lonely kids on city streets or sharing rooms—and even beds—in crowded houses in the suburbs. They are an underclass in the labour market, with working conditions that undermine those for all lower paid workers.

That was the reality as shown regularly through the media. It was the reality of our great international education industry under John Howard. Unfortunately, the reality was that there was exploitation.

Dodgy colleges—there is no other way to describe them—sprang up like mushrooms for the single purpose of providing students a piece of paper that was a pathway to residence. And often the students did not get to the dodgy piece of paper. It was a situation where the government of the time truly lost control of our borders, of our immigration program. Remember, 'We will decide who comes to this country'? John Howard and his immigration and education ministers certainly did not decide. Instead of delivering the skilled workers our country needed to compete, the policies of the Howard government had delivered a situation where Australia was about to gain a generation of migrants with dubious qualifications. This was a crisis of our immigration program, and it was a crisis in our education system.

And we needed to act. Labor acted to clean up the mess of the Howard government's overseas student program, which tarnished our overseas reputation, left students without formal qualifications, and certainly robbed them of their hard-won funding arrangements. So, we tightened up our rules. We cleaned out the migration agents, which is all on the public record. We cracked down on dodgy colleges. Leaving this situation untreated, with unsustainable growth, was not a viable option. Migration outcomes should have been linked with national or economic needs. Instead, education courses had become linked to migration outcomes—the wrong way around. Following the Baird review, Labor acted to improve regulation of the sector: higher entry standards for colleges, much more information, and more care for students.

And care for students is where the Tuition Protection Service comes in. I suspect that most members in this place have not heard of the Tuition Protection Service. Its establishment was one of the suite of measures to really restore that integrity and the quality that we had lost under the Howard government to the international education market. Its purpose: to act as a single point of placement for students affected by a provider default. Prior to this students had nowhere to go; they were just left high and dry. Students adversely affected are either placed in an alternative course or paid a refund from the Overseas Student Tuition Fund—a very good outcome—so that students are assured when they come to Australia that they have protections and that they will leave with a quality education and a proper qualification. The money for this comes from the annual Tuition Protection Service levy placed on all registered providers of international education. This includes vocational training providers and private and public higher educational institutions. In 2013-14 the levy collected was $6 million. The annual report of the Tuition Protection Service tells us that in 2012-13 nine providers closed, affecting nearly 1,000 students. Almost half of those students sought assistance from the TPS; 64 students were placed in alternative courses and 218 students received refunds. So, it is a process and a service that is well and truly working.

So there is clearly still a great need for this service. Its annual report reveals that the TPS fears that up to 22 providers with 4,400 students could close in the coming financial year. But, looking at the future: we know that our international education is our fourth largest export industry. It is very important to us. It sustains more than 100,000 jobs and generates some $15 billion in annual revenue.

Our reputation for quality education must be preserved. It is our most precious resource—our greatest competitive advantage. These amendments should act to help it operate more effectively in protecting international students and Australia's reputation. Thank you.